Globalization Challenged

Conviction, Conflict, Community

George Rupp, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Jeremy Waldron, Wayne Proudfoot

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780231511353
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Globalization Challenged, George Rupp, president of the International Rescue Committee, outlines the steps necessary to engage the contemporary conflict between traditional religious belief and Western secularism.

According to Rupp, the key objective is to build a community that is inclusive without denying the validity of particular commitments. While he acknowledges the threat of "resurgent fundamentalism," Rupp also criticizes secularists who fail to recognize or acknowledge the role of religion and its ideological equivalents in influencing public policy. All views, he asserts, are subject to comparative appraisal. The challenge is to develop ways to evaluate different approaches responsibly, leading to a greater understanding of one's own convictions as well as the positions of others.

Rupp reinforces his critical and theoretical analysis with dramatic accounts of recent events in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan—places where the International Rescue Committee operates. He then addresses the role of globalization in fueling instability worldwide. Inadequately regulated privatization has compromised health care, education, and social programs in many countries, whereas an inclusive community would encourage a more equitable distribution of resources.

Essays by Jagdish Bhagwati, Jeremy Waldron, and Wayne Proudfoot expand Rupp's arguments, and in a final chapter Rupp responds to the issues they raise. Essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the roots of today's geopolitical tensions, Globalization Challenged asks that we shed our complacency, recognize the legitimate role of conviction, and take actions to shape a more just and inclusive society.

PART I

CONVICTION, CONFLICT, COMMUNITY

1

CONVICTION IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

CONVICTION IN A PLURALISTIC WORLD

Convictions matter. At least our own convictions—the affirmations, commitments, and practices that are central to our personal and social identities—matter to us. Yet because we live in an era of unprecedented global interaction, the convictions of people everywhere also matter to all of us whether we know it or not.

We all read about—and probably know personally—people who are passionately convinced that their convictions are absolutely right and all others are unquestionably wrong. We also have friends, neighbors, and colleagues who decline to debate such convictions and call for a stance of tolerance toward them all. But in an age of globalization, neither of these positions is viable—even if both may have been serviceable in more provincial times.

The standoff between these two positions is illustrated in our everyday experience and etched into our awareness through the media. We see fervent convictions in the headlines. The perpetrators of the horrific tragedy of September 11, 2001, are an extreme example, even among extremists. But there is an ample supply of others: for instances across a range of traditions, think of recent conflicts in Ireland, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka. Over against this awful carnage, we cannot but sympathize with the call of Western secular liberalism: religious and other ideological views should be tolerated but must remain private convictions that do not shape public outcomes.

To be blunt, in this secular liberal view religion and its ideological equivalents must be kept in the closet. Individuals may decide to participate in communities based on authorities that are not generally accessible. But such individuals should not expect their private preferences to determine public policies.

This secular liberal view has been the predominant one in U.S. history. Fervent conviction has typically found expression privately or in small supportive communities. More public testimony and larger-scale evangelism have at times been prominent in our history, in particular in awakenings or revivals like those of the middle of the eighteenth century. In our own time, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews united in pressing for the civil rights of African Americans and in advocating disengagement from Vietnam. More recently, Evangelical Christians have become a core constituency of Republican electoral strategy and have thereby gained substantial leverage for advancing their positions on such issues as abortion and public expression of religious beliefs. Yet even with this growth in influence of the so-called Christian Right, the more characteristic American pattern has been one of reticence in imposing particular views on the broader public.

The words of William Butler Yeats in “The Second Coming” resonate through the intervening decades and are hauntingly apt for our own troubled time:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

For Yeats as for us, “conviction” is a telling word. Its Latin stem means to overcome, to conquer, to be victorious. “Conviction” is the state of being persuaded, convinced, convicted in the sense of having any doubts rebutted. Yet “conviction” also refers to the act of finding someone guilty of an offense, convicted of a crime. So the word connotes confidence, certainty, corroboration of views that opponents dispute. But the word is deployed to identify perpetrators of what is taken to be evil as often as it is used to designate advocates of worthy causes.

At a time when terrorism has become so salient a threat, it is hard to argue against any attempt to keep passionate conviction under whatever control is available. Yet attractive as the plea for tolerance may be, it cannot appeal only to virtues of openness to all views and acceptance of multiple perspectives. Instead, any viable response to our current challenges must also be prepared to acknowledge, engage, and appraise the core values that animate and motivate all parties to the controversies.

This requirement is admittedly asymmetrical. It accepts the fact that more than one perspective may be worthy of attention, which means it rejects any claim to exclusive truth without further debate that allows appeal to generally accessible authorities. At the same time, this approach recognizes the extent to which personal convictions not only express private preferences but also legitimately influence public policies.

