Summary Article for Congress Proceeding Identity: Roadmap to a global civilization: Survival or extinction.
The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.
We find ourselves in the threshold of civilizations and in which a newer approach to problem solving needs to be installed in human consciousness taking into consideration globalization, mental health and the development of the Self.
As we enter the 21st century we ought to think not primarily "problems" oriented but in the realm of "questions" or mysteries, that is, issues of meaning. Without a spiritual disposition, beyond strategies of self-interest and control at the expense of others and things, it is impossible to visualize an inclusive human horizon. For this reason, our task is to resolve these problems by transcending the theoretical basis of Reason that has defined the world as an order of possessions.
"Man has to remember the man, who forgets where the path leads" Heraclitus.
I believe that the most pressing problems of the world are philosophical in nature. They have to do with the age old questions such as, what does it mean to be a human being, what is “real” and what is not? Who am I? What is the purpose of life?
In today’s world we are especially aware of different world views and how they conflict. Daily, world media reports on the disparate views of heads of state. And daily, through media and through our lives, we witness the physical and spiritual devastation that result from the clash of ideologies at geopolitical levels.
Philosophers are not to be held chiefly responsible for this state of affairs. We human beings are rational spiritual beings and we are all philosophers in the most general and broadest of terms. But, thinkers or intellectuals have a special role in societies. They have long influenced government policies as advisors and, as history records; there have always been intellectuals who challenge governments’ policies or legitimacy. This extends itself to the realm of definition of health and disease and to therein policies of solutions. From time to time, such challenges spawn revolution and chaos. This is not always the case, however, and, especially in the latter part of the last century and into this one, aided by communication technology, many intellectuals have been able to join together in what we have come to call a network of global civil society. I believe the next level must come from a redefinition of who we are in the most essential aspects of our common identity. Civil society has been able to exert influence for change and remedy a wide variety of issues all of which center on the notion of human rights. Moreover, global civil society concerned with human rights extends well beyond the intellectuals who first propagated it. Indeed, passionate members of a human rights guided global civil society are found in every walk of life in every sort of culture. This trend is cited by some historians and critics as nothing short of miraculous in an era which is also distinguished by its brutality and genocide. The importance of this trend cannot be underestimated for it indicates a growing faith in the power of reason and love for the good of all humankind. Whether it is in the form of communicative reasoning or in the rigorous examination of our understandings of the world, the prominence assigned to this capability of our rationality should give us heart as we tackle the world’s problems at their core: that is, the ideas that have made or contribute to those problems.
I have chosen to look closely at cultural as well as spiritual identity and globalization, two broad conceptualizations that, for at least the last few decades, have posed several serious, even world-threatening, problems. The first of these has developed under a world view which creates the notion that individual cultural identities are pervasive, deep and immutable. The new world view ought to consider the transcendental aspect of a spiritual identity which crosses borders and therefore allows for a better understanding towards clear survival of the species and not constant risk of extinction.
The theme of this presentation invites one to investigate life as a possibility that is a place or piece of earth able to shape itself as a project of history. In other words, "life as possibility" is a way of asking one to discover life or allow it to be revealed to us as an alternative and consequently to assume it as our destiny or life as lived by us.
In fact, man lives experiences without being able to unite them through reflection. This phenomenon that has become prevalent and even characteristic in our age is expressed in the fragmentation of identities.
It appears in the loss of the old Reason that shaped utopian worlds and legitimated our actions. The same can be said about the seductiveness of empirical truth so that there is lack of confidence in those who seek meaning in such issues as God, the world and existence. The logic of validation is rather in terms of efficiency, which masks or disguises the way identity is constituted. The implication of this logic is loss of reliance in modernity's omnipotent and falsely liberating Reason and, naturally, in the narcissist blindness of those who seek protection therein.
The 21st century has confronted us with the challenge of the metaphysical dimension, just when thinkers and philosophers are less prepared to see and think in those terms. The exaltation of scientific-technological devices, the search for a "God who has died" among the comings and goings of the hypertext, cybernetics and epistemology, leaves us blinded by the footlights.
To create room for encounters in thinking and feeling regarding the destiny of man I will search for the sense of events already lived. The hope is to recover the sacred in the process the object of the philosophical search, namely, "to accompany man in his passage towards consciousness of his dignity and sovereignty".
The link of man to philosophy makes of this discipline, at the same time, knowledge, and attitude and, above all, passionate testimony to life, and finally a path towards truth. This is one of the first moments of that reflective conscience which had been relegated to the dust bin for lack of scientist precision. The so-called "exactness" of the reductionism knowledge temporally took us away from any existential commitment. But this choice is also a symptom of the spiritual weariness of Reason that emptied knowledge of meaning According to this view, certain cultures are destined to always be in conflict with those that do not share similar ways of viewing material and spiritual life. To survive, similar cultures must band together and consciously reaffirm their shared values. Only in this way can they ward off the challenges of those individual cultures or, more probably, constellation of cultures which will also be banding together to try to impose their views on the world order. For those who subscribe to this notion, not only are cultural values immutable and pervasive throughout any given culture, as well, clashes between dissimilar cultures are inevitable.
