12/25/2003
Nine Paths to Global Citizenship
By Doug McGill
The McGill Report 
Global
citizenship, one might say, is a kind of super-citizenship – the
familiar idea of rights
and duties of membership in a civic group, only taken
to a higher power, which is the power
of the entire planet.
The
central idea is that global citizens spend time each
day thinking about their responsibility to maintain not only
the health of their particular
city, state, and country – but also about the
civic and moral duties they owe the planet and its
people.
Global
citizenship has its own heroes and a history that runs parallel
to, and usually just below the visible surface of the
more prominent social and political practices and theories
of every age. Today, thanks
to 9/11 and global warming and many other striking contemporary
proofs of our interconnected and endangered world, the idea
may finally be coming into its own.
There
are roughly nine major paths towards global citizenship. Any
person who on a daily basis tries to reconcile the pressing
needs of his or her family,
career, and community with the inner urge
to act each day somehow for global betterment, will
find spiritual ancestors
and some practical advice in one or more of
these paths:
1.
The Path of Reason
2. The Path of Faith
3. The Democratic Path
4. The Humanitarian Path
5. The Ecological Path
6. The Free Trade Path
7. The Feminist Path
8. The Corporate Path
9. The Perennial Path
Citizenship is membership, but it is also remembering, with the first
and most essential memory being that of dependence for our lives as individuals
upon the good health and the goodwill of the global community of human
beings. And, upon the environmental health of the planet.
This is not always an easy thing to remember even within the cozy
confines of family, city, or nation. It’s all the more difficult then when
our fellow citizens – those with whom we need to vividly remember
our connection -- live in foreign countries far away and out of sight
of our daily lives.
Adam Smith remarked in an essay that if a European man lost his little
finger in an accident, he would be thrown into a torment. Yet that same
man, “provided he never saw them, would snore with the most profound
security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren” in
China.
Today, thanks to CNN and a hundred other news sources, we would most
certainly see in graphic visual detail the ruin of millions of Chinese,
if God forbid that calamity came to pass. Yet we also know, for reasons
Smith could not have foreseen, that our sleep usually remains undisturbed
by the suffering of peoples half a world away.
Millions of human souls
in recent years died violently in North Korea, Sudan, the Congo and a
half dozen other hell spots on Earth in the 1990s, for instance, without
disturbing American sleep much. Responding only to what their audience
ratings meters tell them they should do, our TV news media interlinks
reports of the war in Iraq with bulletins on Michael Jackson’s
pedophile case and the latest other nonsense, and on an on it goes, distracting
us hour after hour and year after year, until one day it’s too
late.
Then a killer flu virus suddenly arrives on our shores
from China, or a pollution cloud floats in from Canada,
or
a terrorist-piloted
jumbo
jet explodes on our
own shores. Then and only then we pay attention.
To a large degree, those catastrophes are the direct result of not regularly
remembering and acting upon the vital life connection we know exists
between ourselves and the other inhabitants of our planet, especially
those who live very different lives in a land far away, until it is too
late.
Until recent years, pondering cosmopolitanism was mainly a pastime of
the elite for whom it was either necessary business or diverting pastime,
such as wealthy international traders, diplomats, or philosophers. The
elites who ran the great European colonial empires all had a cosmopolitan
view; as did the early explorers of Portugal and Spain; and the globe-trotting
Jesuits who were as greedy for global souls as merchants were for gold
and spices. Renaissance philosophers like Hugo Grotius spun theories
of international law straight from their vision and genius, without having
much practical daily application. Similarly, the Greek stoics, the first
forefathers of anyone who tries to forge a cosmopolitan outlook today,
philosophized on the equality of all mankind while blithely owning household
slaves themselves.
Yet the inconsistencies and incomplete theories of these global-thinking
pioneers make them no less useful to us today. No doubt we will have
to update, modify, and ultimately transcend their example as mankind
goes on, if it is lucky, to successfully complete the next step in its
ever-expanding consciousness. We had better soon become global thinkers
or all die as local ones. But one thing is sure, which is that whatever
new global consciousness arises, it will grow out of the ideas passed
down from those who have put them, such as they are today, already in
our minds. The new theory will have to save what is useful to today from
the global thinking pioneers, and kick away what is useless or false.
