  Article in the Chron of Higher Ed abt. globalization anxiety. "In The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy (Free Press, 2001), Noreena Hertz describes the supposed spiritual Eden that was the isolated kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas as being defiled by such awful imports as basketball and Spice Girls T-shirts. Anthony Giddens, the director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has told how an anthropologist who visited a remote part of Cambodia was shocked and disappointed to find that her first night's entertainment was not traditional local pastimes but watching Basic Instinct on video.
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It is odd, to put it mildly, that many on the left support multiculturalism in the West but advocate cultural purity in the developing world -- an attitude they would be quick to tar as fascist if proposed for the United States or Britain.
Hertz and the anthropologist in Cambodia appear to want people outside the industrialized West preserved in unchanging but supposedly pure poverty. Yet the Westerners who want this supposed paradise preserved in aspic rarely feel like settling there. Nor do most people in developing countries want to lead an "authentic" unspoiled life of isolated poverty. "In truth, cultural pessimists are typically not attached to diversity per se but to designated manifestations of diversity, determined by their preferences. "They often use diversity as a code word for a more particularist agenda, often of an anti-commercial or anti-American nature," Cowen argues.
"They care more about the particular form that diversity takes in their favored culture, rather than about diversity more generally, freedom of choice, or a broad menu of quality options. "" urlLink http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i35/35b00701.htm 
