“Doing Good in a Bad Neighborhood:

The Threat and Promise of Globalization”

Nov. 16, 2001

 

Stephen Swecker

Editor, Zion’s Herald

 

(INMUN XIV Keynote Address)

 

Thanks to Mr. Mike Keenan for the invitation to be your speaker today. It is a distinct honor to be with you and to participate in this way with you in the Council on World Affairs. I commend Mr. Keenan and all of you who have played a role the Council’s development and work, past and present, and those of you who are in attendance at the 2001 session of the Council.

 

It is especially satisfying to see so many of you taking an active interest in world affairs. Surely, if ever there was a time for seeking an informed, comprehensive understanding of the international community and the forces that have shaped and are shaping life on Planet Earth, such a time is now. Surely, if ever there was a time for members of your generation to contemplate vocations in the world arena, vocations of leadership and service in pursuit of world peace and stability, such a time is now. You are the right people at the right place at the right time. But are you the “right stuff,” to quote Tom Wolfe? We fervently hope so.

 

For the next several minutes, I propose to pursue with you a thesis that reflects the convergence of the two arenas that have most influenced my life’s work for the past 30 years, namely, the world of religion and the phenomenon of social change. Globalization, a term that we’ll define later and use several times as an expression of social change, will figure significantly in my thesis, and will be a major undercurrent through all that follows.

 

So here’s my thesis in its unvarnished form. You can tell your children you heard it here first:

 

All conflict, at its core, is spiritual, and globalization is the predominant carrier of conflict in the world today. In short, globalization is a spiritual phenomenon, confronting the world for both good and ill with clashing values and competing visions of what life should be.

 

We’ll come back to the thesis later. Before that, however, I want to tell you two stories out of my personal experience that will help us explore the thesis in greater depth. Then I will suggest some specific areas in which it seems to me you could well devote your lives of public service in the world arena, perhaps beginning with your work this weekend as participants in the Model United Nations.

 

The first story begins nearly eight years ago in the mountains of Nepal. I was on a trek into the Himalayas with 14 other people. My involvement was both personal and professional because my trek was being paid for by a journalism grant from the Pew Foundation. In other words, I couldn’t just enjoy the experience; I had to work, which meant writing one or more stories for publication about Nepal, which, as you may know, ranks as one of the four or five poorest countries in the world

 

Several days into the trek, we encamped for a couple of nights at about 12,000 feet in the Annapurna range of mountains west of Mount Everest. Nearby was a small village, and a few men and children from the village came out to greet us and to sell us soft drinks and beer. Just so you know, it seemed that no matter how remote the trail got, at the most unlikely of places someone would pop out from behind a rock or a tree and offer us soft drinks, beer and cigarettes for sale. At any rate, one of the men who came to our campsite, (his name was Kul), spoke passable English. When he learned that I was a journalist, he asked if I’d like to visit his home in the village, to see what the “real” Nepal was like. Of course, I accepted Kul’s invitation.

 

What I encountered at Kul’s home was unlike anything I’d ever seen. He, his wife, two young children and Kul’s parents, six of them, lived in two small rooms built cave-like out of stone and wood pressed against the steep mountainside. The ceiling was six feet high, the floor dirt. Furnishings consisted of a single bench on which Kul invited me to sit while he and his family sat on a mat on the floor. In the corner were the embers of a fire used for heat and cooking. That was it, except for one thing.

 

Sitting on a shelf off by itself, as though in a place of honor, was a battery-powered Sony radio. All the while that I was there, world news from the BBC played in the background.

 

The second story begins a few years later in the South African township of Soshengrueve, on the outskirts of Pretoria. A group of us touring the area was given the opportunity to divide up and spend a night with families in the township which, like its sister township, Soweto, near Johannesburg, is a depressing mix of low-income to no-income families living in very close quarters. It happened that the family to which I was assigned was relatively prosperous.

 

Although the house was no larger than a typical two-car garage, it was divided into several rooms and had a few electrical appliances all connected by one switch, including a small television. At bedtime, the switch was thrown and everything shut down for the night. I have no idea how many people actually lived there. No fewer than 10 were in the house when the lights-out switch was thrown. It was what happened just before the switch was thrown, however, that punctuates this story.

 

All the while that I was in the house talking with Francis, the intelligent and deeply Christian householder, I was aware of a group of people in the far corner huddled around the television and its muffled sounds. It was a mixture of generations around the TV, sub-teens to people probably older than I. Finally, around 10 p.m., Francis stood up and asked if I would join him in a family prayer before the lights were turned off. We walked over to the TV group, everyone stood, and I was brought into the circle that was surrounding the television. Then and there, to my utter astonishment, I saw what the group was watching, piped in courtesy of satellite technology: Pornography – of obvious Western origin (images of white faces and Texas license plates don’t lie)!