The first step is to become consciously aware of the ideas that already
move us and limit us from our own living past.
1. The Path of Reason
Patron
Saint: Socrates
Main Idea: Reason and virtue are universal values of mankind.
Followers: The Stoic philosophers (Zeno,
Seneca, Marcus Aurelius), the Cynic philosophers
(Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates),
Hugo Grotius, Immanuel Kant, Martha Nussbaum.
“I am neither an Athenian nor a Greek, I am a citizen of the world,” said
the sage of Athens (quoted by Plutarch). As such he was perfectly democratic
in his application of the standards of reason across all borders and
with all comers. Applying reason to belief, individually and personally,
citizen by citizen, was Socrates’ way. For him good ideas could
come from anywhere in the world. Spreading these ideas to the young men
of Athens got Socrates killed; yet in submitting to the will of Athens
that he be executed, instead of choosing exile, Socrates showed the limits
of his cosmopolitanism. The Stoic schools took the cosmopolitical aspect
of his thinking to greatest extreme, arguing that the entire world was
entirely material and endowed with reason and soul, and it was thus every
individual’s role, wherever they may live on the earth, to live
according to the dictates of rational nature. The Renaissance philosopher
Hugo Grotius built the first system of international law out of the notion
that all humans are rational and social, and thus are bound in a moral
world that transcends national boundaries. When Immanuel Kant wrote “perpetual
peace is guaranteed by no less an authority than the great artist Nature
herself,” he picked up where the Stoics left off. His essay “Perpetual
Peace,” arguing for universal peace based on universal laws, is
the manifesto of many modern cosmopolitans. Martha Nussbaum extends the
theme in many writings, such as Cultivating Humanity, in which she argues
for spreading liberal arts education (Socratic style) globally as a way
to support the growth of freedom, democracy, and human rights.
2. The Path of Faith
Patron
Saint: Albert Schweitzer
Main Idea: Service to God by revering and supporting all life.
Followers: Augustine of Hippo, St. Francis, St. Paul, G.K.
Chesterton, Reinhold Neibuhr, Mother Theresa, Habitat for Humanity
“As long ago as my student days, it struck me as incomprehensible
that I should be allowed to live such a happy life while I saw so many
people around me wrestling with care and suffering,” Schweitzer
scrawled on a notepad only a week before his death in Gabon, Africa. “There
gradually grew up within me an understanding of the saying of Jesus that
we must not treat our lives as being for ourselves alone.” As a
result, Schweitzer sacrificed a promising career as a concert organist
in Europe to go to medical school and then move permanently to Africa
as a medical missionary. By giving up his cushy life to follow Jesus’ call
to live for others, Schweitzer both followed, and established his credentials,
as a modern avatar of the path of the missionary – usually but
not always in modern history, a Christian. Faith not reason is the motivational
spring of these cosmopolitans. God’s plan, not man-in-progress,
is the engine of human history. Humanist critics point to the many crimes
of Christian missionaries and of the evangelical urge; yet the fact remains
that missionaries more than any others, until the multinational corporation
was invented, have overcome the gravity of local life in order to travel
the world, to endure loneliness, to learn foreign languages, to befriend
foreign people, and even to die in foreign lands having religiously converted
others but been entirely culturally converted themselves. Religious humanitarian
groups such as Catholic Relief Services and Lutheran World Relief are
among the largest and most active NGO’s serving refugees and the
world’s poor today.
3. The Path of Democracy
Patron
Saint: Woodrow Wilson
Main Idea: Global political, legal, and trade cooperation.
Followers: Jonathan Schell, Vaclav Havel,
the League of Nations, the United Nations, the
International Court of Justice, the World Trade
Organization.