When this view is carried to its logical extremes, the second conceptualization, globalization, is always a villain. One might argue that the term globalization itself should be considered innocuous, not villainous. After all, it simply refers to the processes by which knowledge and ideas, including customs and values are introduced to one place from another. To be sure, a particular process, like colonization, is nefarious in nature and compromises even the most humane of introduced changes, such as improved medical care, for example. But should the globalization, that is the introduction of certain medical technology in this case, be considered evil, or, at best, undesirable? The answer is yes if culture is immutable, and must only develop out of its own traditions. In that case, any changes are undesirable if they can be attributed to another culture’s influence. Such globalization and cultural identity theories are appealing because the evidence they provide is compelling. None dare dispute the losses endured and destructive changes wrought in any culture that has been oppressed by another culture through the most infamous routes of globalization such as, occupation and colonization, or the present day atrocities perpetrated upon vulnerable populations through the practices of unregulated economic globalization.
Assuredly, the interactions involved in various globalizations and cultural identities are reasonable causal factors for the ills of the world. Nonetheless, to argue that cultural identities are immutable, that globalization exists outside the realm of human agency, and that interaction between the two is the inevitable cause of world problems is to give them an invincibility and omnipotence that neither possesses when they are seen in relationship to other variables of the human condition. I am going to place them in that relationship and examine them from a modern perspective of the development of self. This more comprehensive perspective allows room for competing theories of co-existence because it encapsulates more of reality. Indeed, in this perspective, we need not see the globalization of human rights and civil society as ‘miraculous.’ Rather, some of us may even be tempted to see that particular globalization as, at the least, an inevitable plausibility in a world view perspective which goes beyond static determinism and, instead, encompasses the human capacity to reason, imagine, empathize, communicate and act.
The narratives played out by individual and collective lives are shaped by complex social, experiential interactions with and within the dynamics of history, cultures, cultural identities, globalizations, self and selves. And no one of these can lay claim to the complete sculpting of humankind’s destiny. Neither can any one of them exist without the others. If we could but consult an oracle as to which is the most powerful of them all, I suspect the oracle would answer in true oracle fashion that “Neither one nor all combined are as powerful as the common glory and bane of all humanity which interprets and drives them all.” And what is that common glory, humanity’s blessing and curse? It is the meeting point of human spirituality and rationality and, some would insist, the power that conscious love wields. Thus, in order to explore these entities which shape our lives in terms of the one which names and drives them all, let’s examine as we see the formation of that ubiquitous essence, the self. After all, powerful as ideas potentially are, they do not exist without thinkers. Nor do narratives exist without narrators. Nor lives without souls.
The essence world
With the notion of dynamic and constant flow of interaction among self, selves, history, globalization, cultures, cultural identities and more, the stage is set to present the development of the self in the phenomenological terms of the essence world. Nor are we always aware of the limitations technology places upon us. What is it that we do not see, for example, in our media based realities? Does it have any soul awareness? Are we as blinded by media’s selectivity as is a king who sets his spies throughout his kingdom to see who speaks for him and who against him, but who chooses not to ask about the visible effects of his policies and laws of those who speak one way or another, or, for that matter, on those who are silent?
The interpretive and interactive relationship of the self to the experiential environment that is the essence world is impossible to encapsulate. Its gestalt is, perhaps, best grasped through art and intuition. For me, the gestalt of this state of awareness is romantically and grandly, but deftly, described by a great proselytizer for democracy and inclusively, the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman. “There was a child went forth everyday/” he tell us, “and the first object he looked upon, he became, “and more than that, “that object became a part of him.
What Whitman’s wondrous child sees, he acts upon, and in turn, those objects, people, places and ideas, act upon him. The child both takes unto himself and leaves a part of him in his essence world. It is always a state of contrast and complexity. Even in the bosom of the family it is a world of “affection,” replete with the grace of “mild words,” but it also a world of the “mean, angered [and] unjust.” It is a world steeped in historically wherein, even in the child’s earliest days, he learns from “the family usages, the language, the company, the furniture, the yearning and swelling heart” a “sense of what is real” and even, “the thought of what if after all, it should prove unreal.” IN sum, he learns how to think, to doubt, to question even in the bosom of his family culture. Each day that the child goes forth he carries his sheltered, first world, that is, his home world, with him and returns to it from the broader world with that broader expansion also now a part of him. And thus, the going out and coming back to the seeded values of the early and intimate home world continues. It is not only that early formative home world that is carried back and forth, for that home world changes, expanding itself into the world that goes out each day. All that the child sees and interprets and interacts with becomes “part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.”2 I cannot improve on Whitman’s visionary depiction of change, continuity and interaction in the essence world. Nonetheless, my thesis here depends upon explication of some of the parts in the whole, and I leave Whitman to do just that.
