As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, James Folwer looks at Anton Oleinik’s “On Negative Convergence: The Metaphor of Vodka-Cola Reconsidered” from Telos 145 (Winter 2008).
Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990 there has been an accelerated process of negative convergence between the United States and Russia, encompassing transfers of knowledge, technologies, and institutions. The issue that Anton Oleinik tackles in “On Negative Convergence: The Metaphor of Vodka-Cola Reconsidered” is whether or not this process has helped us move toward a better, more inhabitant-friendly world. As Oleinik explains: “Change is bilateral: from the United States as well as to the United States. These transfers do not always contribute to improving the situation at either end of exchange. On the contrary, mechanisms of negative learning and mimicry operate that support a hypothesis of ‘negative convergence’: globalization in its current form produces a convergence of participating countries toward a constellation of common problems instead of moving toward a better world.”
