I recently referenced Jonathan Lear from his book Radical Hope:
Humans are by nature cultural animals: we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture. But our way of life—whatever it is—is vulnerable in various ways. And we, as participants in that way of life, thereby inherit a vulnerability. Should that way of life break down, that is our problem. …
We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world—terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes—have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today—from all points on the political spectrum. It [is] as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it.
It’s not quite what Lear has in mind, I don’t think, but a name for that vulnerability (though there are certainly many) could be “globalization.” Or at least that’s what Thomas Hylland Eriksen says:
Consumer researchers have often pointed out that consumers are creative and independent, and that apparent standardisation may conceal considerable variation. This is not an irrelevant objection, but it is difficult to deny that the new diversity is qualitatively different from the old. Language death may be an indicator. In the early 2020s, we have about 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. Linguists estimate that 90 per cent of them may be gone in just a few decades. If there is some truth to the assumption that every language produces a unique vision of the world (‘certain ideas can be expressed only in German’, as I was once taught), there is a case for suggesting that the cultural diversity of the world is facing a mass extinction on a par with the reduced complexity of the global biosphere. The world is becoming semiotically poorer. With every extinct language, a unique way of perceiving the world disappears. […]
A major challenge today consists in finding ways of halting this movement away from a world of many differences towards a world of just a few, and defences of biodiversity and cultural diversity are two sides of the same coin. Until now, critics of the negative effects of globalisation have typically focused on inequality, climate change and environmental damage, or the marginalisation of vulnerable groups such as migrants, refugees and Indigenous peoples. It is time now to view the global situation through a lens enabling us to see all the destructive effects of globalisation as threads in the same tapestry. Contemporary globalisation is a bulldozer on speed, razing rainforests, turning tribal peoples into urban slumdwellers, simplifying ecosystems and obliterating traditional livelihoods. The loss of semiotic freedom is creating a poorer world of reduced beauty but, more seriously, it leads to ecological disaster and diminishing options for humanity.