All of us are born into particular communities, inheriting, simply by the accident of our genetics and births in time and place, a language and a culture infused with ways of interacting with members of our respective communities and environments. Our communal environment itself is dynamic, ever shaped by flowing, changing histories of countless generations, countless interpretations and reinterpretations of past and present. Our first environment is heady enough, to be sure, but it is a sheltered one in the sense that, as infants, we are generally confined to interactions within a set circle of caregivers. Into the micro-community that surrounds our birth we arrive, equipped to connect to each other as human beings and to develop our individuality through various modes of human existence.
The role of innate emotions, instincts, and impulses: how nature meets nurture
The activities of communal existence, centering upon such modes as work and play are infused and propelled by emotions, instincts and impulses such as love, hate, fear, will to power, and the need for intimacy. I doubt that I could ever name all of these impulses. Everyone who tackles this aspect of the self strives to provide more and more nuances into these innate human traits which unfold only in human society. William James, much concerned with the formation of the self, compiled a long list that includes empathy and sympathy, sociability, greed and more. I find that it is instructive to make one’s own list from that which one knows of self and others from both the present and from history. All of the impulses, motives and emotions that one can imagine are likely inherent in every human being and brought to the fore through interaction with others very early on. We do not learn these traits and impulses. Rather we learn how to express them in our particular cultures through the modes of our activities. These modes too, it must be noted, are far more nuanced and textured than terms such as “work” or “play” can reveal. Some suggest many more categories. Others place an infinite variety of societal modes under but a few headings. Should art and worship be combined, for example? Can both be categorized under “play” in some broad sense? But it is not the numbers of rubrics we use in categorizing the various modes of existence that is important here. Of far more import to our theory is the knowledge that within these modes, at least in part, we learn upon what to focus our innate traits and impulses. That is to say, through our interactions in these various modes, we learn our particular culture’s patterns of rationalization regarding the focus and expression of innate universal human traits.
I am a great believer in giving examples to make our ideas more clear. So I thought to inject at least a simple, surface example here. I have settled upon the gesture of looking another person in the eyes. In some cultures, this is a sign of respect, of paying attention, and of openness, declaring one’s honesty. In others it is a gesture of defiance, disrespect, even of cursing the person so looked upon. The patterns of rationalization that prescribe the use of these gestures are culture bound and individualistic. However, ways to show respect and ways to show disrespect can be found in every culture. Individuals in any culture are capable of learning how to follow cultural prescriptions for behavior and thought, how to appear as if they are following them but not to be doing so, and how to defy and rebel both openly and surreptitiously. Each of these things is learned as part of a given culture’s patterns of rationalization. Even so, we cannot say that individuals are somehow programmed to learn how to follow the herd in their respective cultures. It is more complicated than that. Individuals are programmed to learn the rules of their respective cultures. They learn how to unconsciously function with those rules.
Each individual is born with unique genetic and biological wiring, so to speak. Even in the unlikely event that two infants might be treated in exactly the same manner, those two infants would invariably respond to the treatment differently. Moreover, we know that even in the smallest, most seemingly uniform of communities, there are varied expressions of emotions and ways of thinking. Furthermore, individuals respond to these models out of their own unique genetic, biological make-up in addition to their past experiences. We do not know the combination of nature and nurture that contributes to the continual development of the self. But we do know that the ideas which govern an individual’s behavior develop in socially communicative, experiential contexts. Each of us interacts with the understandings others express in their actions and interactions. Each of us constantly interprets the interplay of understandings and expressions so that meaning itself is constantly being reorganized and changed. Thus we might say that ideas beget ideas. Moreover, all ideas are influenced and nuanced by changing contexts and the ways in which individuals respond to those contexts. If individuals are programmed to do anything, it is to become active agents in the changing of social contexts. For the self is always an active player in the essence world.
Another player with which the self interacts is globalization, in its many and complex manifestations. In its most literal sense, globalization is the processes by which ideas are spread from one part of the globe to another. As such, it has always played a tremendous role in the nuancing of ideas that takes place when they move from one global context to another. We are told, for example that many of the indigenous people of what came to be known as the Americas as well as the Hawaiians did not have a concept of land ownership. Instead, they saw themselves as part of a harmony of land, sky, water and animals. From the eloquent speeches of conquered chiefs, we know that they came to understand the concept of land ownership as a notion originating with Anglo/Europeans. Alien to them, they came to see the concept as a source of conflict, and could fit it into their world view only as a notion that motivated the Anglo/Euro other. Individual land ownership has never really been incorporated into Native indigenous value systems. However, their rejection of this globalize notion in the form presented to them adds to the total global understanding of land ownership: if nothing else, it can be argued that the notion of ownership of place is not innate to all human beings. How can we then integrate the spiritual identity which has been the perennial philosophical teaching into a practical 21 century operating system so as to prevent and avoid the intrinsic culturization and therefore misinterpretation of the teachings of the masters of all time and re emphasize that in spite of cultural psychosocial identities there is a transcendental way of living our selves from a common denominator which would prevent death decay and degradation of this fundamental source point and allow to a divinely designed destiny that includes the essentialization without even the misuse of spiritual data or lineage. How can we in this day and age surpass the conditioned ego response patterns of misappropriation of every essential knowledge and not territorialize it as in the crusades, inquisition, reformation/counterreformation and current risk pof fundamentalist destruction? I believe it requires a shift of residence a true global vision not only about the transfer of cultures and its products but an openness to our cosmological position in the evolution of soul awareness more that biocomputer shifts.