To return to Yeats’s poetic formulation, neither a lack of all conviction nor an overflow of passionate intensity is adequate. Passionate intensity alone does not settle the matter—if only because there are multiple candidates who can base their claim on this consideration. And the lack of all conviction is not only unfair as a characterization of secular liberal pleas for tolerance but also in any case incapable of holding its own against passionate intensities.

THE NEED FOR COMPARATIVE APPRAISAL

The imperative that results from this standoff calls for a more robust public appraisal of views that we in the West have relegated to the status of private preferences for too long. We all know that personal convictions have social ramifications. We can no longer afford the luxury of pretending this is not the case, even if the alternative is less comfortable than an ethos that simply tolerates any and all positions.

In an age of globalization, this need for more robust public appraisal is all the more acute. Appeals to allegedly absolute authorities somehow are less dispositive or immediately compelling in the face of competing claims that seem similarly grounded. The invocation of inerrant texts loses some of its punch when the Bible of the Fundamentalist Christian confronts the Qur’an of the Wahhabi Muslim or the Pali Canon of the Theravada Buddhist. The retreat to inaccessible private experience—“you just have to know Jesus”—is less overwhelming as a strategy when it encounters the very similar maneuvers of other pietistic and mystical traditions.

The context of globalization presses us toward a comparative perspective that entails public attention to what otherwise might remain private. This comparative perspective is almost unavoidably critical—and at its best is also self-critical. As we become aware of comparability among ostensibly quite disparate communities, we also cannot help noticing the enormous variety within nominally unified traditions. This variety is evident historically: even the most stable traditions change over time. But there are also great differences even at a single point of time—including, of course, the present.

We see this variety in our own communities both over time and in the present. Consider fourth-century Catholic Christianity in North Africa, fifteenth-century Christian Orthodoxy in Constantinople, eighteenth-century Deism in England. Or recall an Evangelical Baptist and a high church Episcopalian whom you may know. Or think of the enormously rich and diverse streams of Jewish tradition simplified as Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform.

Similar and if anything even more variety is evident in Hindu and Buddhist communities. In the case of what we homogenize as Hinduism, the diversity is all the more remarkable because it developed for most of its history within the single (admittedly large and variegated) country of India. In contrast, Buddhists moved out from India across Asia and more recently to Europe and America and developed a virtually limitless array of permutations and combinations with other traditions.

Along with Buddhism and Christianity, Islam is the third great missionary religion in human history, and it too has become rooted in a remarkable range of cultures. Islam has resisted complete indigenization, in particular through its refusal to allow the Qur’an to be translated from Arabic to local languages. Yet there is still great diversity in Islam, far more than is suggested by our tendency to identify it almost exclusively with the Arabian Peninsula. After all, Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, and India has the largest Muslim minority of any country. And even within the Arabian Peninsula, there is the considerable diversity and tension that the division between Sunni and Shia communities represents.

PUBLIC RELIGION AND SELF-CRITICAL SECULARISM

All of this diversity within religious traditions calls attention to a fact too easily overlooked in periods when the prevailing ethos calls for tolerance: religious people themselves have almost never deemed their convictions to be private preferences that can be divorced from deliberations about public policies. Instead, they have engaged in vigorous debate among themselves as to the most adequate understanding of their shared traditions because they believed it to be of utmost importance to be right in their convictions. And they have also been prepared to be public advocates for what their convictions imply for society as a whole.

At a time of social antagonisms that are in part religiously based, this public face of religion is perhaps unwelcome. Surely the world would be safer if such fervent convictions were kept out of the public square. But this option, so attractive to secular liberalism, is—to repeat—simply not acceptable to those whose deepest convictions would be relegated to the status of private preferences without any relevance to public policy.

As challenging as is the insistent presence of religion and its ideological equivalents in public life, it also represents a great opportunity because the recognition of disagreements within a nominally unified tradition opens the door to self-criticism. This process is in fact always under way. But greater awareness of it can encourage support that allows muted or minority or suppressed views to be voiced with greater vigor.

An example of this encouragement that is especially attractive to the West at the moment is the call for proponents of moderate Islam to become more vocal over against their extremist coreligionists. There certainly are such moderate voices: Muslims who affirm jihad as the struggle to live faithfully, who exemplify peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims, who reject suicide bombing and other forms of terrorism. As in other religious communities, there is a contest always under way for the right to claim the designation “Muslim.” This internal contest should not, however, obscure the extent of common ground across a great range of Muslims in opposition to prevailing trends in the West. Indeed, in this respect Muslims also speak for large numbers of religiously serious adherents to other traditions.

Here we return again to the contrast between passionate intensity and lack of all conviction. Even those of the religiously committed who oppose exclusionist extremism and hostility to all outsiders are often strongly critical of what they see as the cultural domination of the West. That this cultural domination may come in religious as well as secular forms only amplifies and intensifies the opposition: for the religiously committed person, unqualified secularism may well be resisted in any case, but pervasively secular views advanced with rhetorical flourishes from another religion is doubly unattractive. Thus, even in the view of the religiously committed who oppose exclusionist extremism and hostility, to accommodate passively to the hedonism and materialism of secular Western culture is to lack all conviction. The sense of such accommodation in turn generates further support for the passionate intensity that the most extreme positions represent.

