THE EXISTENCE OF
RELIGION IN THE ERA OF
GLOBALIZATION
INTRODUCTION
Initially it was a case that occurred on February 14, 1989.
At that time, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhullah
Khomeini, issued a fatwa to execute Salman Rushdie, the
author of the book "The Satanic Verses". From the scope of
Iran, the fatwa spread to all corners of the world, especially in
countries where the majority of the population is Muslim. That
is one of the actual examples of the phenomenon of
globalization, so it can be said that humans live in a globalized
social reality. Boundaries and various communication barriers
have collapsed. Roland Robertson called it "a single place".1
This phenomenon requires that every problem, including
religion, be in the unit of analysis of the global system and
not in its subunits such as smaller nations, countries or
regions. The globalization thesis positions that social
communication has relationships with all corners of the
world. On the one hand, there is a clash of cultures that are
very diverse and often contradictory in the same social unit.
But on the other hand, it also globalizes the sociocultural and
cultural forces that encompass the shared social context,
which ultimately weakens differences in ways of life.
The parallelism of various cultures and specific identities
not only brings humans towards sharper shapes, but what is
more prominent is that various ways of life are diverse
constructions of such a vast construction. Thus, the efforts of
some parties to preserve, stabilize, and recreate the identity of
the particular identity are clearly contrary to the pace of the
global system which seeks to relativize the specific identity.
The obvious result of this condition is a violent conflict.
Another phenomenon is the emergence of rapid change as part
of a globalized society. This is because this rapid change will
bring anomie2 at the individual and group levels.
The global system has undermined the personal and
cultural identities 3 that have been inherited and constructed.
In addition, it also encourages the spirit of creating and
revitalizing specific identities as a way to control the forces of
systemic globalization. In this regard, religion plays one of
the significant roles in developing, elaborate, and
problematize the global system. In the example of the case of
"AyatAyat Satan" written by Salman Rushdie,
There is a big problem related to the handing over the
core value of the eternal sanctity of the Qur'an to be taken in a
global system dominated by non-Muslim powers. In fact,
Khomeini's death sentence against Salman Rushdie is a larger
part of the Muslim interest in fighting the injustices that exist
in the global system through the revitalization of Islam's
particular values.4
Thus, there are two main problems that can be expressed,
namely first, although religion shows a negative reaction to
globalization, this does not mean that religion is simply a
regressive force. Basically, religion can also be a proactive
force in the sense as a tool to elaborate and develop
globalization. Therefore, the main thing that must be
encouraged is to make religion a more deterministic force in
the world system and not to reverse the direction of
globalization. Thus, religion in the global system can be an
anti-systemic and pro-systemic force at the same time.
Second, in the case of Salman Rushdie, there is actually an
important thing, namely that the case is not solely a religious
problem. Indirectly it is also related to the process of political
and economic marginalization that afflicts Muslims. In this case,
Muslims and Islam are not under attack. For Rushdie's
supporters who fight for the freedom to express artistic
expression, the question lies more in the sovereignty of the state
than religion. In other words, the case of Rushdie provides an
example of how globalization brings about the relativization of
specific identities that runs in tandem with the revitalization and
marginalization of religion as a way to communicate socially
(mode of social communication).
RELIGION AS A WAY OF COMMUNICATING
Again, the crux of the problem of "Satan's Verse" for some
Muslims is the great global pressure that leads to the relativization
of religion and cultural group identity as a cost to be paid for the
annexation of the global system. Another substantial problem that
can be traced as following Niklas Luhman's ideas is what
distinguishes socially, especially from psychological problems, is
communication. The social system consists of various
communication which means the situation situation where a person
transmits meaningful information to other rights that leads to the
understanding of meaning. This kind of thinking has two important
implications. First, the element of the social system is not the person,
but the communication that the person produces. Second, related to
religious issues, when discussed sociologically, it means that there
are various types of communication.
In understanding religious entities in the first place, there must
be an understanding that religion is something that goes beyond
normal, everyday things, and something that is easily taken for
granted. With this understanding, religion is no matter how
radically or fundamentally it must condition the existence of
mankind.