Globalization and mundialization
Ideas which come from the outside, that is which are globalize from a culture outside our own may be recognized as different and analyzed as different and/or similar, but they become our own only if they connect in some way with the deep structures and schemata of our own culture’s value systems. When a connection can be made, the concept is transformed so that it takes on the features of our own culture. Many indigenous North American tribes now live on land reserved for them by the US or Canadian governments. Instead of sharing all land with other living beings, they have accepted a parceled out place in which to practice their belief of living in harmony with land, sky and living things. An outsider can see a transformative accommodation to the ownership concept only dimly here because property ownership does not enter into this accommodation. Nonetheless, that individual aboriginal people collectively share community life on ‘allotted’ land is a transformative accommodation to the world view they once held with the world view globalize by the invading settlers several centuries ago. On the surface, they assume a Euro- centric concept of ownership to the extent that they refer to the land as belonging to their tribe, their space in which to live in non-ownership harmony without interference. For example, in negotiating fishing and hunting rights in terms of season and the like, tribal authorities argue that federal laws do not pertain to tribal members living on allotted tribal land since their tribal relationship with the environment is based on a concept of harmonious sharing with all living creatures and therefore cannot be regulated by human made laws. Let us not forget the usually neglected notion that Humans, after all, are only one set of living creatures among many. Transformative accommodation of the schemata of what is alien to our own schemata of orientation toward the world goes far beyond globalization, which is simply the method of transfer of ideas or the product of ideas from one part of the globe to another. The method of transfer is certainly important and does indeed play a central role in transformative accommodation. The slave trade, colonialism, war, the internet, and travel are but a few of the external ways globalization occurs. But, transforming globalize ideas into our own schemata and making them our own is accomplished through transculturation. By transculturation, I mean the mediation of elements in one culture’s conceptual schemata that are compatible with elements in the conceptual schemata of another culture. When transculturation occurs, the schemata in question is transformed all the way around.
This taking in of the broader world into our essence world is what I have come to call the mobilization of the home world. And I mean to equate home world with essence world here. Globalization refers only to method of movement from one locality on the globe to another. Mundialization, derived from the Latin word, mundus, or, in English, “world” connotes far more than physicality of place. “To be worldly” is to be experienced and knowledgeable on a broad scale. Thus, for me, mundialization of the life world signals a transformation of the essence world when our axis of good or spiritual essential identification is the axis or pivot or awareness and thus is not threatened by changing modes of operation which will allow for a loving fluidification of relationships with all aspects of the mundus ( world) by making what is strange and alien in the schemata of others familiar through experiential meditation. Once we are able to fit the strange idea into our own schemata, then the mediated concept becomes objectified in our essencreworld as we stop feeling threatened in our core and embrace all that is changing and new into a possibility of growth and expansion and not a threat to our separate existence.
We can interpret with the concept, reconstructing other schemata as we do so and certainly reconstructing the new concept in the process.4 Mundialization, like globalization, is a natural product of the societal nature of humankind experimentally integrating our core spiritual and transcendental identity.
The role of culture in the formation of the self
With rare, if any, exception, each of us is born into a particular culture whose varied and nuanced patterns of thinking have undergone countless transformative mundializations. Any pattern of schemata must be understood as being influenced by the historically embodied in a particular society’s institutions and traditions, and in the varied reconstructions of interpretation and meaning derived within the contexts of coexistence. The more pluralistic a society, the more pluralistic will be the individual’s essence world. The more varied the ways of thinking and interacting that one can engage in, the more flexible are one’s means of mundialization. The dynamics of the essence world concept are best understood in terms of these transformational possibilities inherent in the relationships of the many developed innate capabilities of the self to the elements of this world. However, the innate capability of reason is the crux in realizing those transformational possibilities. And again, I must reiterate, we cannot posit rationalization without a rationalizer. We can not posit a spiritualization without a central operating unit of spiritualizing: a spiritualize Nor indeed, can we posit a rationalizer without other rationalizes. Nor indeed can we posit a spiritualize without a source. Reasoning, like all else in the essence world, is in the domain of co-existence.
Allow me here to indulge for citing simple examples to clarify this generalization. I will posit a negative scenario for the realization of transformational possibilities,’ simply because Whitman’s poem conjures up a grand sweep of positive images. I want very much to insist that the transformational possibilities may be more negative than positive for many of the world’s individual. So let us imagine Whitman’s child going forth into a world that views him as inferior for one reason or another. How will the child interpret the world and himself now? What can he leave in that world? How does such a self expand in those comings and goings? Surely, that self will not expand in any wondrous, glorious way. Reason is crucial to our human enterprise but it operates only in interactive association with the other sculptors of our destiny. Spirit is crucial to our human peacefulness and it operates only in the context of a larger source .One might well say that reason is nurtured by them as well that source feeds spirit.
