and this is the final episode of Crash Course World History,

not because we’ve reached the end of history

but because we’ve reached the particular middle where I happen to be living.

Today we’ll be considering whether globalization is a good thing,

and along the way we’ll try to

do something that you may not be used to doing in history classes:

imagining the future.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green!

In the future, I’m gonna get to second base with Molly Bro--

No you won’t, Me from the Past,

but the fact that when asked to imagine THE future,

you imagine YOUR future says a lot about the contemporary world,

and listen, Me From the Past,

while there’s no question that your solipsistic individualism is bad

both for you and for our species,

the broader implications of individualism in general are a lot more complex.

[Best]

[intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

[EVER]

Man, I’m gonna miss you, Intro. [if only you were a ringtone. wait…]

So last week (ta da) we discussed how global economic interdependence has led,

on average, to longer, healthier, more prosperous lives for humans--

not to mention an astonishing change in the overall human population.

In the West, globalization has also led to the rise of a service economy.

In the US and Europe,

most people now work not in agriculture or manufacturing

but in some kind of service sector: healthcare, retail, education,

entertainment, information technology,

Internet videos about world history, etc. [it's been a please to serve you! tear.]

And that switch has really changed our psychology,

especially the psychology of upper classes living in the industrialized world.

I mean, to quote Frederic Jameson,

“we are … so far removed from the realities of production and work that we

inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience.”

Think of it this way:

If you had to kill a [chicken 57] every time you visited KFC,

you would probably eat fewer chickens. [yeuup.]

Another change of psychology: Many historians-of-the-now note

that globalization has also led to a celebration of individualism--

particularly in the wake of the failures of the Marxist collectivist utopias.

The generation that lived through the Depression and World War II

saw large-scale collectivist responses to both those crises.

And they were responses that limited freedom.

Like, the military draft, for instance, which limited your freedom,

you know, not to be a soldier.

Or

the collectivization of health insurance seen in most of the post-war West,

which limited your freedom to go bankrupt from health care costs.

Or also government programs like social security,

which limit your freedom not to pay for old people’s retirement.

[as they once did. ah, the circle of life]

But since the 1960s,

the ascendant idea of personal freedom

minimally limited by government intervention has become very powerful.

Even the Catholic church was part of this new search for individual freedom,

as the Second Vatican Council

relaxed church rules in ways that weakened central authority,

[price paid for Nuns Having Fun?]

made concessions to individual styles of worship,

even said that people of different religions could go to heaven.

What good is heaven if it’s gonna be full of Protestants?

It’s just gonna be like Minnesota.

So here in the last episode of Crash Course World History,

in the last thirty seconds,

I have offended, uh, 5/6ths of the world’s population in the form of

non-Catholics and, uh, all Republicans, and probably some political moderates.

Who are confused about what Obama’s healthcare law will and will not do.

[and will now be allowed to keep doing w/o repeal. DFTVA]

Stan, maybe I should just make this episode just an extended rant

where I reveal all of my political biases. And also my personal biases.

[Cue the flaming pit that is the comments section]

Look, you’re never gonna meet a historian who doesn’t have biases.

But good historians try to acknowledge their biases

and I am biased toward Canada and its awesome healthcare system.

I can’t lie. I’m very jealous of you guys. [for reals]

But perhaps the greatest effect of the victory of individualism

was on sex and the family. [this should be interesting...]

We haven’t talked much about sex because my brother’s teaching Biology,

which is basically just sex, [as 1/2 our viewers flee to Bio playlist]

but sex is pretty important historically

because it’s how we keep happening. [for now]

But, in the 20th century, greater variety and availability of contraception

made it possible for people to experiment with multiple sexual partners

and helped to uncouple sex from child bearing, which was awesome,

[and the plot to movie Down With Love]

but individualism also had a destabilizing effect on families.

As the great Leo Tolstoy put it,

all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

But when your individual fulfillment trumps all,

you needn’t live amid your uniquely unhappy family: You can just leave.

So, divorce rates have skyrocketed in the past few decades, and not just in the US.

By the turn of the 21st century, divorce rates in China reached nearly 25%,

with 70% of those divorces initiated by women.

Technology has also driven families apart,

as parents and children spend increasing time alone

in front of their individual screens, sharing fewer experiences.

That’s individualism, too, but not of a kind that we usually celebrate.

But probably the biggest consequence of globalization and the ensuing

rise in human population has been humanity's effect on the environment.

While populations have increased

partly thanks to better yields from existing farmland,

much more land has also been brought under cultivation in the past half-century.

Often this meant cutting down trees in valuable rainforests–

the best known example of this is what’s going on in the Amazon,

but it happens worldwide. [insert own Pandora joke here, in Na'vi]

And we're losing land not just for food, but also to grow the global economy.

Oh, it’s time for the open letter?

An Open Letter to Flowers.

But first,

let’s see what’s in the secret compartment today.

