ROW Episode 40

In this episode we explore the idea that globalization can essentially be understood as the tangible expression of humanity’s journey towards unity.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we explore the idea that globalization can essentially be understood as the tangible expression of humanity's journey towards unity. Today I thought I would share with you some thoughts on globalization and reimagining how we might understand the concept and therefore react to it differently. The word globalization tends to evoke a lot of strong emotions in people. People either react vehemently to it or they're very much in support of it. So before we proceed further, I thought it might be useful to actually clarify for purposes of this conversation what we mean by globalization, or at least the sense in which I'm using it. And this definition, which I've put on the banner down below comes from a meld of two definitions given by two very important figures in leaders of thought in our day and age. One is Jeffrey Sachs, Professor at Columbia University and the other is Professor Ian Golden of Oxford University. Jeffrey Sachs focuses on the idea of globalization as being the fact of humanity's interdependence over vast distances. Ian Golden focuses on the process of increasing global integration and cross border flows that result from globalization that happen over an ever widening set of countries. So in my mind, if you meld these two together, you come up with this definition that I've put here, which is the process of ever increasing human interdependence across long distances, resulting in deepening global integration. Now, one thing is for sure, that globalization has had both positive and negative effects. Some of the positive effects are the creation of opportunities for economic growth and rising incomes across the world. Also opportunities for a wider dissemination of knowledge and learning through the spread of advanced technologies like mobile phones and the internet. These are some examples of the positive impacts of globalization. In fact Professor Golden says that globalization, in his view, has been the most powerful driver of human progress in the history of humanity, which is quite a big statement. Now what's interesting is that we as humans generally have a tendency to focus more on the negative in most situations. And so when it comes to globalization, we also focus on the negative impacts. Not to say that there aren't any, but we tend to over focus on them. The fact is that if globalization has indeed made humanity more interconnected and interdependent and basically made it more integrated, then it stands to reason that having become this integrated unit, so to speak, this unit is also now susceptible to systemic risks and dangers like, for instance, the spread of pathogens, which we saw during COVID, because of increased transportation and people flying hither and yon and moving between one place and another within a country like China, but also across the world. Pathogens are going to be carried ever more rapidly. This is one of the downsides, if you like, of globalization. The other is financial contagion. We see, for instance, that in 2008, the financial crisis started from a housing price bubble in the United States and eventually, through a series of events, triggered a global financial crisis. Now, our typical reactions as human beings is that when we experience the negative, we become myopic, we become very nearsighted, and we lose our ability to accurately read our reality and respond to it. This myopia leads to a couple of typical knee jerk reactions. The first is that we either repeat the same behavior, denying that it has any negative effects. In this instance, we would just keep going at globalization the way we have without giving any thought to the negative impacts, thereby compounding those negative impacts. Or we do the opposite and we panic and we say,"Oh, let's reverse course." We take a few steps back and undo some of the progress that we've made and undo some of the good that's been done. The thing to bear in mind, as Jeffrey Sachs hammers home in his works, is that this process of globalization started when modern humans migrated from Africa 70,000 years ago. This ever deepening integration has so woven and bound our destinies together as human beings that it's really impossible to undo. The way I like to put it is that once scrambled, the egg cannot be unscrambled. Sachs goes on to point out that every time we've tried to take some steps back to slow down globalization or arrest its process, it's proved disastrous. He has some interesting examples, including the example of the Luddites in 19th century Britain. You will remember that the Luddites were a movement of textile workers essentially, who felt very threatened by the new machinery that was coming out, the looms and the textile mills, that was going to do the textile work and displace them. That was their fear. So they would break into these factories and mills and they would destroy the machinery. They were known as Luddites, and even today we refer to people as Luddites if they're opposed to industrialization or automation or computerization or any new technologies. Another example is the Treaty of Versailles that ended up exacerbating economic and political malaise in Europe in the early 20th century, leading to the collapse of international trade and putting finance into disarray. This combination of factors eventually led us to the Great Depression. Any attempts at what is called"slow-balization", slowing down globalization or deglobalization, will lead to decline in growth worldwide and will lead to higher unemployment and destabilization of markets, including the market for food. It will decimate the world economy, lead to conflict with disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable. What's important to realize at this point is that it's critical to acknowledge that globalization has had both positive and negative impacts. The trick is for us to acknowledge that some positive impacts have come and not to take steps that would undermine those, while at the same time acknowledging the risks and the dangers and the negative impacts and learning to manage and mitigate them. As Sachs said, we need to learn to act smarter. Why is that? Because failure to manage risks leads to some bad consequences under which we're straining as a human race right now. The first is that the risks caused by globalization fester and proliferate, subjecting us to tremendous global challenges that include things like nuclear proliferation, runaway climate change, financial crises, pandemics, terrorism, and so on. These are all the systemic risks to which we're exposed