For this reason, Peter Beyer prefers to use the concept or
terminology of immanence/transcendence as a dichotomous label
for religion. Immanent means the whole world, the reality that
can be perceived as a whole, the whole of meaning that can be
communicated among humanity. While the transcendence means
the opposite pole of the immanent thing. Giving the immanent in
the context of overall meaning. In this understanding, the
transcendent acts as the condition that allows the existence of the
immanent. Meanwhile, communication on the basis of meaning is
always immanent, even though the subject of communication is
transcendent. Religion thus operates with sacred symbols that
radically transcend the immanent and transcendent. Religion
simultaneously runs between the immanent and the transcendent.5
Religion places the transcendent to give meaning to the
immanent. The transcendent then becomes a potential solution
to all the important problems of life in the immanent world. In
order to present meanings including the meaning of suffering
and evil and further offer the power to overcome the world's
problems, religion occupies the possibility of communicating
between human life and the transcendent. Religion treats the
transcendent as a social partner.
The tradent thing is logically structured beyond the human
social world and what is perceived. However, the transcendent
cannot be accessed through a special form of communication.
The conclusion is that religion is a type of communication that
lies in the polarity between the immanent/transcendent.
Religious functions is to give meaning to the root of all
human communication which has infinite meaning. Through
religion, a way is also offered to overcome or at least regulate
the infinity and various consequences of human life itself.
MPLICIT MEANING IN GLOBALIZATION
THEORY
The theory of globalization assumes that there has been a
discount in social life in the past, present or future. The theory of
globalization is an expansion and reformulation of the theory of
modernization as once put forward by the Marxian paradigm or
more broadly from the theory of liberal-functionalist theory. Thus,
the debate about globalization based on certain theories is a
process that is always on going and never incomplete.
As a reflection of these implicit assumptions, there is a
terminology called a static future. This is for example conceived
by Emmanuel Wallerstein who analyzed the world system which
he called a cycle that always repeats itself and the crisis will end
when the world capitalist system is defeated by its own
contradictions and diction. That is the concrete manifestation of
capitalism's inability to stabilize itself which in the end the world
socialist conditions will take over this system. In each case, the
physical boundaries of the world determine the process of
globalization from the past and present that is dynamic, which will
then be negated by the future which ultimately results in a dynamic
state.
Marx, Durkheim, and Weber have analyzed religion as a core
part of efforts to understand the modern world transition. The theory
of globalization is the development of a fundamental modern thesis
of globalization. In addition, the issue of identity and difence
between modernization and globalization leads to the central issue
of relativism or the fluidity of identity. The emergence of various
axes of globalization in a number of social structures exists in one
part of the world and the imperialistic actions that occur next are
another matter worth talking about. Thus, globalization can be
understood as western imperalism, either in the economic,
political, technological, or in general cultural fields.
Globalization is more than just the spread of a culture in the
West historically in other parts of the world. Globalization is also a
creation of a new global culture whose presence in
The social structure makes the social context quickly develop
in all specific cultures, including Western cultures. If there is
an idea that global social reality relativizes all particular
cultures, including religion, some questions that arise are first
, does globalization mean the progressive homogenization of
all cultures that have occurred two or three centuries from now,
which causes only global cultures to exist? Or secondly , on
the contrary, globalization has significantly changed the
context contained in the specific culture that still exists,
which means that it transforms but does not eliminate that
part of the culture and there are still various identities that are
still recognized?6 Perhaps, both questions are rhetorical in
nature because they provide concrete answers. Meanwhile, the
religious dimension of globalization is also a fundamental
thing that deserves to be highlighted. Because this problem
leads more to the reorientation of religious traditions towards
the region and global consciousness as a whole and this
particular culture (religion) also tries to identify with its own
traditions in the past.