How cultures change
It is the nature of societies to interact with other societies and to communicatively experience them from their respective world views. Every culture owes some measure of its makeup to other cultures, just as our essence worlds do. Cultures travel and so do ideas. Like essence worlds, cultures are always transcending and widening their boundaries via globalization and mundialization with its transformative accommodation, its transculturation of schemata. globalization in not a “new Western curse,” : a millennium ago, paper, the printing press, the crossbow, gunpowder, the iron-chain suspension bridge, the kite, the magnetic compass, the wheelbarrow and the rotary fan were in extensive use in China, but not known or little known elsewhere. The outcomes of their globalization across the world continue to resonate to this very day.
The decimal system emerged and was well developed in India by the 6th century. At that point Arab mathematicians took it up. However, the system did not reach Europe until the last 25 years of the 10th century. What was its impact when it did? Think about the Scientific Revolution that changed the face of Europe for an inkling of an answer.5 and then think of how Europe’s Scientific Revolution affected the Arab world and so on and so forth.
world view rationalizations have to do with the deepest and most basic human capacities connected to co-existence. Like rationalization itself, those capacities are universal and, again, like rationalization they are realized through co-existence. I mentioned some of the impulses, emotions, or instincts that characterize human beings. I was and am still deliberately vague in defining these traits as impulses, or emotions or instincts because I am not sure precisely which of these they are, or if they are not all of these and something more besides. In modern perception of neurosciences it corresponded to a certain interpretation of levels of certain neurotransmitters at the synaptic self level that when brought in or out of harmony cause disastrous or inspiring behaviors. At every turn, scientists now find a new defining context for them. Recently, some geneticists have even speculated that there are genes for selfishness , generosity and indeed spirituality. We simply as of now do not quite know the material essence of these traits. But they are real enough, and it is the capacity to develop and to express them in societal living that marks us as human beings.
One trait basic to humanity and most directly related to the self in society is one I did not list earlier and that is the trait of “being free.” It is not often listed as a human attribute such as the ability to love or to hate or to be generous and the like. Yet the notion of being free, of knowing that one should be free, is perhaps the oldest of all human traits. It is not simply that human beings are born free in a primitive state only to have their freedom fettered by the necessary constraints of society. It correspond in my understanding to a sense of freedom which I would categorize as sovereignty and spiritual autonomy.
Society indeed must place limits on freedom. However, the hard truth of the matter is that it is only through society, and the constraints inevitable to co-existence, that freedom can be understood in any meaningful sense of the word. And that is the case with every conceivable impulse inherent to humankind.
In his ruminations upon what he perceived as the ubiquitous human impulse for freedom, Freud speculated that its origin might rest “in the primitive roots of the personality, still unfettered by civilizing influences.”6 Freud acknowledged that civilization, of necessity, must place restrictions on individual liberty. He maintained that the processes of civilization evolve. As each stage becomes more refined “justice demands that these restrictions apply to all.”
But there are precious few if any civilizations that have ever achieved the justice of which Freud speaks because the inclusively demanded by justice, if freedom is to exist for more than a few, has been extremely slow in its conceptualization. It is small wonder then that justice itself has gone through so many crude and bizarre stages. Bear in mind that some of the most civilized nations of the world imprisoned their poor and hungry for stealing bread. Freud is right, of course, that a developed sense of justice must demand inclusively in the notion of freedom. The concept of justice is still in a process of development. One can but hope that it will continue to develop until the end of humankind.
The inclusively of freedom has, of course, been rationalized in the past, even in ancient times. Most religions, for example, are founded on an inclusive spiritual freedom. But the inclusively of freedom in a political sense was only sporadically expressed before the mid 20th century. The United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights of 1948 is credited with being the first to lead toward serious rationalizing on the specificity about the inclusiveness of freedom. And in roughly the same period, history records two activist thinkers who came to terms with the nature of political and spiritual inclusively as they deliberated upon the means with which to achieve freedom for oppressed peoples. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who was much influenced by Gandhi, both came to the conclusion that political freedom had to be conceived of as inclusive in the same manner in which spiritual freedom is. Their work stressed this dimension of inclusively that had not been previously recognized in the political realm: they made clear that the oppressors of freedom are as unfree as the oppressed because, by their acts of oppression, they become demoralized and dehumanized to an even greater degree than the oppressed can. This insight into the true nature of inclusively was proclaimed in the United Nations Declaration and given historical authority through the personal convictions and actions of such figures as Gandhi and King. It now propels the countless peaceful strategies for change that are initiated and practiced by global civil society groups in the name of human rights all over the world.
Inclusively and the theories of the world
The recognition of freedom as basic to human nature is by no means a theory of how the world operates. Nonetheless, it must be accounted for in any worthwhile theory. The inclusively of freedom and the globalization of a civil society, bent upon realizing that freedom for all, point to the fallacies in the notion that cultures are isolated from one another in the most fundamental of ways. Furthermore, it is global civil society that keeps protesting the neo-liberal claim that democracy and prosperity follow on the heels of development, no matter how that development is initiated and carried out. Not only do NGO’s and other civil society groups and individuals protest, they offer viable alternatives and remedies. Yet, despite movements, protests, activist and diligent NGO’s and the numerous successes which they enjoy, incomplete and dangerously exclusionist theories persist. They appear to be guiding governmental policies and heads of states, sweeping us all toward disastrous conflicts. Can reason and comprehensive theory truly save us?
