A global culture seems to have evolved in which the primary response to economic recession is to protect national citizens by restricting migration allowances if necessary. Presumably this has a traditionalizing and territorializing effect by reinforcing the culture that regions are primarily closed populations with common cultural traditions, etc. (national culturalism). The question is what implications this culture has for science. Internet allows unrestricted point-to-point communications globally, so people can still communicate and collaborate in that way despite regional separation, but do you think it is generally detrimental for science to face a global culture of rising nationalist separatism in response to recession or can science function fine between fences?

Edited May 23, 201114 yr by lemur

Science has been quite international for some time, and it is only during major world wars that communication in science is really cut off, as it was with respect to the development of the dialysis machine in occupied Holland during World War II, or penicillin during the same period.

 

Still, medicine seems to be peculiarly culture-bound, even though human physiology is pretty much the same everywhere. Thus in Germany it is taken for granted now that benfotiamine is an essential supplement for prventing the development of the vascular and neurological complications of diabetes, while in anglo-saxon medicine most endocrinologists and diabetologists have still never heard of this.

Interesting that we have come so far that Anglo-Saxon is used as an antonym for German.

Interesting that we have come so far that Anglo-Saxon is used as an antonym for German.

What about turning Jewish into an antonym for Christian and then replacing Christian with German and Jewish with Semitic? Could it be that recoding commonality as antithesis and religion as race are both symptoms of a more general cultural trend?