Oh, it’s fake flowers.

Thank you, Stan.

One for behind each ear. [because just one would be too girly]

Dear Flowers,

You capture the best and the worst of the globalized economy.

You’re so pretty.

Even the fake ones are pretty. But the real one are constantly dying.

They’ve got to be harvested, and shipped, and cut very efficiently.

And it’s a global phenomenon.

Like there are flowers in my corner market from Africa.

These are from China, but because they are plastic,

they could just be shipped in a shipping container.

More people can afford to apologize by giving their romantic partners

professionally cut and arranged roses than in any time in human history,

but in that we have lost something,

which is that the whole idea of flowers is that you had to go out into the field

and, like, cut them and arrange them yourself to apologize.

It’s not supposed to be,

“I’m sorry I forgot your birthday. Here’s $8 worth of work that was done in Kenya.”

[sentiment falls a bit flat, doesn't it?]

It’s supposed to be,

“I’m sorry I forgot your birthday,

so I went into the frakking forest and got you some frakking flowers.

Anyway, flowers,

Best Wishes, John Green.

Aww.. you guys got me flowers for

my last episode of World History. [cupcakes now reserved for Merebration]

Okay, let’s go to the thought bubble.

As worldwide production and consumption increases,

we use more resources, especially water and fossil fuels.

Globalization has made the average human richer,

and rich people tend to use more of…

everything… but especially energy.

This has already resulted in climate change, which will likely accelerate.

The global economy isn’t a zero-sum game.

Like,

I don’t need to become more poor in order for someone else to become more rich.

But growth, at least so far,

has been dependent upon unsustainable use of the planet's resources.

The planet can’t sustain seven billion automobiles, for instance,

or seven billion frequent flyers,

although most of us who can afford to drive or fly feel entitled to do so.

You'll remember that when we talked about the Industrial Revolution,

we discussed the virtuous cycle of more efficiency making things cheaper,

which in turn made them easier to buy, which increased demand,

which increased efficiency.

But from the perspective of the planet, each turn in that cycle takes something:

More land under cultivation, more carbon emissions, more resource extraction.

That can’t go on forever, but worryingly,

our current models of economic growth don’t allow for any other way.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

And then there is our astonishingly robust health.

Although much of the world has

been ravaged by HIV/AIDS for the past three decades,

there’s been a relative lack of global pandemics since the 1918 flu.

And that’s particularly surprising given increased population density and

more travel between population centers.

China has seen 150 million people

leave the countryside for cities in the last 20 years.

This was Shanghai in 1990; and this is Shanghai in 2010.

The population of Lagos was 41,000 in 1900;

today, it's almost 8 million.

Of course, people have been moving from country to city for a long time;

remember Gilgamesh? [& the Mesopo-taaaaa-mii-aans]

But the pace of that change has dramatically accelerated.

Similarly, there's nothing new about international trade,

but its pace has also increased dramatically:

In 1960, trade accounted for 24% of the world's GDP;

today, it’s more than double that.

Almost no human being alive today

lives with stuff only manufactured in their home country,

but a thousand years ago,

only the richest of the rich could benefit from the Silk Road.

Still, trade isn’t new.

And while it’s tempting to say that the types of goods being traded –

pharmaceuticals, computers, software, financial services –

represent something wholly new,

you could just as easily see this as part of the evolution of trade itself.

At some point silk was seen as a new trade good.

As tastes change and consumers become more affluent,

the things that they want to buy change.

So is anything really different, or is it all just accelerated?

Well, some historians argue that

an economically interdependent world is much less likely to go to war.

And that may be true, but increasing global, cultural, and

economic integration hasn’t led to an end to violence.

I mean, we've seen large scale ethnic and nationalistic violence from Rwanda to

the former Yugoslavia to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Afghanistan.

Globalization has not rid the world of violence.

But there is an ideological shift

in the age of globalization that does seem pretty new,

and that’s the turn to democracy.

Now this isn’t the limited democracy of the ancient Greeks,

or the quirky republican system originally developed in the U.S.;

there are almost as many kinds of democracies as there are

nations experiencing democracy.

The fact is, however, that democracy and political freedom,

especially the freedom to participate in and influence the government,

have been on the rise all over the world since the 1980s and especially since 1990.

For instance,

if you looked at the governments of most Latin American countries

during most of the 20th centuries,

you would usually find them ruled by military strongman.

Now, with a couple of exceptions (Fidel, Hugo)…

Stan, are they behind me right now?

Because if they’re behind me,

I am in favor of collectivising oil revenue and distributing it to the poor.

If they’re not behind me, that’s a terrible idea.[love the iron constitution]

Right, but anyway, democracy is now flourishing in most of Latin America.

Probably the most famous democratic success story is South Africa,

which jettisoned decades of Apartheid in the 1990s

and elected former dissident Nelson Mandela

as its first black president in 1994.