FOUR APPROACHES TO GLOBALIZATION
The development of social science about globalization
as a specific and empirical theory is relatively new. It appeared
around the 1970s and 1980s. The whole world is nothing more
than a collection or a set of privileges that are lined up. The
shift in the unit of analysis is the root of the difference
between the perspective of globalization and other
perspectives that also look at the whole world as well as
international relations whether it is politics, economics or legal
services. The question of why the shift in analytical units
states indirectly more accurate will be discussed from the four
variants of the globalization approach. Immanuel Wallerstein,
John Meyer, Roland Rebertson, and Niklan Luhmann are
among those who are important contributors to the scientific
debate. Their efforts crystallize into four differences but
mutually reinforce each other's direction to understand the
order of the whole world based on the analysis, the global
economy, the global state, the global culture, and the global
society in succession. They produce a view of the
multidimensional and cultural structure of the global system
but also an inherent biguity and the same contradictions. These
characteristics are important to understand the potential role of
religion in the system.
Immanuel Wallerstein
Wallerstein in his theory that talks about the world system
was greatly influenced by the French school of Annales which
discussed a lot of history, as well as the study of Fernand Braudel
and Marx's theory which lowered the theory of dependence. The
two discussed the importance of seeing politics and ideology as a
historical journey by not leaving the economy and material context
in this phenomenon. The forces that encompass the problems of the
economic system and the material context give rise to what Waller
Stein calls an era of domination that shackles individuals in a social
network. This is evidenced by the emergence of elite actors who
form a certain network of power. Wallerstein quotes from George
Lukacs that it is not only the power of economic motives in the
historical explanation that makes a strong difference of opinion
between Marxism and the bourgeoisie but more in totality.
The Hegelian influence in Wallerstein is interpreted in his
opinion by seeing the characteristics of the social system as
an existence of the division of labor reviewed from the
dependence in the system of economic exchange between one
element and another element in a region.
First, the social system in multi-perspective. According to
Wallerstein, there are three types of social systems, namely
the small system, the world empire, and the world economy.
The small system is a simple division of labor in the cultural
system where there is an agricultural or hunting society that
does not play a prominent role due to the squeeze of the
world empire and the world economy. The world empire as a
multi-cultural system is still limited in the political system
and the division of labor as a singular. For example,
civilizations that have been included in this criterion are
China, Egypt, and Rome. However, in its role, this model
finally emerged in the formation of the world economy which
involved the involvement of other countries as well.
The world economy includes multi-political and cultural
activities in a single division of labor. Wallerstein's way of
deducing the division of the social system is no longer a new
item because it follows Hegel who divides art, religion, and
philosophy as a form of knowledge and the three form a
complexity that forms a form of knowledge. Like Marx, he
places philosophy with economics but still adds in his
explanation the totality of a system.
Second, the economic development of the capitalist
world. Wallerstein gave his limitations on the capitalist world
economy, namely as a global social context and in it there are
various links and conditions in various aspects, including
politics and culture. The history of the modern capitalist
world system began in the mid-15th century in Western
European society. Success in the world of trade and
development has led to the emergence of an elite group that
has power that ultimately controls the bureaucratic system
and consumption patterns of that time. The power possessed
by a group of elites led to the emergence of a single power
and influenced the redistributive system of world empires.
This group of merchants eventually took control of various
regions of the Baltic islands and even reached the new world
and created a part of the world economy with a single
division of labor. From this history, finally until now the
European world economy has emerged which has penetrated
all over the world.
Third, the history of world economic development. The
large European world economy then gave birth to the concept
of geographical division of the economic world and
depending on the economic position of a country in a system
of division of labor:
1. Core; is the dominating area of a system. There is a
concentration of capital, a concentration of labor and
the use of advanced technology.
2. Periphery; As a provider of raw materials and also a
concentration of cheap labor, using simple technology
and functioning as a supplier of continuity of
production activities for Core.
3. Semiperiphery; stands between the periphery and the
core which functions as a stabilizer between the two.
Directly exploiting the periphery and also exploiting
by the core. Various possible conflicts that can arise
between the core and the pe- riphery are resolved by
the semiperiphery in its function as a controller of the
production and trade system carried out by the two
parties above.
