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Message from the Director:
Global challenges of reconciliation

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

English Folk Poem, circa 1764
From David Bolier, Silent Theft, 2002

In elementary school I had a splendid sixth grade teacher named Odessa Cooper. In our small town in North Carolina she wanted us twelve-year-olds to begin to understand ourselves as citizens of the world. She did not use the term “globalization”—it had not been invented then. But in her own indomitable way she opened our horizons to include international relations and a sense of the history of our country’s interactions with other nations.

Above all, she awakened us to an appreciation of the promise and the vital importance of the then young United Nations. She wanted us to develop a consciousness of, and commitments to, global interdependence and its responsibilities. In the intervening years since that era, global interdependence—and the political challenges it brings—have intensified immeasurably.

A complex mix of factors coalesce when we speak of “globalization." It refers to the shrinking of the world due to rapid travel, telecommunications, and the internet. It includes the intermingling of cultures and experience through the media, business interactions, and the international flow of music, art, and culture.

The term invites us to claim hope for the possibility of increasing a sense of our interdependence on this small planet, and for the ethical and spiritual wisdom and practices we are called to nurture in our politics. At the same time, it warns us to attend responsibly to the ways in which commercial and military-strategic interests–unbalanced by humane and ethical commitments in national and world governance–can lead the world toward a very grim future.

Globalization has been fueled by the flow of capital across national borders through international investment, and through a variety of mixtures of private and governmental cooperation in developing areas. Developing nations have encouraged corporate patterns of international trade and profit-taking by offering businesses waivers of local obligations or taxation. The entry of manufacturers who move to claim the advantages of lower costs of labor and raw materials introduce workers with rural backgrounds and experience to new ways of working and earning as well as to new aspirations.

Although low by western standards, the wages they receive are welcome and often set them apart from their neighbors. Most often their jobs offer no benefits or long-term guarantees of employment; they likely involve long hours of work, sometimes in unhealthy conditions. Critics point out that the larger populations of such countries unfairly subsidize these enterprises due to the often destructive consequences of unrestricted clear cutting of forests, the waiving of taxes and fees, and the consumption of the nation’s other natural resources. At the same time, in older industrial nations many workers and domestic producers are put out of jobs or business when their labor cannot compete with the low costs of those from developing countries.

Globalization points not only to the movement of capital and the means of production across national boundaries. It also includes the flow of refugees from regions where over-population, war-torn villages and cities, and crumbling societies and economies make people’s prospects, and those of their children, bleak. The migrations, in significant numbers, of Asians, Africans and middle easterners into Europe and Britain, and of Hispanics, Koreans, Vietnamese and many others into the U.S., represent determined and often desperate efforts by those able to move to provide better futures for their children.

Religion, and religious movements, play complex roles in globalization. International congresses of leaders from the religious movements of the world meet and explore ways in which their traditions and practices can contribute to peaceful and fruitful interfaith relations, and to steps toward international justice. At the same time, fundamentalists and conservative religious leaders often see their missions as involving the call to personal conversion, the strengthening of families, and the grounding of those with whom they minister in their religious traditions and practices.

The path of inter-religious understanding, combined with strategic cooperation in the resistance to, and reform of, the more destructive features of the globalizing process, holds significant possibilities. As history shows, religious leaders can bring their faith communities to engage the challenges of reconciliation and justice. On the other hand, religious leaders can also mobilize their adherents to ethnocentric “righteousness,” fueling the politics of violence, exclusion, and revenge.

In the coming academic year a significant part of the public programming of the Center for Ethics will provide occasions to think, learn and discuss together the issues and challenges of globalization. One of the themes will focus on the ways in which religious traditions can provide ethical leadership, vision, courage–and political influence–to address the human and humane issues the processes of globalization entail.

In the course of these occasions I trust we will also attend to the vision toward which Mrs. Cooper’s teaching pointed when she led us in singing “One world, built on a firm foundation; one world committed to justice and peace.”

[ Posted by James Fowler at August 15, 2003 11:07 AM | More Opinion articles ]

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