The Preamble to the UNESCO Constitution offers insightful hope here. Most of us recall that the Preamble begins with these words “…since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed,” but we seldom recall a later passage in that same Preamble which speaks directly of governments. It reads,…a peace based exclusively upon the political and economic arrangements of governments would not be a peace which could secure the unanimous, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world, and that peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.
This passage should remind us of how difficult it is for governments to hold an agenda for peace, freedom and equality in balance with politics and economics. The day may come, of course, when such balance may be achieved. Certainly we must believe that it can come. We can hope for it and work for it. We can push our governments. However, mindful of how long it took for the words of that Preamble to come into being, if, indeed, we are not to fail, we must always look to the minds and hearts of individuals, for it is they-those myriad, miraculous selves- who make up cultures, nations, and civilizations. And, in the end, it is they, -rationalists all- who will nudge, push, badger and guide governments into accepting, developing and practicing the true tenet of justice: the inclusively of freedom and human rights do.
But how can we move to this idealized situation at a point in time in which rogue nuclear leaders disregard the social values of life. I believe a shift to a spiritual identity is needed so that we can go beyond the pacts and superficial agreements of the mind to a more metaphysical inclusive perception of reality. Hence, a conversion is needed if knowledge is to become a living and profound experience of radical thinking.
The principal world problems begged for an answer at the end of the 20th century. Amid the enthusiasm of some people and the uneasiness of others, few foresaw that gaining domination was a Pyrrhic victory. For example, the victory of capitalism opened uncertainty regarding its capacity to solve social, political spiritual and economic problems. These arose from the new state of affairs in the world which current theories are inadequate to solve. Obviously, to initiate a revolution and make peace requires new strategies, attitudes and, above all, a substantially different use of freedom and power. This is why it is so difficult to understand why good meditative thought is scarce.
The present proposal highlights the central problems we face in this millennium, many of which will reach a serious and decisive point in our children's life time. They are not primarily problems, but questions which demand from each person -- especially from leaders -- a reordering of the course of events in the direction of the possibilities of human life. Hence the role of metaphysics is radical reflection without any restriction in order to realize the full possibilities of humanity. This requires that we not be already committed (metaphysically speaking) to "living the illusion of the world".
Many of the main problems we face today and that many historians and social scientists have already described and accurately analyzed, concern human destiny. Survival or extinction. This is implied as well in the wrong or invalid projections of developmental trends over the long term and on a world - wide scale with regard to demographics, ecology, politics and the social-economy. A critical approach looks for the possibilities of all and any human beings. This is not another megalomania which intellectuals are accustomed to produce theoretically, but an ethical condition.
At the heart of any possible solution lurks a question about the meaning of life. Unlike a problem, a question imposes an unavoidable decision which cannot be avoided, but is subject to our freedom and to knowing where to stand in terms of existence. The challenge is to be able to accept life in its fundamental possibility for interchange and of communicating with others.
But the so-called phenomenon of "globalization", as established by the decision making centers, far from giving priority to a planetary conscience, has oiled the mechanisms of supremacy. By not including the other, in the end, globalization lacks its own identity. This has already happened through lack of effective historical consciousness in the Western World. Globalization consists of an updated and efficient expression of the old logic of supreme domination, capable of erasing differences and flattening landscapes as if they were deserts. This phenomenon may continue as a tragic imitation of instrumental reason of it remains anchored in the fragmentation and isolation of populations and human beings. As already pointed out, the term sums up the pincer-like maneuver in the `80s by the concepts of post industrialization and postmodernism. Together these constitute the present socio-economic paradigm and the force of the postmodern mentality: the imperative of political and cultural freedom.
One of the questions to be considered is the very nature of the phenomenon of globalization. Is it just a relapsed sign of appropriation, acquisition and consumption, of supreme control by calculating Western Reason? Or, can we hope from this phenomenon, the rise of an authentic and true "communicative society" which will eventually lead from a transformation of dialogue to a transformation of consciousness. This must be in the sense not of pure technological readiness which is always restricted, but of the effective creation of a realm of encounter. This must allow our conscience to overcome barriers so that we can grow with the real -- not virtual -- presence of the Other. This alternative globalization is no longer defined in markedly economic terms, at least not unilaterally as regards interests. Instead it projects a global vision, in which singularities (not fragmentations) constitute the fulfillment of its universal condition. However, for the time being, this alternative is only slightly possible, not even probable, because its realization depends on an essential change in understanding in the Western world. Certainly, an implicit questioning of reason is required. Whether criticized or not, reason has been fundamental to metaphysics from Greek times until now. Nevertheless, a transformation or, better still, a change of spirit may rise from the need to provide an answer to the crisis of systems of order and interchange of society at the planetary level as the basic historical operating trends of the beginning of this century engage in conflicts for survival.
