myth of Jacob
and his sons served to unify formerly non-allied desert tribes (with
the same names as Jacob's sons) in ancient Sinai. They not only
conquered much of the region, but created a fairly stable regime for
centuries.

So these stories enable a certain kind of functionality. Their
relative stasis, if protected against the effects of time by
fundamentalists, can allow for the adoption and implementation of
long-term projects that span generations, even centuries. But when one
group's absolute truth bumps up against another group's absolute
truth, only conflict can result.

New technologies, global media, and the spread of international
corporate conglomerates have forced just such a clash of worldviews.
While cultures have been reckoning with the impact of cosmopolitanism
since even before the first ships crossed the Mediterranean, today's
proliferation of media, products and their associated sensibilities,
as well as their migration across formerly discreet boundaries, are
unprecedented in magnitude.

Globalism, at least as it is envisioned by the more expansionist
advocates of free market capitalism, only exacerbates the most
dangerously retrograde strains of xenophobia. The market's global
aspirations (as expressed by Global Business Network co-founder Peter
Schwartz's slogan "Open markets good. Closed markets bad. Tattoo it on
your forehead"4) amount to a whitewash of regional cultural values.
They are as reductionist as the tenets of any fundamentalist religion.
In spite of the strident individualism of this brand of globalist
rhetoric, it leaves no room for independent thinking or personal
choice, except insofar as they are permitted by one's consumption
decisions or the way one chooses to participate in the profit-making
game. Mistaking the arbitrary and man-made rules of the marketplace
for a precondition of the natural universe, corporate capitalism's
globalist advocates believe they are liberating the masses from the
artificially imposed restrictions of their own forms of religion and
government. Perceiving the free market model as the way things really
are, they ignore their own fabrications, while seeing everyone else's
models as impediments to the natural and rightful force of evolution.

As a result, globalism to almost anyone but a free market advocate,
has come to mean the spread of the Western corporate value system to
every other place in the world. Further, the bursting of the dot.com
b