A country in a peripheral position has a very strong
dependence on the core on the assumption that the
bourgeoisie in the country moves in a realm with a
bargaining position so that it cannot lift its submissive
condition. The nation-state that is in the periphery and
semiperiphery positions falls into a circle called Wallerstein
as the system of ideas of the
capitalist world economy. The system is like two sharp
blades on the one hand to eliminate obstacles to social
obstacles to the function of commodification and market
execution. However, on the other hand, there is an unbalanced
distribution of the surplus value for capital accumulation. The
social, cultural, and economic elements of a nation-state that
emerge as an effect of the world system will foster class
conflicts that are triggered as a result of clashes in nations,
genders, races, ethnicities, and religious systems. Waller Stein
added that specificity will increase as the world system
becomes increasingly globalized. The development of the
world system forms a kind of circle that is increasingly spurred
on by conflicts and contradictions. The struggle between the
state and ethnic groups in the struggle for interests is
understood as class conflict. The division of core, periphery,
and semiperiphery tries to see the placement of the country's
position and ethnic groups in the world system of labor
division.
Although class conflict is the root of the problem of the
globalization of the world system, it is nothing but the
implication and consequence of the contradictions in the
capitalist model of production. It also concerns the need for a
linear path and constant expansion to support the profit limit.
According to Wallerstein, the modern world system is the
economy of the capitalist world so that other factors in social
life such as politics and culture are the dependency functions
of the economy.7 This thesis needs to be studied again
because the movements that appear in daily life are the result
of the implementation of the world economy. Na mun Peter
Beyer himself disagrees with Wallerstein because it is not
only an economic problem because there is a connection to
the norms, values, and moral responsibilities that are
integrated in these various movements.
John Meyer
John Meyer's contribution is a pattern of meticulous
application of quantitative methods to the Wallersteinian model of
the world system, especially regarding the structure of the world
economy. In the idea of the world economy, he added the analysis
of world politics, especially the global system of nation-states.8
For Meyer, the world state is a system that operates in parallel with
the world economy and to a significant degree functionally
independent of it. The nation-state is not only conditioned by the
world economy but also by the functioning of the economy in a
way that does not diminish the strength of the economy. Meyer's
term is world politics. The system is closely related to the
improvement and expansion of the commodities of the world
economy but also works on restructuring and transforming these
economies and changes in social life. This view overhauled
Wallerstein's capital base because it rejected that the global social
system is the world economy fundamentally of the country where it
is located but a superstructural reflection. The economic perspective
is not always synonymous with the perspective of unity, the
economic perspective cannot explain the independent power and
variation of the nation-state system.
His criticism of Wallerstein on a theoretical level is that
Meyer distinguishes between politics and economics as
distinct or distinct from social value-creation systems. The
economy creates value through commodification, namely
through the extraction, production, exchange, and
consumption of commodities. The operation of the market
and political power is in accordance with Wallerstein's theory.
Politics in contrast creates value through collective authority
through the construction of goals and from invisible
commodities, by negotiating directly from value to its ends.9
reviews
What Meyer is thinking about here is a wider portion of
the three sectors of the economy, more strictly that services
and their production and distribution are not regulated by the
process of exchange and a market, but strictly through the
exercise of collective authority. In the modern context, the
state is the dominant agent of collective authority, but Meyer
emphasizes that the term government also applies to other
such agents. For example, religious organizations and other
cultural organizations. The world-wide expansion and
increasing power of the state made it easy to focus its
concrete analysis on the global system of the nation-state.
Theoretically, Meyer limits the term economics to the
meaning of commodity economics. Thus, it allows him to talk
about a functional property independently. In addition, Meyer
points out that the global system of nation-states is the actor of
an overall structure that classifies most of the broad economic
inequalities. With a few exceptions, the rationality of nation-
states around the world is the same.
