Global warning

This week Theodore Dalrymple begins a new column — on globalisation, moronic technology and modernity in general.

Whenever I read the French newspapers I come to a strange conclusion: that I hate anti-globalisation as much as I hate globalisation.

What, then, do I stand for? I don’t know, really. But it seems to me clear that, just as the globalisers are the party of the triumphant corporatists, so the anti-globalisers are the party of the French train drivers who want to retire at the age of 50 at the expense of all the people unfortunate or foolish enough not to be French train drivers. I think I must be what a consultant doing his ward round called the illness that his lymphoma patient had — neither cancer nor leukaemia, but something in between the two.

Which brings us to the question of freedom of the labour market. Like everyone else, I like a lot of different restaurants, but I’m not sure I like schools in which children have no common language. Can we have the one without the other? Honesty compels one to admit that even now there are still not many Somali or Kosovar restaurants, though a friend of mine, a Welsh-speaker, was astonished not long ago to be addressed in Welsh by a Somali waiter in a Chinese restaurant in Llansomewhereorother.

Not long ago I took my French mother-in-law to Bath, that city whose council in the 1950s, ideological followers to a man of Le Corbusier and T. Dan Smith, wanted to demolish it in favour of something a little more modern, and we stayed in an elegant small hotel with a courtyard where we took our aperitifs.

The waiter who served them was a dark-skinned Dravidian Indian. My mother-in-law asked him where he came from.

‘I’m Danish,’ he said.

You could have knocked us down with a Campari and soda. These days, you can’t take anything for granted, for example that it is more likely than not that an uncle is older than his nephews, or that grandchildren are mostly older than children.

As it happens, I went to Copenhagen not long ago. The Danes, of course, are the least goody-goody of all the Scandinavians. I learned to love aquavit in Copenhagen.

Once you leave the most obviously Danish part of the city, however, by walking a few hundred yards at most, you could be anywhere: Birmingham or Ankara, for example.

Is it not strange how, in the name of diversity, everywhere (everywhere in Europe, that is) becomes the same, just as, in the name of choice, every shopping street in the country becomes indistinguishable from every other? Why is it that immigrants from all over the world — the men, that is — end up wearing nylon shell suits and baseballs caps?

And this in turn brings us to the question of the role of the Third World in our lives. It serves three purposes, as far as I can tell: the first is to furnish us with a certain amount (but not too much) of cheap labour; the second is to tickle our palates with exotic cuisines, so that we can establish our sophistication in the eyes of our peers by our familiarity with them; and the third is to serve as an outlet for conspicuous compassion.

Thus we have found our very own answer to China’s unbeatable combination of high-tech and low wages: cheap labour and cheap emotion.