Global
Transformations
Sohail
Inayatullah
Abstract: Sohail Inayathullah examines the changing concepts of nature and
technology in an essay on global structural transformations. He
argues that the nation, the local, and the global capitalist system
are in the midst of a dramatic structural transformation pointing to
massive shifts in identity, economy and governance. He suggests ways
for these changes resulting from current imbalances to lead to away
from global depression to
global transformation.
Something
I learned many years ago from cultural historian William Irwin
Thompson is that all scholarship is autobiographical, so let me
begin with my biases. Born in Pakistan and raised in Europe and
Asia, with the last two decades in Hawaii, my approach to issues is
often global. Having
never lived in one place for long, and having seen human suffering
in all places, I focus more on transformation than stability.
I
see us going through three layers of transformation: (1) epistemic
transformation in how we know the world, nature and ourselves, (2)
structural transformation of the world political and economic
system, and (3) short-term crisis. Let us first examine the current,
short-term crises.
Current
Crises
The
short-term crises include dramatic shortages of drinking water for
the majority of the world. Of course, for those who live in that
part of the world, who
cares? The crisis will become one--as with all crisis--once the
western middle-class cannot find clear water to drink. We can
anticipate water wars. The reasons for this crisis is our industrial
lifestyle as well as the view that big is better.
The
second crisis is intergenerational.
While caucasians at the end of the 19th century
represented 50 percent of the world's population, by the middle of
the 21st century, they
will represent less than 10 percent. Quite a turn around. For
example, in California, it will soon be 50/50 caucasian/hispanic-asian.
However, the caucasian population will be mostly older and employed
while the hispanic will be younger and unemployed. California's
scenario will be globally played out, with the Third World being
young and the First World being old. Age wars (conflated with race,
wealth and geography) is the forecast if presents trends continue.
To survive we will need cultural and economic systems that see
people as resources, who can physically, mentally and spiritually
contribute to society, and not as unemployed dregs that only consume
valuable non-renewable resources.
The
third crisis is transformations in China, possibly through its
breakup, the Balkanization of the Great Wall, if you will. This
could lead to a south-west Muslim China, a Northern communist China
and a south-east capitalist China. Alternatively,
China could continue to internally consolidate its power, and
have occasional forays outward--Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even India
could be under threat.
Structural
Transformations
Sovereignty:
At
a deeper level are structural transformations to the interstate
system, in predatory capitalism, and global governance.
While the nation state has not withered away, certainly it
cannot claim the allegiance it once had.
Neither pollution nor capital respect state boundaries.
International organisations, regional associations, and world
treaties and unions become daily more important. It appears it is
only the passport office that can manage to protect local conditions
from globalism. For
even as capital is free to travel worldwide, labour must still pay
for airline tickets and visa fees. And if one is from impoverished
areas, then travelling upwards to OECD nations is all but impossible
save for a select few with skills needed in the First World.
The
nation-state, while once an elegant solution to tribalism, to
difference, has only managed to delay the issue of larger governance
system. Unities exist
in the context of an unequal global interstate system.
Democracy, liberalism, and individuality might be fine
nationally but certainly are too radical globally.
Nations might have order within but anarchy is still
prevalent outside of them.
The
challenge then is to move to a new systemic level, a bifurcation to
global governance.
Unfortunately, in this post-communist period, instead of
becoming increasingly open and transforming to a new level of unity,
we have regressed, slinked back to tribalism. Local leaders have
used past wrongs, the fear of the Other, as a ruse to consolidate
power. Barbarism has
come back with a vengeance, making many wish for the stability of
nation-states, however inequitable they can be to local communities,
to minorities. A police-state after all is stable.
The
paradox is that the economy is now global but politics remains
national. Activism at
the level of the nation-state in changing human conditions is
difficult since labour and ideas are bounded. Leftist, green, and
other transformative strategies do not succeed at the national level
since nations merely export their problems.
Reducing deforestation in one nations merely means that
corporations move to another country. As Hazel Henderson writes:
‘Countries with well-regulated, human labour markets and social
safety are uncompetitive as corporate employers move out.’
To tame capital, labour must become global, or localism must
become strengthened. However, localism, while somewhat able to deal
with issues of community, identity, can also be contaminated by
racism. Difference is not tolerated since community is culturally or
racially defined.
