theologies and cultures Vol. III, No. 2, December 2006
Impact of Globalization
Editor M. P. Joseph
Associate Editors Yatang CHUANG
Po Ho HUANG
Augustine MUSOPOLE
Fuya WU
Consulting Editors Tissa BALASURIYA, Sri Lanka
Mark BURROWS, USA
Enrique DUSSEL, Mexico
Virginia FABELLA, Philippines
Dwight N. HOPKINS, USA
Abraham, K.C, India
Yong-Bock KIM, Korea
Jessi MUGAMBI, Kenya
Michael NORTHCOTT, Britain
Teresa OKURE, Nigeria
Choan-Seng SONG, Taiwan/USA
Elsa TAMEZ, Costa Rica
Lieve TROCH, Netherlands
WONG Wai Ching Angela, Hong Kong
THEOLOGIES AND CULTURES is an academic journal dedicated
to inter-disciplinary research and scholarly exploration in the
field of theology and its interplay with the social, economic,
political and cultural dimensions of people. The journal is
committed to promoting engaged dialogue of different faith
traditions and theological formulations in view of creating
communities of justice and mutual understanding.
Views expressed in this journal are those of the authors, and do
not necessarily reflect, those held by the editorial board of
THEOLOGIES AND CULTURES or of FCCRC or its sponsors.
Copy right @ Chang Jung Christian University & Tainan Theological
College and Seminary
All rights reserved. Reproduction of articles is allowed with an
acknowledgement of the source.
ISSN no. 1813-7024
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Contents Editorial 5 Myth of Globalization: Rule of Capital to Global Apartheid of Resources M. P. Joseph 9
Embodying Climate Change: Biogeochemical Limits to
Trade and the Contradictions of Liberalism 29
Michael Northcott
Ecumenical Spirituality Overcoming Violence: Globalization, Violence, Cosmopolitanism 54 And Transmodernity Lawrence A. Whitney, LC+
Globalization and Communication Preparedness: Risk Assessment of SARS 89 Chou Kuei-Tien
Impact of Globalization on Labour: Migrant Workers in Taiwan 127 Sr. Wei Wei Depeasantization: Impact of Globalization on Farmers in India 136 Mammen Varkey
theologies and cultures,Vol.3, No.2
December 2006, pp. 5-8
Editorial
lobalization, without doubt, is the dominant reality
at the present time. This process is one of the most
comprehensive phenomena that influenced almost all walks of
life. The self understanding of a person is now shaped by the
values and norms of globalization. The ability to control public
‘mind’ made it possible for the forces of globalization to elevate
itself as the normative. To achieve this objective globalization
controls the prevailing discourse. In reality globalization creates
the governing consciousness of the people around the world.
With the aim of developing a critical understanding of
the reality of globalization, and to evaluate the ramifications of
this process on people and nature, Formosa Christianity and
Culture Research Centre organized an international seminar.
This seminar dealt with three areas of life that has been affected
by the process of globalization. These three issues are pertinent
to the life and struggle of the people of Taiwan.
1.Agriculture. Though the agricultural statistics shows
remarkable increase in food production, poverty related death
continues unabated. This calls for a rethinking. Several issues
need to be discussed in relation to the growing crisis. Some of
them are: the shift in the pattern of crop selection, changes in
land ownership, alienation of farmers from the process of
production, and the pricing policy or control.
G
6 theologies and cultures
2. Ecology/environment. The ideological foundation for
globalization namely, modernization and growth has promoted
wanton exploitation of nature and the warnings from the
environmental groups are alarming. All life sustaining systems
of the nature including water and air are highly contaminated,
and the ability of earth to sustain life is under threat.
3. Migrant labor. Although migration is as old as human
history, forced migration of labor in search of life has grown in
unprecedented magnitude in recent past. The impact of such
migration is enormous, both in the sending communities and the
receiving communities. Impact of migration in Taiwan society is
yet to be evaluated fully. A better understanding of the
economic and social factors behind migration is imperative for
creating a just and peaceful society.
Some of the papers appear in this issue of THEOLOGIES
AND CULTURES are presented at this international seminar. Few
others however, are research articles corresponding to the theme
of the seminar.
The discussion in this volume reiterates that
globalization is not just a prescription for a new economic
model, but is a way of organizing collective life. It has assumed
the role of a religion with well-articulated theologies, dogmas,
rituals, priesthood, missionaries, cathedrals, and of course with
its own concept of the divine. It has a concept of hell as
well. The heathens and sinners who dare to question the
revealed truth of the market divine are condemned to life in
eternal hell.
The core of the doctrine of globalization has three basic
pillars, viz., a) Market as the social principle; b) Growth and
modernity as the normative culture; and c) dictatorship of
money as politics.