Just as we encourage debate within the Muslim world, we must, therefore, also welcome vigorous criticism of prevailing trends in the West. Only if we resist our own tendencies to provincialism and triumphalism will we be able to acknowledge, engage, and evaluate the multiple streams in our own traditions. And on that basis, we can perhaps also recognize points of contact with the very different perspectives of the outsiders who criticize and even attack us.

A CRITIQUE OF CURRENT TRENDS

To illustrate social patterns that invite criticism from friends and foes alike, I propose a consideration of two: the growing disparity between the rich and the poor both in the world as a whole and also within the Untied States itself; and the tendency to favor private interests over public goods.

It is not surprising that the enormous gap between the wealth of the United States and the relative poverty of most of the rest of the planet’s population would generate admiration—and also envy, antagonism, and hostility. The envy, antagonism, and hostility are not lessened when people learn that we, who claim to be more generous than others, in fact come in dead last among the developed countries in the percentage of our total economic output devoted to publicly funded foreign assistance. But even apart from this dubious distinction, there is the escalation of the spread between the well-to-do and the disadvantaged in the United States itself over recent decades.

As Paul Krugman has documented in his columns and articles, almost 40 percent of the wealth of this country is now in the hands of 1 percent of our population—an increase in concentration of more than 70 percent in the past two decades. The same trend is evident if we look at current income. In the mid-1970s, the very top tier in terms of total income—one-hundredth of one percent of the population—received 70 times as much as the average family. Today this top tier receives 300 times as much as the average: the already very large gap of the 1970s is more than four times as big now. And this gap is between the top and the average: it would of course be much larger still if the comparison were between the top and the bottom.

While Americans not only claim exceptional levels of compassion but also take pride in the egalitarian traditions that have served the country well, the United States at the same time allows a distribution of economic benefits that is both far more uneven than in other developed countries and also much less generous in providing assistance to developing countries. This state of affairs may be defended as the outcome of equality of opportunity in the context of unfettered competition. But this defense serves only to call attention to a second set of issues that the nation must address, namely, the relationship between private incentives and public standards, between market mechanisms and governmental policies.

Markets are crucial for efficient economic development. Data from the past two decades on an increasingly worldwide basis bear powerful witness to the dynamism of freer markets. Still, markets work best when there are rules to the game that all the players accept.

Airport security is a telling illustration of what happens when public services are contracted out to private firms without adequate attention to performance standards. Profits for the vendor can be high even if costs to the purchaser are low, as long as there is little concern for quality control. The solution to this problem is certainly not simply to make airport security personnel government employees. It is instead to design a system that preserves incentives for service providers while at the same time insisting that publicly imposed standards of quality be met.

The same position holds for such services as health care, education, and welfare. Private contractors, profit motives, and other incentives may well have a constructive role to play in fostering efficiency and countering complacency. But important though such means be, the end to be achieved is a public good; and in each case even private vendors must be held accountable to publicly monitored standards of quality.

Here, too, the issues have an international as well as a domestic dimension. Even friends abroad who admire the dynamism of our society may question how low our standards are for publicly guaranteed services, while they nonetheless view such decisions as our business. But in the international arena, our national predilection for unrestrained private initiative over public accountability can translate into a tendency toward unilateralism that disparages the interests or concerns of others. Recent examples include our abrogation of the Kyoto protocol, our move toward a missile-defense system apart from discussion even with allies, and our announcement of a policy of preemptive attacks wherever and whenever we deem justified. This tendency toward preemptive unilateralism is no doubt dangerous for our enemies, but it is also damaging to our relationships with the allies whom this approach, in effect if not in intent, disparages. As those of us who have traveled abroad in recent months know all too vividly, the result is that the United States is now more isolated—and more reviled—perhaps than ever at any time in our history.

These two patterns—a large and still growing gap between the rich and the poor and a vigorous advocacy for private interests even at the cost of public goods—illustrate tendencies in Western societies that their self-declared enemies deplore. Globalization as it has been pursued under the leadership of the United States and transgovernmental institutions like the International Monetary Fund has in some ways contributed to both sets of developments, as Joe Stiglitz argues in his Globalization and Its Discontents. Yet neither pattern is a necessary correlate of greater international integration—a fact that invites examination of how processes of globalization may be recalibrated to give fuller consideration to the criticism of its most convinced antagonists.

GLOBALIZATION AND COMMUNITY

Globalization in its current forms presses toward international integration into the patterns of Western secular society. Production processes, management practices, financing systems, accounting standards, and so on are all adopted ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Part I: Conviction, Conflict, Community
• Part II: Critical Responses to Globalization Challenged
• Part III: Globalization Challenged—Again
• Index