Globalism,
on the other hand, commodifies difference using it to continue the
march of capital. Ideas
appear to be free, as information gurus want us to believe, however,
ideas often flow directly from the West to the South, it is rare
that flows of news, entertainment, and significance both ways.
We do not have dialogical relations. This does not mean that
their cosmologies exist in isolation to each other; rather, travel,
international conferencing, ‘development’ the lure of western
education and the flux of yogis, sufis, and zen roshis westward, all
have began to create cultural fusion at many levels, beginning the
irreversible (let us hope) process of creating a global
civil/spiritual society. However,
while not successful at a grand system level, the counter-culture
movements--the anti-capitalist movements, the non-governmental
organisations—have began to threaten the citadel of continued
economic growth, have began to call into question the universality
of the West and of the tyranny in the Third World, that is too
easily passed off as post-colonial socialist critique.
Emerging
crisis in predatory capitalism:
Capitalism,
historically successful, because of its ability to adapt, to create
destruction, is in the midst of moral crisis.
Capitalism is based on the belief that hard work leads to
rewards. That if there is inequality it can be explained by effort.
Those who are poor are lazy. This link between work and success is
being undone at many levels. At
the level of the stock markets, the question remains, why work when
riches can be earned on the speculative markets, through gambling?
Global casino capitalism has begun to undo the moral basis of
capitalism. Social movements concerned with justice have undone the
positive contributions of greed and have undone the importance of
wealth accumulation. Without the moral justification for capitalism,
it will collapse as an organising system.
Economist
Ravi Batra also argues that the system will collapse but for
different reasons. He believes that as more and more money goes into
speculative markets, it is only a matter of time before the system
collapses. The ratio of the financial economy to the real economy
begins to widen-- indeed, currently 90 percent of the trillion
dollar daily markets are speculative not trade or
investment-based--leading to unsustainable (and false) growth. The
communist solution, of course, was not much better. Then, the State
pretended to pay and labour pretended to work.
In comparison, Third World bureaucracies suffer from a
deficit of moral capital. Why
work hard and save when jobs are given to those with the correct
genetic connections or those close to the ruling junta. Corruption,
while easily rationalised, as a filing fee, devalues a culture's
self-worth, leading to deficit of the soul (and to the rise of the
religious right).
The
global financial system merely fuels greed and inequity, not
development, and not challenge. The result is a global economic and
cultural imbalance. What
is needed is not a recovery of the relationship between greed and
growth but the creation of a world cooperative economy, where
agricultural, industry and services are balanced, where wealth
between regions is better balanced, where moral stories of
cooperative behaviour have as much currency as stories of instant
‘scratch and win’ millionaires. The nation, the local, and the
global capitalist system, while apparently eternal are in the midst
of a dramatic structural transformation.
These changes on the daily level often go unnoticed but taken
together they point to massive shifts in identity, economy and
governance. Let us hope
that changes that result from grand imbalances do not lead to a
global depression but a global transformation.
Global
Governance:
The
final level of structural transformation are changes in global
governance. With the bi-polar world less possible now--unless China
remerges and claims superpower status in opposition to Europe and
the US, the possibilities are either for a world with many hegemons
or a system of global governance. The many hegemon system will see
the US as a major player continuing to spread its influence over the
rest of the Americas (and the world); in addition, we will see
Europe over Africa; India over South-Asia, Japan over South-East
Asia; and China over itself (however defined).
Alternatively, the crisis of the nation-state and capitalism
could see the development of a world government in the form of a new
United Nations. Johan
Galtung argues for a four house system: a house of nations, a house
of corporations, a house of social movements and a house of
individuals, direct democracy. Houses would be interlocked with the
house of nations gradually weakening as zones of identity move from
nation to globe. Central
to this model is the realisation of a new type of leadership, of a
spiritual/servant leadership and of legal accountability of current
State leaders. Transparency
International and other movements are partly about this, the spread
of a worldwide accountability movement.
We certainly cannot be sure which direction the world
capitalist system will head in, however, along with the
nation-state, it appears in terminal crisis.
Epistemic
Transformations
What
is occurring is a fundamental change in how we know ourselves.