These global citizens see global health primarily as the absence of
war, with world peace arising primarily by individual action taken in
the political sphere. The government’s role is to work with other
nations towards global cooperation in all matters of common interest
including health, humanitarian relief, education, the environment, and
armed police actions when necessary. Citizenship to them implies individual
action through voting, vocal political dissent, and other means of pressuring
governments toward these ends. A few Wilsonians see the world ideally
evolving towards a single global federalism; most favor continued national
sovereigns working ever more closely through international treaties,
protocols, laws, and practices that are backed by public opinion. To
them, Woodrow Wilson’s idea for the League of Nations – especially
his principles of democracy, freedom, self-determination, and the rule
of law – was not proved fatally flawed by the League’s failure;
rather it was a noble idea ahead of its time. The most prominent Wilsonian
today is Jonathan Schell who argues in The Unconquerable World that the
string of strikingly non-violent democratic revolutions that occurred
in the late 20th century in the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia,
South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, Spain, and other countries is evidence
that America’s present military dominance goes against the grain
of history – which shows the might of people power.
4. The Humanitarian Path
Patron
Saint: Henri Dunant
Main Idea: Humanitarian action based on universal human rights.
Followers: Aryeh Neier, Paul Farmer,
International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders,
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International
In 1862, Henri Dunant, a French businessman in northern Italy, witnessed
one of the bloodiest battles of the 19th century – Napoleon’s
armies driving the Austrians out of Italy at the town of Solferino. Young
Dunant, 34 at the time, walked through the battlefield afterwards and
saw scenes of unimaginable suffering – soldiers shot through, their
guts opened, missing arms and legs, but still alive and with no medical
or nursing help at all. Writing up the experience in a small book called
A Memory of Solferino, Dunant immediately poured all his time and funds
into travels around Europe to get governments to send representatives
to a conference to address the problem of wounded soldiers and prisoners
of war. The 1864 conference drew up the Geneva Convention which codified
rules for the treatment of wounded and prisoners, and formed the Red
Cross. The phrase “human rights” would not become current
for another 90 years, but the Red Cross became the first transnational
humanitarian organization based on the idea of human rights. The group’s
fundamental principles then as now were humanity, impartiality, neutrality,
independence, voluntary service, unity, and universality. After World
War II, especially after the United Nations General Assembly passed the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, human rights groups have
proliferated by the thousands, creating a global civil society composed
of “non-governmental organizations” working transnationally
through aid efforts and conferences. In addition, the language and law
of human rights has become a pillar of U.S. foreign policy, used in the
justification and adjudication of numerous foreign military and humanitarian
projects. Human rights activists in the United States have given the
movement special impetus by transferring to the global human rights movement
many of the political, organizational, and ideological practices and
beliefs of the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960’s.
5. The Ecological Path
Patron
Saint: Rachel Carson
Main idea: Living in harmony with nature is a key to peace.
Followers: Aldo Leopold, Sigurd Olson,
Arne Naess, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Bill
McKibben, World Wildlife Fund, World Conservation
Union, Greenpeace
Ecological consciousness is the Copernican revolution updated to modern
times: it puts mankind not at the center of the universe but rather in
one small if critical corner in the great web of life. Backed by the
authority of modern science, the ecological view holds that the health
of the whole earth depends on the health of all the parts, with a flaw
or cancer in any part possibly leading to the death of all. Theoretically,
this insight could lead to a humble politics, one that takes into account
the possible consequences of every action not only locally but throughout
that web of life, including the citizens of faraway lands. Aldo Leopold,
the author of the ecological classic “A Sand County Almanac,” connected
ecology and civics when he wrote of man being “a plain member and
citizen of the biotic community.” Leopold’s friend and colleague,
the naturalist Sigurd Olson, hiked in the wilderness of northern Minnesota
and believed it offered lessons of global import: “Harmony of knowledge,
will, and feeling toward the earth is wisdom, for it has to do with living
at peace with other forms of life. Since the beginning of civilization,
harmony with nature has been almost disregarded, though it has been recognized
by a few great minds as the only solution to the problem of finding peace
and contentment.” Sooner or later every environmental writer comes
to roughly the same conclusion. Putting the earth first – biocentrism
trumping anthropocentrism -- inevitably makes all men citizens in stewardship
of their common home, the glistening blue sphere of Earth.
6. The Free Trade Path
Patron
Saint: Adam Smith
Main Idea: Unregulated global capitalism improves everyone’s
life.
Followers: Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek,
Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, libertarians,
multinational corporations (except when protectionism
suits them better)
The British liberal economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith theorized
in 1776 that every man, “intending only his own gain” in
making and selling goods, was actually working for the benefit of all
men, whether he was conscious of this or not. In so doing, Smith invented
a notion – the invisible hand of the free market – which
remains one of the most powerful globe-encircling ideas to this day.