as a result of the interdependence caused by globalization. The second thing that failure to manage risks does is it leads to a backlash that translates into insular practices in an attempt to regain control. What are some of these insular practices? First we see xenophobia. We saw this particularly in Europe as a reaction to the tsunami of migrants coming from the Middle East and Africa, especially when the war in Syria was at its height. It led to a backlash within Europe with the rise of far right governments, and eventually even led to Brexit, with Britain saying, we want to take control of our own destiny, we want to keep the migrants out, and we can't do this within the context of the EU, they're not doing enough, so we're just going to exercise national sovereignty and do this. So xenophobia is one of those insular practices. The second one is protectionism. We see this with the tariff trade wars between China and the United States that have led to bad consequences for people on both sides and for the world. Isolationism is another insular practice. Nationalism is yet another one, this idea of, wherever we are, our country first, whether you're in Hungary or Turkey or Russia or the United States or Britain. This crazy idea that our nation comes first and we will do whatever it takes for our nation in an interdependent world to come out ahead. It has led to wars like the wars we see in Ukraine and the danger of war in places like the South China Seas and Taiwan and then the wars in Yemen and Ethiopia and so on. There are many examples. What's interesting to note here, and I've always been fascinated by this, is that these insular practices tend to come in clusters, very much like autoimmune diseases do. If you get one autoimmune disease then your likelihood of getting one or more others goes up quite a bit. How do we manage and mitigate these risks? By acting smarter. I believe that the first step is for us to start with our beliefs by reframing our concept of globalization. We need to let go of our limiting beliefs and the false assumptions that globalization is only bad for us, and there's no good that comes of it, and that we need to quash and reverse it. We do this by changing our understanding of human history. The first step is to recognize that history is an unfolding story of the human race, and its movement from a stage of immaturity and childhood starting with infancy, to towards maturity. It's a collective journey that we all take together that is marked by ever widening circles of integration and unity. It's time for us to really abandon all these old fetishes that get in the way of our maturity, all these insular practices that we talked about, like nationalism and xenophobia, and really get with the program and say,"Okay. We're now maturing as a human race into collective adulthood. What new ways of thinking and behaving do we need to adopt?" we also need to be patient with ourselves as we do this, while also ensuring that we don't prolong this stage, because it will lead to unnecessary suffering. The second thing to change in the way we understand our world, and we've talked about this before on this series, is that humanity now functions as a single organism. Because we're so interdependent and interconnected as a result of this movement of humans over 70,000 years we have become as one and it reflects the fact that there is a law that governs our social and spiritual life which is akin to the operation of the law of gravity in the physical life, and that is the law of oneness. It requires that we develop a vision of our shared identity and common purpose as humans, or else what will end up happening is we will continue to be buffeted by competing ideologies and power struggles and an endless permutation of us and them, which leads to the tearing asunder of the social fabric. It's been happening and it will only continue to get worse unless we do this. This brings us to the crux of this episode: the proposition that globalization should be viewed as the tangible expression of humanity's journey towards unity. This is what globalization really is, and once we start to view it in that light, it liberates us to start to take the actions that are necessary to manage and mitigate the systemic risks that are caused by this deepening integration. Before I move on to change in behaviors, having addressed change in thought, I wanted to talk for a second about the role of suffering. It's important to acknowledge that suffering, both mental and physical, has a role to play. It's not something we should seek, but once it happens, it can be used to help catalyze a shift in our collective thinking and perception by first stirring our conscience. When we suffer, we, our conscience gets stirred. We saw this during COVID with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, which had a ripple effect across the world. The stirring of the conscience, the disillusioning of the masses: as we see our world falling apart at the seams and people suffering needlessly everywhere, we become disillusioned. This stirring of our conscience, and the disillusioning of ourselves prompts us then to want to make radical changes in the very conception we have of what society is. And that radical conception will allow us then to coalesce our disjointed limbs of this human society and bring them together in unity, thus fulfilling our destiny of maturity as a human race. Suffering can also be viewed as a fire, if you like, that fuses the discordant elements of society together. It also instills in our leaders a sense of responsibility, and maybe we haven't suffered enough because we're not quite there yet, but the sense of responsibility that's necessary for them to really act as stateswomen and statesmen and create peace in this world once and for all. Interestingly, both Jeffrey Sachs and Ian Golden acknowledge the role of suffering and disaster in bringing about the next level of change. One example is that after the Second World War, the suffering of the Second World War, humanity created the institutions of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions to deal with all the global financial matters. Now, after we've changed the way we think, we need to change the way we behave. We need to adopt the necessary tools, powers, and capacities that are appropriate to the next stage in our collective development, which is our maturity, our unification as a human race. There are three particular behaviors that I believe we should start off with, or would do well to start off with. Before we get to behaviors, there's a certain set of skills that we first need to hone, and that is the development and honing of the core disciplines of collaboration and cooperation and meaningful