To begin with, technology is redesigning human evolution
itself. Susantha
Goonatilake's metaphor of technology bypassing culture to recreate
the lineage of evolution is fitting.
Imagine a hand, he asserts, wearing a glove, writing with a
pen. The hand represents the stability of evolution, our body
constant over time; the glove represents culture, our meaning
systems, our protection, our method of creating shared spaces and
creating a difference between us and nature; and the pen,
technology, representing our effort to create, to improve, to change
culture and nature. While the traditional tension was between
technology and culture with evolution ‘stable’, now the pen
(technology) has the potential to turn back on the hand and redesign
it, making culture but technique, a product of technology. Thus the
traditional feedback loop of culture and technology with biology the
stable given is about to be transformed. Equally stunning are the
potential impacts of virtual reality, artificial intelligence and
robotics.
There
are four levels to this epistemic transformation. The first is:
transformations in what we think is the natural or Nature.
This is occurring from the confluence of numerous trends,
forces, and theories. Genetics
contests the biological order. Soon it may be possible to produce
children in factories. With the advent of the artificial womb, women
and men as biological beings will be secondary to the process of
creation. The link between sexual behaviour and reproduction will be
torn asunder.
But
it is not just genetics which changes how we see the natural,
theoretical positions arguing for the social construction of nature
also undo the primacy of the natural world.
Nature is not seen as the uncontested category, rather humans
create natures based on their own scientific, political and cultural
dispositions. We "nature" the world. Nature is what you
make it. There is no longer any state of nature. Eco Feminists point
out that they have been constructed by men as natural with men
artefactual. By being conflated with nature, as innocent, they have
had their humanity denied to them and tamed, exploited, and tortured
just as nature has.
It
is not just nature that is now problematic but natural rights as
well. Arguments that rights are political not universal or natural,
that is, that rights must be fought for also undo the idea of a
basic nature. The view that nature should have rights, as an
argument against exploitation, also assumes that rights are fought
after. The view that the non-living should also have rights, as with
robots, and the humanly created, as well contests the idea of
natural rights. Finally,
nature is seen as romanticised. For example, Hawaii's forests are
seen as natural, as stable, as always. But almost all of Hawaii's
trees are recently planted, after the sandalwood trade led to
massive deforestation. Hawaii's natural environment is very much a
human-created environment. Thus, nature as eternal, as outside of
human construct, has thus come under threat from a variety of
places: genetics, the social construction argument, and the rights
discourse.
Related
to the end of nature are transformations in what we think is the
Truth. Religious truth has focused on the one Truth. All other
nominations of the real pale in front of the eternal. Modernity has
transformed religious truth to allegiance to the nation-state.
However, thinkers from Marx, Nietzsche, to Foucault from the
West, as well as feminists and Third World scholars such as Edward
Said have contested the unproblematic nature of truth. Truth is
considered class-based, gender-based, culture-based,
personality-based. Knowledge is now considered particular, its
arrangement based on the guiding episteme.
We often do not communicate well since our worlds are so
different, indeed, it is amazing we manage to understand each other
at all.
Multiculturalism
has argued that our images of time, space, and history, of text are
based on our linguistic dispositions. Even the library once
considered a neutral institution is now seen as political. Certainly
Muslims, Hawaiians, Aborigines, Tantrics, and many others would not
construct knowledge along the lines of science, socialscience, arts
and humanities. Aborigines
might divide a library--if they were to accede to that built
metaphor--as divided by sacred spaces, genealogy and dreamtime.
Hawaiians prefer the model of aina (land), the Gods, and genealogy
(links with the ever present ancestors).
Not just is objectivity under threat, but we are increasingly
living in a world where our subjectivity has been historicized and
culturized. The search is for models that can include the
multiciplicities that we are--layers of reality, spheres with cores
and peripheries.
The
end of modernity
The
final level of transformation is in what we think is humanity.
Whether we are reminded of Foucault arguing that humanity is
a recent, a modern category, and that our image will disappear like
an etching on sand, about to be wiped away by the tide, or if we
focus on the emergence of the women's movement as a nudge to
humanity as centre, humanity as the centre of the world is
universally contested. While
the enlightenment removed the male God, it kept the male man. The
emerging worldview of robots—what Marvin Minsky of MIT calls
‘mind-children’--cyborgs, virtual realities, cellular automata,
the worldwideweb, microvita as well as the dramatic number of
individuals who believe in angels, all point to the end of humanity
as the central defining category.
