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| September 2007 Religion & Globalization: Globalization
as Ubuntu? J. Kristen Urban teaches international relations at Mount St. Mary’s University and serves on the ICPJ Board. She gave this talk at the Unitarian Universalists of Gettysburg on July 1. The word globalization evokes strong feelings in people. Feelings of excitement and connection: “I can find Starbucks even in Singapore!,” or “Look at this great jacket I bought from Peebles–it’s from Indonesia!” Or the fact that I can have my International Relations students carry out research projects with students at the University of Bahrain thanks to internet communications. Globalization also evokes feelings of alienation and despair: This week on PBS News, we were told that with the introduction of Bio-Tech (BT) cotton farming to south India by US agri-giant Monsanto, peasant cotton farmers have discovered they can no longer produce their own seed–each year they have to buy the seed and pesticides for the BT cotton. This is not horrible if the monsoons come and water is available and the promised high yields are realized, but in the face of drought for the past several years, thousands of India’s cotton farmers have been driven to suicide because they see no relief from their debts. Last year alone the suicide rate averaged one death every eight hours. Here I want to share some thoughts about the relationship between globalization and cultural values, especially as understood through religion. As a political scientist who focuses on international conflict, I’ve been struggling for some time with the kind of unfettered capitalism we seem to have unleashed on the world in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, and to understand the link with the events of 9-11 and the role that religion now plays in global affairs. So most of these ideas are mine, but have been distilled from readings and discussions with others over the past decade. Most recently, I had the great good fortune to be invited to join a 2-week discussion at Boston University’s Institute for Culture and Religion (CURA) with a diverse group of folks who included academics, military strategists, journalists, politicians, and business personnel, so some of these reflections will draw upon those very rich discussions. Religion Usually when we talk about globalization we think about economics . . . maybe about communications . . . but religion wasn’t really on the radar for many of us until after 9-11. Of course religions were some of the first of society’s institutions to become globalized:
But all that was a long time ago! Since the Enlightenment–the Age of Reason–which began in the 16th and 17th Centuries, religion has slowly been sidelined. We don’t believe in superstition and myth any more: Science and Capitalism have emerged as the religions of the Western world. This is what we call “progress” and “modernization.” Indeed, with the rise of democratic liberalism, which presupposes the separation of church and state, we have come to speak of this trend as one of secularization. Social scientists have some theories about this. Modernization Theory was advanced in the 1950s and 1960s to help policy makers understand the best ways to assist in the development of the many new countries that came into being after World War II, when Great Britain, France, and other colonial powers let go of their colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Development was the key word, and it involved a process of moving from the traditional to the modern. Some people argued that development required economic progress first and that political change would follow; others argued for the reverse. Regardless of which formulation you adopted, Modernization Theory was very clear: that development involved a path that incorporated mass education, industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of increasingly similar roles for men and women. Religion and culture don’t figure into the development scheme at any point: they represented tradition, and it was assumed they could only retard modernization. Indeed, Secularization Theory, which accompanied Modernization Theory, argued that as people modernized and increasingly adopted the Western approach of democratic governance and economic capitalism, they would discard religion altogether and live their lives as secular human beings. So what has happened? Religious revivals have been under way for the past decade everywhere in the world except Europe. These include
and, as we’re all aware, Islam has begun a battle for hearts and minds in the Muslim world. So what has happened? Clearly the social scientists were wrong. One explanation was offered in 1992 by Benjamin Barber, who published an article in the Atlantic titled “Jihad vs. McWorld.” The essence of his argument was that as we have become modernized and globally connected–globalized–we have become more homogenized, more alike–we’ve become the McWorld! The response to this–what Barber called “Jihad”–suggested that as people increasingly see themselves as part of a modernizing uniformity, there’s a kind of blowback, a counter-reaction, in which they seek to express their own particular identities, which rest with culture and religion. So, for instance, as India increasingly modernizes and becomes part of the global world, with Coca Cola and Big Macs in Calcutta, New Delhi, and Mumbai, Indians increasingly draw upon their Hindu roots, their Hindu identity, as a means by which to express themselves–to make real their presence in a world of interdependence and market uniformity. Journalist Ira Rifkin tells of high-tech workers in Bangalore, India, now a major center in the global communications network, draping their computers with flower garlands, lighting candles, and performing puja celebrations before their computers at their work stations. Part of Barber’s explanation makes sense to me. But I think there are other things at work as well. The whole process of modernization that culminates in global exchange involves a marketplace of ideas– modernity brings together people of different beliefs, cultures, and values. That is to say: modernization pluralizes. More than this, as Peter Berger argues: Pluralization creates a market for religion–there are different godson offer! People become aware there are other ways of looking at the world . . . other truths. Even if you are born Italian-American, for example, that doesn’t mean you will choose to be Catholic, but your great-grandmother in Sicily had no such “choice”–she would never have even imagined anything else. Villagers growing up in Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, or Brazil today are leaving the Catholic churches of their birth to join Pentecostal congregations, a phenomenon that not only has the Catholic