The neo-liberal ideology that governs the present stage
of globalization has made the market as the foundation for social
and community formation. The market assumes the exclusive
right for mediation between individuals, communities, and
nations - meaning that the market has become the functioning
Editorial 7
ecclesia of the present time with ability to interiorize the outside
into its logic and control. This new system, however, has
replaced the values and systems that govern life and history of
people and the earth. Such a rule invariably resulted in the
‘mammonization of values and morals’ where people and nature
were subjected to the logics and demands of money and
accumulation. Under this new logic the objective of agriculture
is not the production of food, but the thrust to increase the
monetary value of those who control the productive forces.
Labour is deprived of its ability to contribute to the sustenance
of life when the sole objective was geared towards making
money. Mamonization of values reveal the total alienation of
people from their inner beings, the sublime urge to be a social
and spiritual being by becoming a person for the “other”.
Another objective of this issue of THEOLOGIES AND
CULTURES is to encourage the search for alternatives which are
sustainable and humanizing. The total control of Capital over
the forces of life at present furnishes no space for people
initiatives to leave any aspect of human life from seeking such
alternatives. However, creation of an alternate economic logic
and its practice is fundamental in people’s politics.
What is basic in this search is to find a new culture for
production and consumption where both production and
consumption become a humanizing act. Production is an act of
overflowing one’s own being, or an extension of the being of a
person in time and space. Agricultural production on the other
hand is an expression of one’s on spirituality, a participation in
the life creating and life sustaining mission of the Divine.
However, for this action to be humanizing, the producer should
have control over the goals and conditions of production. It
should neither be an obligation or be enforced by factors which
are not satisfying to the producer or dictated from elsewhere or
by factors generated elsewhere.
Consumption too should be humanizing and for that a
total freedom from the logic of consumer market will be an
imperative. Consumption is essence, is an expression of
8 theologies and cultures
sociality, an act of communitarian bonding and celebration.
Table fellowship in Jesus community epitomizes the
communitarian character of consumption. Traditional festivals
of the communities too reify that spirit of community bonding
through consumption. However, in the rule of capital, under
market, consumption has become an act to ensure a position or a
status in a hierarchical society. By consuming an expensive
automobile, one acquires a status relatively higher than those
who consume a vehicle with relatively lesser value.
Reordering of production and consumption is to make
human more human. And that is possible only by creating the
need for the other in oneself. Possibility for actualizing freedom
of a person lies in the ability to become totally for the other.
Without the other there is no self (me) exist.
theologies and cultures,Vol.3, No.2
December 2006, pp. 9-28
Myth of Globalization:
Rule of Capital to
Global Apartheid of Resources
M. P. Joseph
yths shape social consciousness more than reason
does. History acknowledges that. As a symbolic
representation of ever changing events, myths evoke a passion
for the unreal and conceal reality from public consciousness.
Myths appeal to and inhabit in the unconscious and regulate
human action. In the political domain, myths release psychic
energies for change and control, whereas events in political
history reiterate that the construction of myths was placed above
other strategies for effective governance. Examples in history
such as the claims of divine authority by King Solomon and the
assertion of superiority of the Nordic race by Nazism
manipulated the explosive power of myths to enslave the
collective being of a people by taming their consciousness in the
service of power. Being aware of the creative power of myths,
M
10 theologies and cultures
Hitler observed ―The driving force which has brought about the
tremendous revolutions on this earth has never been a body of
scientific teaching which has gained power over the masses, but
always a devotion that has inspired them, and often a hysteria
which has urged them to action.‖1 Existence of power cohabits
with an industry to fabricate myths.
End of Geography?
Using the term ―globalization‖ to delineate the dominant
economic and political process of the past two decades is one of
the dominant myths produced in service of global capital. The
term suggests that the concept of ―One world‖ [oikoumene] is
finally realized. The imaginative courage of the global
community dismantled the walls of separation, [reified in the
case of Berlin wall], enabling them to experience the warmth of
brotherly and sisterly relations. Transcendence of barriers was
the reality of the time, and according to this myth, the collapse
of boundaries marks the highest notion of freedom. This claim
assumes theological importance, not only for being associated
with the ultimate will of God in history, the oikoumene but of
the place of wall in the metaphoric description of the Bible. In
the book of Isaiah, walls epitomize the darkness of God.2 Walls
are constructed to darken the sight of God in history.
Dismantling of walls facilitates the light of God to shine on all, a
possibility where God people nexus moved to the world of real.
This is however, a myth.
Describing this shift as ―end of geography‖ this view
holds that two types of rapid changes are visible.
