Franklin Foer Quotes

As globalization proceeds, tribalism increases.

Is Islam a tribe or is it a force of globalization? Islam has certainly been studied as a local, tribalistic phenomenon. But Islam is also theoretically a universalist idea, its spread has been facilitated by modern technologies, and it's an identity that people can slip into and out of fairly easily. I don't think Islam has really been understood as a product of globalization. It might be one of these instances where globalism and tribalism ultimately go hand in hand.

I think globalization actually maintains and fosters various elements of national and cultural identities. I don't think everything is being homogenized. If anything, your food, your culture, and your ethnicity might become part of the globalized world, and thus absorbed by other countries.

Although when Christianity appeared the total population of the planet was only a fraction of that of the twentieth century, most of the earth's surface was quite outside the Mediterranean world, Persia, India, and China.

I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us - about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.

I think I came to see Islam, or at least one part of Islam, as an important defense mechanism against the commercialization of the world.

Christianity has been global for hundreds of years before anyone used the word globalism.

Fact is, given a choice to erase or embrace Western popular culture, most Muslims would gleefully embrace it.

We need to preserve our cultural peculiarities; however, going to the extreme would lead to cultural isolation

Commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith.

The things and ways the West took to the rest have become the ways of the world.

Identity politics includes the assertion of difference from ‘the West’, and the defenses against cultural invasions and ‘pollution’ by Western styles. The insistent emphasis on this theme is accompanied by its flagrant but largely unacknowledged subversion in everyday activity and styles, from dress, to food to music and entertainment, to media consumptions, to public spaces and general consumption patterns. While McDonald’s is boycotted because it is American, native fast food chains emerge which are direct imitations; the boycott of Coca Cola spawns Mecca Cola.

The question whether nationalism, patriotism, the love of the homeland, is beneficial either to the individual or to the human race as a whole is open to discussion. It might be a much better world if this instinct were eradicated. On the other hand, it might be worse. The fact is that the instinct exists, and that, far from losing its grip on us, on all of us, it is becoming constantly more intense, more exacting, more all-embracing…. Nationalism as we know it may pass, but for the moment it is more powerful than any other idea or even than any religion.

Tribalism is the most powerful force in the world.

Clash of civilizations

There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame.

The bipolar world of the Cold War is history. The new world order, however, is not the One World dreamed of by Wilsonian idealists. It is a Balkanizing world where race, tribe, culture and creed matter most, and democracy is seen not as an end in itself but as a means to an end - the accretion of power by one's own kind to achieve one's own dreams.

I've found just the right amount of balance in my life. I'm this pop artist in America, but I'm also Malaysian. And I'm also Muslim.

Just because you are Latino does not mean you can't be global.

Like the ancient Silk Road itself, 'The Sound of Silk' will make the foreign familiar while challenging long-held notions of identity and our place in the world.

Few of us doubt that stealing is wrong, especially from the poor. But the accusation of 'cultural appropriation' is overwhelmingly being used as an objection to syncretism - the mixing of different thoughts, religions, cultures, and ethnicities that often ends up creating entirely new ones.

Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.

Donald Trump understands sense of belonging. And a lot of people think globalization, any time you make any particularity, you're sort of offending some other group. And a lot of people in this country think they belong to America anymore, and he at least appeals to some sense of belonging. I like the idea that we belong to Western traditions, so I'm glad he appeals to that sort of thing.

I think globalization has been really good for America.

If globalization is a sphere, where each point is equidistant from the centre, then it isn't good because it annuls each of us. But if globalization joins us as a polyhedron where we're all together but conserves the dignity of each ... that's good.