and extensive consultation to find solutions to problems. We have a great example. During COVID, scientists really role modeled well for us. Whereas in the past it would take 12 to 14 years for them to come up with a single vaccine and bring it to market, we saw that during COVID, within 11 months, we had several new vaccines. What that required was amazing collaboration, absence of secrecy, putting aside of their egos to hold out until they got published first. So it is possible. Imagine what humanity can do once we set our minds to it and collaborate. The beauty of globalization is that it makes it easier to collaborate and cooperate because of improved communication and instantaneous communication. Now, the first behavior that we need to change is creation of a set of institutions at the global level that we desperately need, or at the supra national level, set of collective decision making and enforcement institutions to meet the challenges of our time. Most of our collective challenges like climate change and nuclear proliferation and global financial crises are collective and therefore demand collective solutions. And yet we lack the requisite mechanisms. As Ian Golden says global institutions, which may have had some success in the 20th century, are now unfit for purpose. And he goes on to say that our capacity to manage global issues has not kept pace with the growth in their complexity and danger. We see that again with climate change, this complex problem that affects and implicates the whole world requires the whole world to be able to act together and come up with something beyond just voluntary pledges that are loosey goosey. The second change in behavior has got to be identifying a shared set of global ethics, which we then weave into the very fabric of all our new institutions and processes. These are critical. As Jeff Sachs says, we need to agree upon a model of understanding and ethics on the basis of which to build peace. Ian Golden also argues that it's necessary to make ethics the central concern in our discussions on the future of global governance. In fact, there are so many leaders of thought now, not just academics, but people who are in politics and have served on various institutions have all arrived at this conclusion. What sorts of ethics and principles, first principles are we talking on about? First and foremost, the law of oneness, which must be made the ruling principle of international life. A recognition, in other words, that the advantage of one nation can only be guaranteed by guaranteeing the advantage of the whole organism, the world, so all nations. Dispensing with unfettered national sovereignty: we need to abandon this immature and childish fetish. The principle of collective security that we have spent a couple of sessions here talking about at length. I'd refer you to, I think, episode 29 was one of them, where we limit the number of arms that each nation has to the amount necessary to preserve internal order, and then agree that if one nation flouts the rules, the rest will arise as one to reduce it to submission. Another principle is that force is to be used solely in service of justice, that international force is to be used only internationally, not by individual nations, to safeguard the organic unity of the world. For those of you who are skeptics that such a thing is possible, it has been done before. I would refer you to a book, Building a World Federation, The Key to Resolving Our Global Crises, that gives an example of a principle that from conception to adoption by 193 nations only took five years. This is the Responsibility to Protect principle. The third behavior is that we need to train ourselves to elect fit leaders with the requisite qualities and motivations to tackle the tremendous needs and global challenges of today. We know that building institutions isn't enough because any institution, no matter how perfect, is capable of misuse if the people who are members of that institution are unfit and don't have the qualities of character, including honesty, uprightness, selflessness, and so on. The first step in, in training ourselves to elect fit leaders is to change our conception of and assumptions about power, that power is not a means of domination, but rather a necessary element in social organization whose sole role is to create the environment in which you and I and everyone else can fulfill our potential. And that power should be associated with uplifting words like"release" and"encourage" and"channel" and"guide" and"enable." And that power is not something to be seized and jealously guarded, but rather it is a limitless capacity to transform that resides in the human race as a whole. If we were to do all of this, then imagine what a different world it would be. A world in which, for instance, critical natural resources are equitably managed and distributed, including energy resources. It's a world in which the quantity of arms in each nation is restricted to what's necessary to maintain an internal order. And so it liberates us from the fear and suspicion and the enormous waste of money in these ever escalating arms races that we're engaged in, and the scourge of both conventional and nuclear wars. It'll take away the fears of the wars. We fear war over Taiwan between U.S. and China. We fear that the war in Ukraine will spill over and involve NATO and that Russia and NATO will have a nuclear standoff. We'll also have mechanisms to manage and mitigate climate change and to manage our financial and economic affairs so that we don't have destabilizing financial crises. In short, we'll be able to live in a peaceful and secure world. If you are interested in learning more about some of these thoughts I would refer you to one of two things. The first is book that I wrote in 2021 called The Alchemy of Peace, Six Essential Shifts in Mindsets and Habits to Achieve World Peace. This is the cover, available everywhere on Amazon. And the second, if you want to delve more into the idea of globalization, I recently wrote a chapter in a collective monograph entitled Religion and Science in the Globalized World. It's a collective monograph. You can also get that on Amazon. And it was really wonderful to participate in a webinar with a couple of my colleagues, Houshmand Badee and Paul Hanley, in discussion on this topic. Feel free to pick up a copy of that, I've highlighted some of the ideas that I had put in this chapter for you in this episode. But if you have any comments or questions, please put them on YouTube or on Facebook, and we can engage in a conversation. Thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward to seeing you next month. Take care. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.