The main problems of the world must be pondered in the light of a spiritual disposition that is alien to any strategy founded on self-interest or on power achieved at the expense of the others and of things. Otherwise, a generalized holocaust is likely to come sooner or later in the next generations. Earlier the thought of the death of the species was impressed on the conscience of the European population. It prevented a nuclear war by forcing the world's political leaders to reformulate their ambitions. Similarly, we can hope that in view of a new threat of annihilation or "infinite of nothing" a conversion of humanity is feasible, although the present historical conditions are more complex and determining. The [twentieth] century ended with a global disorder of an unclear nature, and without any mechanism to stop the disorder or keep it under control. . . . The reason for this impotence is not only the depth of the world crisis and its complexity, but also the apparent failure of all the programs, new or old, to deal with the issues of humankind to better them.
There are two decisive problems for the long term, one demographic, the other ecological. Both problems must be examined in a context of generalized anomie, questionable or illegitimate institutions and leaderships, exaltation of the banal and a total commercialization of people's expectations and grievances. These entail social, political, economic and cultural phenomena whose results are absolutely uncertain from the point of view of the normal predictions of the sciences and of the present resources of the today's intelligentsia. Only a break in observable trends makes it possible to identify unexpected and alternative solutions to present conditions.
This underlines the need, responsibility and opportunity of philosophers to focus their efforts on carefully thinking over the available scientific information on these problems. By nature, they immediately turn them into questions, into a reflection in which the decision to give new sense to our life as "human beings" -- with all the philosophical connotations of this expression -- is foundational for any practical consideration.
This is not a mere academic discussion; the future of humanity is at stake. It is the choice between supporting the birth of a new threshold of the conscience of humanity, or, on the contrary, accelerating the final phase of its prostration -- the inertial process of the death of the species, as some post-modern authors have already diagnosed. By the term "man" I mean to designate all and every concrete human being living on the planet; not one class of people or some populations to the exclusion of others. This clarification ceases to be obvious as soon as we examine the partiality of the solutions to the world's present problems proposed by the specialized organisms and the governmental leaders of those countries relatively capable of taking steps.
Even taking into account the hypothesis of moderate growth in the world population with a tendency to stabilization and with a lower birth rate than estimated for the year 2025, there are many and grave problems: regional imbalance, the deepening of the abyss between rich countries and poor, the installation of "essentially unequal societies" in a region or state, the increase of urbanization, intolerance, racial, religious and juridical discrimination towards immigrants in search of work and a better standard of living. All are real causal vectors of social conflicts, hardly predictable or manageable.
The contradictions of progress made legitimate by the work of Cartesian Reason, have, in fact, created the bad place, the "distopia," of the utopian dream of Modernity. In this process of decomposition of order there is prospect that some countries will be left out of history for ever. This discourages our daily claims to a spirit of justice and dignity. Where there are no "strategic" interests, that is, where there is no dominant self-interest the West has no "humanitarian" disposition. Other humans -- as important as the other biological species which are the object of international concern -- in Africa "the Third World's Third World", Asia, Latin America and in the social margins of the rich countries die of starvation, AIDS or of silent forgetfulness in this era of communication. Despite rational anxiety over the ecological crisis and the efforts to overcome it, global solutions seem to aim unilaterally at the benefit of those countries which have achieved an acceptable development for most of their citizens.
Proposals such as the one of a world with zero growth . . . are completely impracticable. Zero growth in the existing situation would freeze the present inequalities among the countries in the world, something that turns out to be more bearable for the average inhabitant from Switzerland than for the one from India. It is not by chance that the main support to the ecological politics comes from the rich countries and from the middle and wealthy classes from all countries (except for those businessmen who expect to earn money from contaminating). The poor, who multiply and are underemployed, want more development, not less. Sustainable development in the mid-term is a self-limited possibility, as long as the principles and instruments of action continue to be incompatible with the true and unclear aim of the efforts.
Scientific experts can establish what is necessary to avoid an irreversible [ecological] crisis, but we mustn't forget that establishing this balance [between Humanity, the renewable resources it consumes, and the consequences that its activities produce in the environment] isn't a scientific technological problem, but a political and social one.
There is no doubt that this balance would be incompatible with a world economy based on the unlimited search for economic benefits by some corporations, which are essentially devoted to this aim and compete with each other in a global market. From the environmental point of view, if Humanity is to have a future, the capitalism of the crisis decades shouldn't have one. In fact, what derives from the data provided by specialized international organizations in our interpretation is not only the "problem" that humanity has to face in this millennium, but the metaphysical question of choosing a new way, as I have previously pointed out. If we want to succeed in the solutions or, even better, in the "re-solutions" we make, "choosing a new way" must refer explicitly to the tremendous task of reformulating the symbolic universe that has sustained the history of humanity up to this day.