We
are thus witnessing transformations coming through the new
technologies, through the world view of non-western civilizations,
through the women's movement, and through spiritual and Gaian
perspectives. All these
taken together point to the possibility but not certainty of a new
world shaping.
Let
us say this in different words. We are witnessing the end of
modernity. What this means is that we are in the process of changes
in Patriarchy (I am male); Individualism (I win therefore I am);
Materialism (I shop therefore I am);
Dualism (I think therefore I am); scientific dogmatism (I
experiment therefore I know better or I have no values thus I am
right) and Nationalism (I hate the other therefore I am). This is
however a long term process and part of the undoing of capitalism.
All these connect to create a new world, which is potentially
the grandest shift in human history.
We are in the midst of galloping time, plastic time, in which
the system is unstable and thus can dramatically transform.
The
good news is that transformation is quite possible. The bad news is
that previous efforts to transform inequitable, unjust, unbalanced
systems have often failed since change-oriented movements can be
easily accommodated, or in the process of revolutionary change,
agents tire, or the system provides incremental change by exporting
structural problems to others. We can no longer export problems to
the ‘Other’, victims are becoming scarce. Our problems have
become global, knowledge of them is shared and the interactions
between events known--the famous butterfly affect. While traditional
systems were stable since heredity and status kept the system
afloat, modern systems are growth oriented and thus to survive
export problems: to nature, to the periphery, to rural, to women, to
children.
The
most vulnerable bear the burden.
However, globalism as defined as the awakening of the
spiritual, of the multi-culturalism, of a planetary civil society
contests this export. New
technologies, even as they play out the dark side of postmodernity,
also allow social movements to better make their case, to inform
others of immediate injustice, to organise against the brutality of
national governments.
However,
it would be a mistake to believe that postmodernity is the end of
history. Postmodernity has a cost of entry. It is primarily for the
rich. It is individualistic and unbounded from history. And even
while it gives voices to other cultures by undoing the hegemony of
western modernity, it does so not in the terms of others--nature,
culture, community, all become discards.
Cyberspace, for example, gives the appearance of community,
yet without responsibility--there is no face to face interaction.
What
then should we do? What are the range of possible responses?
Responses
(1)
One response is Enantiodromia; that all efforts to transform are
doomed since we become what we struggle against, what we hate. Our
shadow side comes out more as we try and distance our selves from
it. History but is
reversal. To rationally plan the future is a mistake, chaos and
disorder are the natural states. There really is not much we can do
but attempt to get a glimpse of the cosmic forces we are engaged in.
This is the time of myths--of progress versus nature, of self versus
the other, of the tribe versus the planet. As the drama unfolds, we
should sit back and watch, as if we were at a Greek drama. Let us
hope that this time the Gods do not have a tragedy in store for us.
(2)
Another response is Inner transformation. The main thing to do is
meditate, to take care of one's own family, to shop less. To live
simply. Life is cyclical anyway--and controlled by the
Cosmos--things will take care of themselves. At the same time, the
good actions of many, of numerous individuals engaged in
meditation--synchronously and asynchronously--can lead to a critical
mass of consciousness. There can be abrupt spiritual transformation.
While not all will become spiritual, we can hope society will be
more open towards the more subtle dimensions of existence.
(3)
The third response often emerges from inner transformation. Here we
join others in social movements. While humans cannot do everything,
there are specific areas in which differences can be successful.
By finding one's passion, we focus on a particular dimension
of the critique of modernity. We can join the environmental, the
feminist, the consumer, the anti-nuke, the meditation, and the
cooperative movement. The task is not to conquer the state but to
rethink power and politics, to move hearts and work on local detail
levels to empower each of us. Neither prince nor merchant nor
warrior but the interconnected humanity and planet is the operating
myth. The potential success of these movements lies in their
globality--linking rich and poor, West and South.
When social movements are only local, then they only export
problems from one region to another. Nuclear testing will go on
elsewhere or tree killing will happen in the next nation.