The nation-state in Meyer's analysis is very many actors
who can get the main legitimacy in the world state. Internally,
they are based on the power broadly between citizens, the
control of legitimacy is a violent means demonstrated in the
activities of its population and a favorable method of
achieving the global ideal of progress and equity. The core
nation-state recognizes the legitimacy of The internal
monopoly in all other countries without recording their
economic position. Meyer sees that internal sovereignty is that
the system of world cultural norms that governs or influences
its members in the global system of the nation-state. States are
representations of legitimate citizens because they follow
legitimate goals that are more global toward progress and
governance. To expand this, they follow the path of limiting
the breadth of approved schemes, they can benefit from a
range of external support ranging from access to technology
and financial assistance to international agreements of various
patterns.
Meyer's emphasis is on the basis of his claim to the
relative autonomy of a world system other than the world
economy. Far from what Wallerstein's theory is proposing, it
is a mere conjecture. However Meyer's contribution offers a
critical complaint to it. Meyer did not oppose the world state
with the world economy. He sees it as reinforcing each other's
ways of creating value.
Implicit in Meyer's analysis is that the state, especially the
periphery, is a more fundamental socialism. They are
antisystemic feeds but only in the sense that they are pursuing
a value creation that is largely untouched by the functioning
of the market, driven by the commodity economy.
Since Meyer mentioned that there is no other way of
creating value than politically and economically, and since he
distinguishes between economics and commodity economics,
the ideal of the state seems to function as a kind of residual
category that includes all actions except those relating to the
economy. Meyer's correction of Wallerstein's theory can be
defined that the global system is not a world-economy but a
world-political economy.
Meyer's contribution at the empirical level to the global
talk of sasi has been a major focus of rapid development of
the national education system after World War II. The
education system does not grow faster in a strong country or
the same in one of the weak countries. In the absence of a
clear causal relationship, Meyer and his colleagues
considered a more general "world culture" as an explanation.
That the education system and state power soon expanded in
the first, second, and third countries. Continued development
may be a historical accident but it looks like
reflecting the work of a world culture that legitimizes the
nation-state and mandates the expansion of education as part
of the nation-building process based on individual citizenship.
For Meyer, world culture is the one that holds the
decentralization of the world state (world politics) together.
The world's culture brought about intellectual modernization
that acted like the people of the international pen who
supported the global myth of progress and engineering.
Religious and cultural processes are also resources of
collective authority. However, Meyer did not move far in the
analysis of the alternating native on the country. Like the
education system and the international cultural elite, they are
an important part of the global process, but their proper
relationship to the world's commodity economies is to leave
unclear.
Roland Robertson
Robertson introduced the continuity between the theory of
globalization and the developments that occurred in the 19th
and early 20th centuries as a development involving
modernity. Furthermore, he focused on the problem of
differences of opinion between individuals and society
affected by modern conditions. In classical discussions,
experts distinguish pre-modern conditions and modern
societies as forms of Gemeinschaft or communal societies and
Ge-sellschaft or association structures.
According to Robertson, globalization is understood as a
looping between the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft that
transcends the present society and is not just within that
society. This means that the dynamics of society that occurred
are a leap from the previous dynamics and these changes are
seen in various new structures and conditions of the
community. Life in the modern world seems to stand between
two poles, namely the reality of social functions and in the
other corner is in the reality of the individual within itself.
Globalization displays both because it presents a certain
society in the social system and also causes relativization
between society and the individual itself.
Globalization is a process that brings in a single social
world. This then brings an understanding of the relativization
of the self or society and also dualism in the world system in
society or the dualism of humanity. Understanding of dualism
The second cannot replace the first understanding. With
globalization, the entire content of the world becomes
interdependent and becomes a single place, and on the one
hand becomes the world's society by eliminating their
respective national identities. In the end, the national state
emerged in the global system of social security as an
important thing but could not limit personal identity.
Relativization, in Robertson's view, is a sub-unit of the global
system that places itself only by involving all elements in the
global community. Globalization involves a paradoxical
process. This is because in the absence of a dominant model
in which a society can be formed, each society shapes its own
image through the renewal of its national identity. On one
occasion, Robertson spoke of universalism and
universalization of particularism that society must have a
different identity).
Individuals can give up their social identity when working
in an international NGO, tourism, social movements, migration,
becoming a foreign worker and also intercultural contact in
society. Conflicts within individuals often come to the surface
when confronted directly with images of the stability of the
pseudo-global world of various minorities, individual
personal forms and collective fictitious identities.