The key notion is the price system, which magically finds a specific
trading point at which parties on both sides of the transaction are satisfied.
In other words, economics isn’t always brutish competition with
a winner and a loser. In a free market, everyone can win. This idea became
the foundation of “neoliberal” economics that, under the
leadership of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, fueled the phenomenal
growth of globalization in the post-war period. With Milton Freedman’s “Capitalism
and Freedom” as their bible, neoliberal policymakers in the 1980s
and 1990s drove vast global programs of government-led privatization.
Global financiers used the philosophy to rationalize moving vast amounts
of investment funds in and out of foreign banks in search of the highest
returns. By the middle 1990s, the downsides of these policies, such as
the destructive impact of investment funds suddenly withdrawn from an
entire national economy, or the crushing financial terms imposed on foreign
countries by the International Monetary Fund, had drawn thousands of
protesters to annual conferences where global economic bodies (such as
the World Trade Organization) met. The Nobel prizewinning economist Joseph
Stiglitz and the journalist William Greider have both offered penetrating
critiques of the free trade or “neoliberal” path, while also
acknowledge the tremendous good that economic globalization has done.
The enduring allure of the free trade path to the global citizen is captured
by its modern prophet Milton Friedman: “When you buy your pencil
or your daily bread, you don’t know whether the pencil was made
or the wheat was grown by a white man or a black man, by a Chinese or
an Indian. The price system enables people to cooperate peacefully in
one phase of their life while each one goes about his own business in
respect of everything else.”
7. The Feminist Path
Patron Saints: The women of Mandal village, Uttar Pradesh, India
Main idea: Feminine values are universal, practical, civic, and green
Followers: Carolyn Merchant, Carol Adams,
Carol Gilligan, Elizabeth Spelman, Women’s Environment and Development Organization,
the Gorilla Foundation, Feminists for Animal Rights
The odd name comes from the Hindi word for “hugging,” which
is what the village women of Mandal in northern India did to the trees
in a nearby forest in 1973, when logging companies threatened to clear-cut
them. The protest was spontaneous and the women refused to budge even
as the bulldozers charged, as if they were protecting their own children.
It was Ghandi’s principle of non-violent resistance or satyagraha,
put at the service of a forest, just as Ghandi had used it to win independence
for India. The fact that women often are on the front lines of environmental
battles around the world, and that they often find common cause despite
language and cultural barriers, suggests the feminist view has much to
offer aspiring global citizens of either gender. In particular, feminist
group action not only on global environmental issues but also on social
and economic justice issues is often marked by intense collaboration,
open and free discussion, listening, and compromise. Further, feminist
writers like Carol Gilligan and Elizabeth Spelman have argued that women
tend to develop mastery of relationship maintenance skills to a higher
degree than men. Gilligan’s idea that women tend to follow an “ethic
of care” as opposed to men’s “ethic of justice” seems
especially apt in a global citizenship perspective. The ethic of justice
looks to abstract moral principles as guides to action, while the ethic
of care stresses attention to the particular case and person, being open
to different outcomes and stressing the maintenance of personal relations
in each case to the degree possible. Virtues often exercised more naturally
by women than men – hospitality, modesty, restraint, kindness,
and the impulse to repair – these feminists argue, are the indispensable
virtues to any global civic life.
8. The Corporate Path
Patron Saint: Rev. Leon Sullivan
Main idea: Doing business globally with a social conscience.
Followers: Business in the Community, Business
for Social Responsibility, Robert Haas, David Grayson,
Anita Roddick,
Simon Zadek, Levi Strauss & Co., The Body Shop
As economic globalization progressed in the 1990s, a backlash formed
among critics who saw it as a form of empire, enslaving a new generation
of underpaid workers in third world countries to wealthy first-world
masters. Riots in Seattle in 1999, where the World Trade Organization
had its annual meeting, showed the depth of the anti-corporate sentiment.