 

It was the most bizarre prayer circle I’ve ever been part of. Mercifully, Francis said “amen” and threw the switch!

 

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ foreign affairs writer, tells better stories than I do, (and well he should since he gets paid three or four times what I make). But he deftly uses stories similar to the ones I’ve just told to illustrate and interpret the phenomenon of globalization. Friedman, in fact, might be called Mr. Globalization because of his masterful synthesis of information, events, and economic, technological and political insights into the forces that are shaping life all over the earth, often in surprising ways. His book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, is must reading for anyone wanting to grasp a big picture of how the world works, and often doesn’t work, because of converging circumstances that make the planet a tightly connected global village. He calls it, the phenomenon of globalization, the “One Big Thing” going on in the world that affects us all.

 

What is globalization, according to Friedman? It is basically this: the Americanization of the rest of the world, primarily through the dominance and spread of Western technology, economics and social structures that, to put it in crass terms, simply work better than anyone else’s’. It has come to this, he thinks: only two options remain for the world’s political leaders – democracy or kleptocracy. The choice is either institutions based on openness, freedom, honesty and the rule of law, or institutions based on graft, payoffs, bribes, theft, raw power and the exploitation of the citizenry to maintain the ruling classes in power; witness Saudi Arabia. It is the clash of these two alternatives, brought into increasingly close and unavoidable contact through the sticky fingers of globalization that frames the struggle to define and shape the planet’s future.

 

The facts are plain for anyone to see: Through the infinite reach of the Internet, through increasingly interlocked and interactive financial institutions, through the media epitomized by the pervasiveness of CNN and satellite television, anyone, anywhere on the face of the earth can be the beneficiary or victim of Western values and a Western vision of life. In short, it makes no difference how remote or how poor you might be, you have choices that, for good or evil, are reshaping the world’s culture into something approaching a single culture, at least on the surface. You have your choice, anywhere on earth, of tuning into the BBC and Maggie Thatcher or the Playboy Channel and Pamela Anderson. Take your pick.

 

Is it any wonder that the Taliban is running scared? Is it any wonder that their response to this pervasive, all-but-unavoidable interconnectedness is to want to shut it down altogether, to be able to throw a single switch through an act or acts of terrorism, that will stop this thing called globalization in its tracks? Why do they want to do that? According to Friedman, their rage and that of many, many like them around the world, arises from the inability of their native societies, often kleptocracies, to plug into and benefit from globalization’s benefits, primarily economic growth and more equity in the distribution of resources. Their rage can be compared, he said, to a Marx brothers' skit in which Harpo is presented with a telegram. He looks at it, rips it to shreds and throws it to the ground in blustery anger. Why did he do that, someone asks Chico. “Because,” Chico said, “he can’t read.”

 

You see the One Great Problem there, don’t you? Unless those who are frightened and angry about globalization develop an ability to “read” and benefit from its many and complex forces, the resulting conflict of which we now have a bitter taste can grow only deeper.

 

It is appropriate here to mention Tom Friedman’s famous “Golden Arches’ Theory of Conflict Prevention.” The theory is this: No two countries that both have McDonald’s franchises have fought a war against each other since each got its McDonalds. Or, in other words, when a country reaches the level of economic development where it has a middle class big enough to support a McDonald’s network, it becomes a McDonald’s country. And people in McDonald’s countries don’t like to fight wars; they prefer to wait in line for burgers. Economic integration makes the cost of war much higher for both victor and vanquished. Which is to say, people who are “reading” off the same script for how to conduct their nation’s business are far less likely to take up arms against each other to resolve conflicts. Friedman admits that since the theory was formulated, the Balkans conflict appears to defy it. He thinks, however, that it is the exception that proves the rule: a semblance of stability now exists in the Balkans because its people, by and large, don’t want war anymore. They want their burgers, and they’re trying to ensure that they get them by learning to read from the script of the Western world.

 

And, so it is time to repeat our thesis:

 

All conflict, at its core, is spiritual, and globalization is the predominant carrier of conflict in the world today. In short, globalization is a spiritual phenomenon, confronting the world for both good and ill with clashing values and competing visions of what life should be.