Yet again Robertson draws attention to the tension
between the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft in the
framework of globalization first about being concerned with
how a society is formed. Second, paying attention to the
world as a whole can be formed. The two types of
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are as follows:
The first type of Gemeinschaft is understood as the world
order of a closed community or an identity that is less
communicative. This means the rejection of globalization as a
logical choice under the influence of the objective conditions of
globalization. Robertson cites fundamental religious political
movements in the Soviet Union and Iran as examples.
The second type of Gemeinschaft is an order that forms a
single global community and its small nature as exemplified
by Dur kheim is collective consciousness in the form of a
global village. These are examples of structures that exist in
the Catholic Church, today's peace movements, and various
liberation theological movements.
While the two types of Gesellschaft are:
1. An amalgamation of the world order associated in an
open society with a huge sociocultural exchange
between them. For example, the condition of the
liberal nationalist society in Quebec Canada today.
2. Emphasizing oneself on the integrity of the national
society where acknowledging this condition is based
on the idea of liberation and systematic world
organization.
The hybrid form emerged as an answer to the global
demand and also a reflection of the order of the economic and
political system of the modern world. On the one hand,
traditional nature closes the attachment between certain
religions and cultures that form the formulation of personal
identity in the global system on the framework of a particular
religion (as concrete forms are the fundamentalist movements
in the US, Iran, India, and Japan). These movements emerged
as an answer to various forms of globalization.
The second side is the crystallization in the character of
globalization and the implicit application of eschatology in
the teaching of open humanity. For example, the Catholic
church, which began to open itself up to the development of
the times with various liberation theologies in it since the 60s,
ecotheological including the green movement and Soka
Gakkai.
Ultimately, the relativization of society and the individual
within a national framework fosters the search for a certain
identity and gives meaning to universality in general and is
also related to the universalization of particularism and the
particularization of universalism.
Niklas Luhmann
For Luhmann, the question of globalization has entered
through his definition of society. Society is first of all, a kind
of social system. The social system in turn consists of actions,
but is based on meaningful communication. They use
communication to elevate and to correlate events that add to
the system. Society is a social system that includes all
communication. Society is a system of social communication
in the very broad sense of the word. Words will only be able
to reach the boundaries of a society if communication stops
thinking.
Furthermore, if we talk about the community, there must
be enough degree of communication between groups of actors
and the creation of opportunities for sparse and limited
communication. In a statement,
Luhmann together with Wallerstein and Meyer gave the idea that
man has a world society basically because the fundamental relative
ways (communication, value creation, economic exchange) are now
increasing continuously around the earth completely. Luhmann is
more abstract at the starting point to avoid economic and political
reduction. The advantage is that Luhmann can remove the capitalist
economy and the nation-state system from the analytical burden to
bring about the structure of the global system.
For Luhmann, modernization and globalization are
closely related. In this case, modern society is a consequence
of the transformation in western societies in the type of
differentiation of the dominant core of society. Luhmann sees
modernity as characterized (not primary) by a quantitative
increase in differentiation, but more importantly by a
qualitative change in the criteria in reference to which a major
part of social communication is formed. To compile the
characteristics of differentiation of modern society is to see a
change or shift from a multi-level differentiated power to a
functional differentiated power.
What is a stratified and functional differentiated society?
The key assumption is the thought or idea that a fictitious
stratification can be a form of subsystem differentiation and
not just an uneven distribution of status, well-being, power
and other forms of influence. For Luhmann, the gradual and
indegenization of the shift to modernity in Western society
has become the structural center of the reordering of the
stratified priority.
For Luhmann, the development of Western modernity
must involve more than just a single structural factor. The
basis of the position is not such a change in the dominant type
of differentiation found in modernity, but more than that this
shift holds the key in understanding the many changes.