church in a quandary, but one that is changing the lives of the new converts, as the local culture becomes transformed: men give up alcohol and prostitutes, for example, and become more present for their families. Thus, pluralization revitalizes religion! Things previously taken for granted now, in principle, become questionable. For some people this is a great liberation. But after a while, such freedom can become a burden–you don’t want to have to choose everything! So one explanation for the rise of religious “fundamentalism,” whether Christian, Muslim, or Hindu, is an attempt to restore certainty: to restore the “taken‑for‑granted-ness” of an earlier time, a time before the choices of modernization and globalization. Economics For economists, choice is always a good thing. When consumers have the freedom to choose their products in the marketplace, whether at the local farmers’ market or from the Dow holdings on Wall Street, the competition that drives such markets ensures that consumers get the best goods at the best prices. Creativity is unleashed, and humanity flourishes. We have only to consider the trauma that is today Russia to see what un-free societies and un-free markets can do to a society. This does not mean, of course, that market explanations are always the best ones for all cultural settings. Indeed, goods are much easier to transfer than ideas! I am happy to say that economists are finally discovering this: the claim is now being made that you cannot talk about economics independently from behavior. And behavior derives from cultural values, among which religion often plays a central role. For example, a “pure economist” might talk about the market for babies–one of my graduate school buddies argued vigorously for this in the 1980s–and talk about how to match suitable donors with recipients, etc. “Wait!” you say, “We don’t want to sell babies–we don’t even want to consider such a thing as a ‘baby market’!” Values define the “rules of the game,” what is permissible within a society. And also what is possible. You might have heard of Mohammed Yunus, the Bengali economics professor who founded the Grameen Bank; he received the Nobel Peace Prize this year. Part of the success of his micro-credit project was that Bengali villagers had social values upon which to build. The whole point of micro-credit, where the poor borrow as little as $20 to finance small income‑generating projects, is to help them trade on their collateral–their social capital, their reputations–and eventually to parlay that into collateral that will be honored in banking institutions. They will “graduate” to the next level. Saudi Arabia and Russia have both joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the past couple of years. Whether and to what extent the WTO rules (which stipulate openness, transparency, and accountability, and require institutions and rule of law) will actually coincide with the “rules of the game” defined by Saudi culture–both traditional and religious–or those defined by post-Communist Russia, has yet to be seen. For Saudis, a big challenge comes with the entry of products that could alter Saudi traditional values (movies, foodstuffs, clothing, etc.); for Russians, the problem is one of predation and lawlessness, as the elites (mobs?) make off with the spoils of the market at the expense of the rest of the society. Essentially what I am asserting here is that the only path to development is an indigenous one–or, as Ira Rifkin has termed it, glocalization. The fact that there is not a “one size fits all” market approach to resolving all development problems has become very apparent with economic globalization. But there are some constants:
Ubuntu So, in concluding, how does culture impact these relationships? The hope of globalization (for those of us who are social optimists) was the development of robust societies around the world through economic and cultural exchange. Such hopes were probably best captured in the Jubilee 2000 initiatives, through which the Global South sought debt relief from countries of the Global North–the Have‑Nots asking the Haves to join together in healing the global family. But robust societies cannot arise out of nothing, and economic theories alone cannot provide the fix. Thus, we might speak of a “comparative cultural advantage,” when we consider that cultures grounded in religious and social values that promote social cohesion will serve to lower the social costs in maintaining economic development; that is, where there is a civic culture, people will work together to make change happen. Coercion will not be necessary. We may not all love or understand each other, but those cultures grounded in value‑sets that affirm the worth of individual human beings and the significance of the other, and that respect the importance of the community will stand a greater chance of successfully navigating a course to well-being. Africans in the Southern cone have a name for this: it is called ubuntu, and it is the acknowledgment that “I exist because you are.” One of the presenters at our CURA seminar was Pete Boettke, a libertarian economist, Professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University in Washington, D.C. Because of his work with economic development in Eastern Europe and Russia, which seek development in the absence of institutions and infrastructure, social capital, and business leadership, he was called in to assess the post-Katrina debacle in New Orleans. While New Orleans had a governmental culture that was itself hostile to business and investment– rule of law was “somewhat compromised,” graft and corruption were rampant–he was astonished at the rich civic culture he encountered at the level of the people he interviewed. The folks responsible for evacuating over 100,000 people stranded in the floodwaters after the levees broke were Vietnamese Catholics and Baptist church members, who risked their own lives to help thousands of strangers. This was in stark contrast to what he had observed in the former Communist states, wherein survival over the past seventy years resulted in a complete focus on “taking care of myself” an attitude that still prevails–and retards recovery and development. I think the Africans have it right: call it Wisdom from the Ages. The first real globalization began on their continent when the first humans began spreading out into the rest of the world tens of thousands of years ago. The only way our newly re‑globalized world can succeed in the 21st Century is if we understand it through the concept of ubuntu: I exist because you are. |
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Last updated March 24, 2008 |
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Interfaith Center for Peace and Justice
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