 

Friedman, of course, captures the essence of these “clashing values and competing visions” in the title of his book. The Lexus represents the essence of Western technology and sophistication fed by the elixir of globalization. The olive tree stands for traditional cultures and ways of life that, in their collective soul, want little or no part of globalization’s blessings and burdens. And that, we now know, is no insignificant demurer. As Mike Keenen aptly stated in an e-mail to me after the events of Sept. 11, “It looks like the olive tree fell on the Lexus.” Indeed.

 

Harvey Kushner is a terrorism expert who, following the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, all but predicted the Sept. 11 attack. The cover of a book that he wrote after the first attack used a clever image of the Twin Towers to make them appear to be the crosshairs on a rifle scope. In a New York Times article following Sept. 11, Kushner commented that, globally speaking, it is time for us in North America finally to realize that we “live in a bad neighborhood.”

 

The world is a dangerous place, and we in the Northern Hemisphere are not exempt from its perils despite 200 years of an almost unparalleled sense of safety and security guaranteed by vast protective oceans to our east and west, and friendly borders separating the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The shock and fear that have penetrated our collective psyches are as though a veil has been lifted from our eyes, and we see now, with horror, that what we so warmly thought of as a global village, as basically a harmless extension of Mr. Rogers' neighborhood, is actually a place of deep and seemingly unresolvable conflict. And we, as most of the rest of world has experienced for some time, are vulnerable to its violence and rage arising from an awareness of gross inequities and pervasive injustices in the distribution of the world’s resources. Globalization is the primary carrier of that awareness, not to mention an exacerbating force in its own right, that brings to all of us both promises and threats on a scale never before experienced by the human race.

 

Do you, the post 9.11 generation, have a challenge before you, or what? As you ponder vocations that will plunge you squarely in the middle of this globalizing ooze, this tantalizing but sticky mixture of technology, economics and institutional reform that both promises to save and threatens to destroy our planetary neighborhood, can you imagine yourselves, say, 20 years from now, being the Tom Friedmans of another day? That is, can you see yourselves being the generation that will be called upon to make sense of a world that, right before your very eyes on a crisp, clear day in September, 2001, went crazy? Indeed, can you even begin to grasp what “doing good” in such a world might entail?

 

In closing, I offer you just a few handles for your efforts this weekend and in the years ahead to do good in a bad neighborhood:

 

n      Respect conflict. Neither reject nor fear it. Simply respect it as part of the human condition that drives us back to basic questions about life itself. Who are we? Why are we here? What must we do and refrain from doing to make and keep life human? What vision or visions of life give us the best chance of finding meaning and sustaining the human enterprise?

n      Preach and practice non-violence. It should be apparent to all by now that the short run value of violence to resolve conflict simply is not worth the long run peril that violence creates. Acquaint yourself with the research of Gene Sharp, who has catalogued the effectiveness of nonviolence in resolving conflicts throughout history.

n      Embrace tragedy. The world is more complex that “reaping what you sow.” In a topsy- turvy world, doing good can turn out bad. Accept it and move on, and don’t hold others to a higher standard in these matters than you hold yourself.

n      Seek peace, not mere safety. The latter too often means building ever higher walls and way too expensive missile defense systems that presume and perversely promote the very attacks they purport to discourage. Peace, on the other hand, is shalom, the welfare of everyone, seeking after what is good for all the land. Only in peace can real security be found.

n      Plunder history. It’s our best, most wise teacher. From the experience of our ancestors, we learn, among other things, that our greatest insights and sustaining visions have emerged from life-shattering events, whether a captivity or a crucifixion. We might even learn that it’s only as we experience from time to time the depths of our “bad neighborhood” that we find the inspiration to envision and seek the Heavenly City.

 

I don’t want to leave you with the sense that there is more despair than hope in the world that is ours today. Trouble aplenty has always been available to focus upon and to worry our souls with thoughts of doom and destruction. So, I offer this fragment of a poem by Wallace Stevens to you as a reminder that, no matter how deep the thicket of gloom might appear, the underlying reality of nobility and uplifting vision is never too far away (never forget the deep connection between politics and poetry; remember Dag Hammerskjold):

 

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake,

A composing as the body tires, a stop

To see hepatica, a stop to watch

A definition growing certain and

A wait within that certainty, a rest

In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.

Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence,

As when the cock crows on the left and all

Is well, incalculable balances,

At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes

And a familiar music of the machine

Sets up its Schwaermerei, not balances

That we achieve but balances that happen,

As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.

Perhaps there are moments of awakening,

Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which

We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,

As on an elevation, and  behold

The academies like structures in a mist.

-- The Collected Poems, p. 386

 

In all you do, may the peace of God, Allah, Yahweh, the Creator be with you.