What he offered was that globalization was connected to
the increasing dominance in the modern social structure of
knowledge as a way of responding to disappointing
expectations. Luhmann understood hope as fundamental to
social structure. In reality, the social structure consists of
expectations. Since as a structure refers to a relatively stable
context in which communication can occur, communication
becomes impossible without expectations and structured
expectations. Therefore, there must be a way to meet with the
disappointment of hope. Luhmann sees two approaches,
norms and knowledge (kog nisi).
Luhmann's further claim is that the historical dominance
of normatively structured expectations is instrumental in the
addition of a higher complex society than the pre-modern and
early modern eras. The argument is that a normative emphasis
allows for a greater contrast between social structure and
natural events.
For Luhmann, the West's shift from stratification to
functional differentiation is at the same time a shift in
dominance from the normative mode to the cognitive mode of
responding to expectations of disappointment. Only in the
type of differentiation does this change mean not a simple
change, but further a ringing; the specific modern norm is that
structure and by encouraging knowledge, not as described in
the limits of knowledge. In Weber's terms, normative
rationality shifts from the end to the means. This shows more
instrumental.
Luhmann speculates that the greater complexity of
modern functional subsystems is possible only on the basis of
a cognitive mode advantage. Attributing his empirical
observation that the type of communication that globalization
possesses is largely a cognitive orientation that eventually
leads to the conclusion that world society is a direct
consequence of modernization which has later been
understood as a shift in the functional differentiation of
society's dominant subsystem. Luhmann then saw
globalization as an almost incidental consequence of
structural modernization in Western society. Luhmann
describes a consistency per difference between whether
society as a social system and thematic presentation or
impression of society. Therefore, Luhmann also talks between
the dominant impression and the impression of being
involved or competing. For Luhmann, a more complex
society is one that is more problematic in all of itself being
thematic. It is not surprising, then, that Luhmann's view of
modern global society as dominated by functional
differentiation plays a key role in his conclusion.
With a shift in the advantage of functional differentiation,
Luhmann considers that the archaic solution to the
tematization of the syarakat has become highly problematic.
He gives two reasons: first, the adaptive tuning resulting
from functional specialization means that each subsystem
creates an abundance of possibilities for social action.
Second, unlike in stratified differentiation, the relationship of
the social subsystem in functional differentiation is
structurally non-hierarchical making it more difficult to treat
anyone than it does as oneself, the part that clearly represents
it all.
In accordance with that, Luhmann's theory expects the
tematization of the self to be thought about clearly. In general,
he sees three kinds of efforts in looking at this. The first
thematicization of the global system in terms of what is called
a "not". In this category, Luhmann should place utopians and
antisystemic dreams of all kinds. One who understands the
present is confused by the calculation that one or more ensure
the future against the one faced.
The second thematicization seeks to revitalize and renew
the solutions that have become a characteristic of the
premodern given politically and regionally society. Here he
places the conception that seeing society as a normative
structured system of the same people-oriented way.
The third thematicization uses a functional subsystem that is
specific as a part that represents the whole. Here, Luhmann
wants to take the idea of seeing the global community as a
capitalist system. In this way, he privileged the economy as
Robertson and Meyer prioritized a political system. The style of
the global system as an aspect of technology will also be found
here.
CONCLUSION
Globalization requires a single model in the world and
society. Everything, including religion, becomes an
instrument for society to interact and communicate. The
specificity of religion has transformed into something
universal in language and symbols that are agreed upon by
consensus by the world community. As an instrument of
communication, religion relativizes itself so that it has the
flexibility to function functionally for interactive instruments.
It moves from closed religious exclusivity to an open public
idiom that can be accessed by anyone who is not limited to
certain religious groups.
In addition to the universalization of religious specificity,
universal global instruments are also specialized in religious
idiom. Commodities and economies, for example, which were
previously universal, are transformed into symbols and
languages, religious languages, and functional interactions in
sacred interactions. Religion is economically oriented in the
sense of providing economic support for the community in
building transactional relationships and sharing commodities.
Religion in globalization has transformed from things that
are private, unique, and sacred to public, general, and factual.
Transcendence as the main characteristic of religion is
commodified as a global spirit that continuously and
continuously overcomes the social problems identified in
economic and political problems.