Ultimately, a think globally and act locally strategy improves one's
own condition but not that of the other.
The
larger response is the creation of global civil society. For the
consumer movement this means putting information on all products in
terms of how it impacts animals, women, the Third World, as well as
the aggregate distribution of wages. The challenge is to link these
movements and create an alternative to predatory capitalism or
authoritarian Statism. Clearly
this has been what the alternative UN global forums have been about.
(4)
A deeper response then is Local Globalisms and Global Localisms.
What is required are social movements that are both universal and
local at the same time. To survive in cross-cultural environments,
efficiency cannot be the goal. They must be based on chaotic
flexibility not on bureaucratic hierarchy. What is needed are myths
and stories of illumination linked by unity of purpose not by
institutional infrastructure. We must remember that it is between
order and disorder that new ideas, forms of consciousness emerge,
new forms of organisation prosper. If we overly focus on order we
end up with the iron cage of modernity; if we overly focus on
disorder we have lack of coherence, wasted effort, and movement
burn-out. Finally, movements should be outside of the imperium,
reflecting the view of other cultures and worldviews. Indeed,
most important are non-western movements that are global in
scope.
(5)
Useful in creating new movements and as a worthy goal in itself is
the Search for new metaphors. What is needed are new stories of
where we came from and where we are going. Cellular cooperation,
Shiva Dancing, Gaia are all excellent beginnings. Metaphors are
important in that they deal with the ecology of our mind, with our
unconscious frames. Metaphors inspire and create alternative
futures. However, we must remember that all stories come from grand
crises, from temporal ruptures, from human suffering and
transcendence. Merely hoping for a story that unites all stories
eschews culture and history. Stories must dialogue but not find
their own bases eliminated. The metaphor is that of a global garden
where each civilisation, finds its flowers flourishing--each exhalts
the other.
(6)
We must deconstruct the present as well as our own
alternative politics. We must be sensitive to the politics of
language, of power. We need to see all truth claims are power moves,
seeing language as discursive is the strategy. We need to see the
present as a victory of a particular paradigm or discourse and not
as an essentialist or Platonic sense of immovable eternity. This
perspective makes the present less rigid, more malleable. The
environment too must thus be destabilised and recovered from
instrumental renderings. Seeing language as political allows us to
see why it is that national policies toward better environment,
multiculturalism, and more cooperatives fail, and symbolic words
announcing change succeeds. By deconstructing how power uses history
and idealism for its own expansion, we will be less impressed with
quixotic words, with the rhetoric of ego-politics.
Levels
of Transformation
There
are thus many levels of transformation. At one level is the
epistemic level. This is changing the way we know, attempting to
transform civilisation, changing the categories from which we know.
Part of this is the creating of new myths, new stories of
meaning, that inclusively and rationally speak to the many selves we
are becoming, to our emerging planetary civilisation.
At
another level, this is about cultures recovering themselves, the
categories they lost from modernisation. Central to this project is
the role of the First Earth people, the indigenous groups, who
represent a modern history. That
is, we must inquire into transformation from Islamic, Buddhist,
Tantric, Confucian and others' perspectives, asking what can the
defeated offer to the future.
At
yet another level crucial are gender relations, particularly in
fairer treatment to women. This of course as western feminists now
concede must include issues of class and culture, there is no final
western feminist solution. We must ensure that new technologies
include women's concerns, especially the new genetic technologies.
Creating
a new global civil, a global communicative, society to counter
tyrannical and secretive power, whether at the feudal level, the
corporate level or the State level is a critical dimension of
creating a new world system. Without which, social movements will
remain only locally effective and ultimately harmful in global
social transformation.
The
challenge is to create a global community that is
multicivilisational and grows through a value-oriented ethical
science.
Note
This
article draws on material presented at the 1995 Richard Jones
Memorial Lecture
November
24, Hobart, Tasmania
Bio-note:
Sohail
Inayatullah is a political scientist at the Communication Centre,
Queensland University of Technology. He is prolific writer with a
number of books and over one hundred and fifty journal articles,
book chapters and magazine pieces.
Address:
Communication Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Box 2434,
Brisbane, Queensland, 4001.
S.Inayatullah@qut.edu.au