“Development and Social Change” by P. McMichael

“Development and Social Change” by P. McMichael

Nowadays, it became a commonplace practice, on the part of many political scientists, to discuss the notion of linearly projected social, cultural, economic and scientific progress, which is now being closely associated with the concept of Globalization, as utterly controversial. In its turn, this can be explained by the fact that, as some of these scientists note, there are a number of counter-beneficial side effects to this progress, such as the destruction of traditional societies, the emergence of previously unknown environmental hazards and the deterioration of people’s sense of cultural identity. Therefore, it does not come as a particular surprise that the contemporary Globalization-related discourse revolves around the question of whether the benefits of world becoming ‘flat’, such as the substantially improved standards of people’s living, the expansion of world’s markets and the dramatically increased efficiency of manufacturing processes, overweight earlier mentioned side effects.

In his book, McMichael (2004, p. xIii) outlines this discourse’s dilemma with a perfect clarity ‘Do we continue expanding industry and wealth indefinitely/ or do we find a way that human communities… can recover social inti­macy, spiritual coherence, healthy environments, and sustainable mate­rial practices?’. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to believe that the arguments directed against Globalization, and ultimately against the very notion of development/progress, are nothing but the byproduct of their advocates’ intellectual arrogance. In this paper, I will aim to explore the validity of an above suggestion at length, while exposing McMichael’s idea that ‘the development is not just a goal – it is a method of rule’, as fully legitimate. The reason for this is simple – as it will be shown later, this idea is being fully consistent with the most fundamental laws of nature, which serve as the foremost driving force behind the process of Globalization.

When it comes to discussing the notion of development, in regards to human societies, it is important to understand that this notion is being essentially synonymous to the notion of evolution. In its turn, the notion of evolution came to being as a result of scientists having grasped what accounts for the very essence of universe’s workings, concerned with the continuous process of non-organic and organic matter increasing the extent of its complexity. Nowadays, we are aware that initially, universe’s matter accounted for only the isotopes of hydrogen and helium (García-Bellido 1999). Nevertheless, as time went on, the elementary particles of hydrogen and helium never ceased undergoing a qualitative transformation, which in turn resulted in the creation of a more complex blocks of matter. As of today, there are 118 chemical elements listed in Mendeleev’s periodic table.

The same can be said about the evolution of organic matter. After all, even today’s school children are being fully aware of the fact that the contemporary life-forms have evolved out of utterly primitive organisms (Stewart 2003). Just about anywhere we look, we get to see a variety of different emanations of the process of organic and non-organic physical matter growing ever more complex. Therefore, it will only be logical, on our part, to assume that the dynamics within human societies are also being fully reflective of the most fundamental laws of nature, concerned with enabling a physical reality to attain ever-higher levels of complexity. The reason for this is simple – given the fact that human societies are essentially material (they consist of people endowed with material bodies), the qualitative dynamics within these societies never cease being fully subjected to the most basic physical laws. What it means is that Globalization, which is essentially a process of human civilization attaining qualitatively new levels of complexity, has been dialectically predetermined. This is exactly the reason why, the claims that Globalization is ‘immoral’ and that people should be actively resisting it, can be best referred to as utterly counter-productive. After all, there has been not even a single instance in the history of people having benefited from trying to violate the objective laws of nature.

Nevertheless, given the fact that, as it was mentioned earlier, the continuous development of human societies appears to be predetermined by the very laws of nature (which implies the notion of ‘development’ being synonymous the notion of ‘improvement’), why it is not only that many ordinary people continue to refer to this process in strongly negative terms, but many well-established social and political scientist