In order to allow for the improvement of our perspective on reality, it is important to pay attention to the use of language as a conditioning factor in the formulation and testing of the problems themselves. Here I refer to such expressions as "central societies" and "peripheral societies", "North-South", "development" and "underdevelopment", "Third World-First World," etc. It is not simply a way of speaking or a conjecture that subsequently may be refuted. It consists of a starting point in terms of which alone solutions can be thought. Its truth function is accepted more naturally than a statement about the existence of God. Social sciences and, of course, philosophy evidence here their incapacity for a prior criticism and submit to a structure of institutionalized power. What is "North"? Is it perhaps a geographical place, the direction in which we have to go, the meaning of the power of dominion, a welfare model? Why is it necessary to identify "South" with what is peripheral and marginal, marginal with respect to what? Is it not a cultural scope, a life-style, or maybe a geographical place too? What are the developmental parameters? Are these concepts the result of an aseptic linguistic agreement, in which event is it possible to imagine an asepsis in social sciences? Or is there present in linguistic usage a "Cosmo vision," a necessary idea about life, about man and his ontological possibilities? Are linguistic games not essentially power games?
This appalling "metaphysics of legitimization", that the philosophy of dusk is unable to account for, sustains at present the whole discursive assembly of social sciences and the operative logic of international actors. It closes the way for all open interchange about the true metaphysical questions that today should define the future horizon of humanity. Ignorance, indolence or the interested justification of dominant power spaces are installed in the conception of the world as an entity. This ontology has imploded into a fragmentation of expectations in a recurrent and purposeless history. Certainly, the dominant-submission relationship and the manipulation of hope put into practice the principle of inequality between men and nations. This is the reason for contradictions between discourses and facts in the "humanitarian help" game: the need for subtle but revealing conditions of growth, speculation about sustainable development, care for environment, the effects of ineptness, or the political appraisal of human rights.
If every living thing has its cycle, then it is proper to hypothesize that central societies are entering -- if they have not already done so -- into a cycle of "inertial prostration" having completed the shapes in which historically they have modeled their destiny? Why count further on some finite ways of manifesting freedom as if they were the necessary unfolding of being. In this millennium, "societies with an integrated history," enter a process of exhaustion of their historical time. They face the choice of either being defeated by the spiritual weariness that vitiates their future realization, or joining together as societies with a possible history. This must begin from recognition that they are immersed in a logic of appropriation and consumption.
THE METAPHYSICAL / SPIRITUAL QUESTION IN THE 21ST CENTURY
What is our responsibility in the problems of humanity in the 21st century? What can we do with philosophical reflection from the anchorage of a living metaphysics that engages the ontological-existential questions involved in the social, political, economic, and scientific-technological problems of this new century? The first is to break with the assumption that the task of philosophy is to arrive late and to contemplate the world in the somnolence of dusk. If philosophy is a way of thinking, then action must be preceded by thinking. The search for truth that has accompanied it during the worst moments of its history must sustain it in permanent wakefulness. This critical task regarding our own foundations and position before the world can be translated into practice as an openness to truth, not the possession and legitimization of one truth above the other. In philosophical questions truth is not a term of knowledge, but a state of openness. Has this not been the Socratic inspiration in the Western philosophical tradition and mutatis mutandis the principle that has encouraged the real, silent and effective work of authentic scientists in all times?
The second step in accompanying man in the configuration of a new ontological horizon is to determine what is essential, namely, to discover that we confront not problems, but questions of meaning. This calls for joining together with the others and with things in the symbolic configuration of the world. It is essential, then, to assume the questions of human destiny and to re-solve them.
The third step is to open truth by questions of the† meaning of being with others. This is to recognize that in the event itself of questioning there is neither "a unique account" of our history nor "a unique idea of reason" that articulates the meaning of human life. The task at this stage for the Western philosophical tradition is to be capable of a new Assent. That is, of a leap in the consciousness of being from opposition or contrast to others, to a way of thinking, feeling and, above all, acting with all others without exclusions. In this way the despotic experience of modernity reflected in postmodern culture can be thought of as the human possibility of a free decision to exist in the world according to an identity which is not one of appropriation, grasping or consumption.
"It is a rule of being and of life,"
That when time is compressed and failures obstruct progress, the species -- whether biological or rational -- confronted with the threat of death passes through a threshold, rises, and is sublimated. There is an unknown way of adaptation at the highest level. The first model for this is thinking, when animalist appeared limited by its `giant's wings' and unable to go further then, the choice emerges between death or survival, destruction or a way out.
If it is true that common sense or reason is the best distributed thing in the world and that it is just a matter of applying it correctly in life, then instrumental reason as the prime product of modernity can find in globalization its universal meaning. This universality, however, does not imply a planetary historic consciousness of truth. Rather, it is a universality as identity, a space of things in a time of things. Like things, it is mired in what is useful, in presences without faces or names.
In summary, the integration of spirituality in all aspects of life, a greater thrust toward the individualization of spirituality among consumers, the enhanced role of cyberspace in the spiritual domain, and the synchronization of spirituality as the universal identity which will lead beyond the synergy that allows for survival through the congruent and coherent alignment of man and its place in the cosmos.
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