That confrontation and others led to the rise of the latest trend in
doing business with a social conscience, known as CSR for “corporate
social responsibility.” Cynics say CSR is a branch of corporate
public relations. It is true that while several companies, such as Levi
Strauss and The Body Shop, put significant resources into social programs,
no companies have scored notable successes in the social and profit categories
simultaneously. The patron saint of this path, the Rev. Leon Sullivan,
built a worldwide network of self-help worker training centers and in
1971 joined the board of General Motors, becoming the first African-American
to hold a board seat on a major corporation. In 1977 he authored the “Sullivan
Principles,” a human rights code of conduct for U.S. and other
multinationals operating in South Africa, while apartheid was still the
law there. By getting American companies in South Africa to commit to
equal opportunity employment for black as well as white employees, the
Sullivan Principles turned multinational corporations into agents for
social change that led ultimately to the end of apartheid in South Africa.
This example, at least, shows that multinational corporations can and
sometimes do play a critical role as global citizens by expanding human
rights and democracy worldwide. Environmental and labor cases involving
major multinationals like Nike, Union Carbide, and others tend to grab
headlines. Yet the overseas staffs of U.S. multinationals, which numbering
about two million U.S. citizens, create a de facto overseas diplomatic
corps for the United States that shows a human face of America to the
world – a great act of citizenship. Also for every factory worker
scandal, U.S. multinationals also offer employment, and social and educational
opportunities to foreign workers that they could never otherwise afford.
History also shows that multinational firms are sensitive to pressure
from consumer protests and NGOs, which have driven companies towards
increasing social accountability over the years. Working as “expatriate” employee
of a multinational remains the most practical path available to most
Americans, to experience global citizenship firsthand.
9. The Perennial Path
Patron
Saints: Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King
Main idea: Spiritual oneness
through shared suffering and renouncing ego empowers
people and secures the world.
Followers: Michael Lerner, Ken Wilber, Jacob
Needleman, Joseph Goldstein, Marianne Williamson, Huston
Smith, Joseph
Campbell
What
did the Buddha say to the hot dog vendor? “Make me one with
everything.” The “unitive knowledge of the divine Ground
of being” is how Aldous Huxley put it in The Perennial Philosophy,
summarizing the universal truth that is taught at the oft-shrouded heart
of the world’s great religions: “All is one.” Each
of us is in essence but a tiny shard of a single Godhead. It’s
an obvious insight to many, yet hard to translate into meaningful civic
action. Today’s followers of the Perennial Path are trying to find
just such practical paths by which individuals can turn their spiritual
search into effective global citizenship. Jacob Needleman, the historian
and philosopher, speaks of the need for America to overcome its intensely
selfish worldview by building a “community of conscience,” one
citizen at a time. America’s founding fathers provide ideal mythic
models from which each citizen can be reassured that the possibility
for true greatness can be tapped by seeking the light of divinity within.
That act puts man “in accordance with his structure and nature
as an image of God” and allows him to fulfill his highest purpose: “Namely
to care for the inner divinity and through that to care for our neighbor.” The
New Age philosopher Ken Wilber suggests that a widespread breakthrough
in consciousness to a “worldcentric” view, which previously
has been the domain of social elites, may be the next step in human evolution
that began with egocentrism (self-focus), and then successfully progressed
then to sociocentrism (partially subjugating the needs of self to the
needs of the group). “In this transformation,” Wilber writes, “from
the sociocentric to the worldcentric, the self de-centers once again:
my group is not the only group in the universe, my tribe is not the only
tribe, my god is not the only god, my ideology is not the only ideology.” Some
Perennial Path leaders, such as the Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein,
say that working spiritually to eradicate the sources of conflict within
oneself, such as through meditation, is possibly the highest form of
peace work that a human being can do. Others, like Marianne Williamson,
say that at some point well before reaching enlightenment, individuals
must explicitly engage in civic life. This very engagement can itself
be fuel for continued spiritual growth: “Where people join, breakthroughs
occur,” she says. “Where we are separate from each other – angry,
polarized, and defensive – breakdown and disorder are inevitable.
The way to heal social disorder, domestically or internationally, is
to find our spiritual oneness. We don’t need
deeper analysis of our sickness so much as we desperately
need
a more passionate embrace
of the only thing that heals them all.”
Copyright @ 2003 The McGill Report