1. Geographic distance is becoming a factor of
diminishing interest in creating and maintaining economic,
political and socio-cultural relations. Along with the defeat of
1 Quoted by Noel Sullivan, Fascism (London: Dent and Sons, 1983), 92
2 See Abraham Joshua Heschel Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity;
essays edited by Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1996, p. 294)
Myth of Globalization 11
distance, a decoupling of time and space occurs; time and space
are not bound together, but function separately. Boundaries
between domestic and global matters increasingly becoming
blurred; global events started to touch and shape our
consciousness and our orientation of life. A growing sense of
world-wide connectedness becomes a reality. This feeling has
been assisted by the growth of information technologies.
2. End of geography goaded radical transformation of
all structures and systems that occupy the social space
[including family, community, educational institutions and
political organizations]. When the priorities of life changes, as a
sequence, social relations will undergo radical changes. These
changes, among others, includes the changes in habits,
objectives of life, tastes [in food, cloth, transport, recreation..]
and aesthetics in general.
These myths are far from the truth. But they succeeded
in creating an illusion that market helps to make ―world
flat‖[reifying the prophecy of John the Baptist]. The term
globalization was a carefully constructed to fanaticize the world
with this illusion of togetherness. At the end of Gulf War in
1991, US administration echoed that history is in the threshold
of the advent of a ―New World Order‖.3 The ―New World
Order‖ theory was to gather momentum to the emergence of a
mono-polar world order at the [so-called] end of the fictitious
cold war. End of cold war also marked the witness of loosing
teeth for all other power-blocks including the non-aligned
movement in the international arena. End of counter-power
offers the mono-polar power a free space for a uninterrupted free
ride over the world. Further, the Gulf War of 1991 demonstrated
the cutting edge of the indomitable gun power that the dominant
power could unleash at any potential challengers. Nevertheless,
the term ―New World Order‖ failed to invoke imagination
among the people around the world. Because of its rather insipid
3 For a detailed discussion refer Adrian Salbuchi ―The World's Mastermind:
The Hidden Face of Globalization: A view from Argentina‖ Global
Research, December 2, 2006
12 theologies and cultures
nature, the term ―New World Order‖ was withdrawn from
public consumption and a dynamic, seemingly neutral and
morally sounding term ―globalization‖ was replaced. This new
term is armed with the power to create an illusion of a global
village, with a discourse on the defeat of distance as the
character of the emerging new world order.
However, history of recent times has proved that the
opposite is true. Instead of creating mutual understanding based
on peace and justice, war and violence have become the rule of
the time. There is nothing to be surprised about this
development since its inherent logic is meant to create unequal
distribution of power and resources. People are increasingly
becoming alienated from one another. The ―other‖ has become a
problem. And as a result the language and practice of war has
become normative.
To strength the myth of globalization, the myth industry
further suggests that globalization is a historical [natural]
process, achieved through the innovative growth of science and
technology.‖ [IMF web-page]. Besides, this myth claims that the
recent surge of technology, especially information technology is
the contribution of globalization.4 Globalization thus is a moral
process, an expression of the collective will of people to achieve
moral good of all. Critique of globalization is not received with
sympathetic listening, because such critique according the
prevailing view is a challenge to the moral imperatives of a
society that seeks freedom from ignorance through the
development of science and technology. The so-called ―success
stories‖ of few countries including China and India and the
carefully constructed ―economic predictions‖ such as ―if the
policies towards the integration of the economies of China and
4 Technological development is only an expression of the creativity of
people. The development of civilization from Stone Age to the present state
of science and technology demonstrate this fact. However, the change now is
that technology has brought under the premise of capital. Such control has
stifled the growth of technology in areas related to human life and redirected
it as an instrument for capital to grow.
Myth of Globalization 13
India remain uninterrupted, within 25 years the combined GDP
would exceed the group of seven wealthy nations‖5 reinforce
this myth. Fabrication of this conscious lie helped to create the
rationale for the invasion of market in the collective and private
life of the people around the world. Technology is not a reason
but a means of legitimation for the dominance of globalization.
Dictatorship of Capital
A closer look at the economic process however provides
a different view of the present process. In a book published long
before the advent of the present phase of globalization Paul
Sweezy and Paul Baran observed that there are two dangers in
the emerging world economic structure: (a) development of
giant corporations with virtual control of global production,
replacing small and medium size producers; (b) emergence of
transnational finance capital which frees itself from any social
responsibility and function within the logic of its expansion6.
The early years of the twentieth century witnessed the growth of
giant corporations consolidating the economic forces in the
former colonial nations, otherwise euphemistically termed as the
developed nations. The robbery and transfer of enormous
resources from the former colonies by colonial powers during
the long period of colonial rule abetted the growth of these
corporations. The uneven distribution of the loot within the
colonial economies helped the concentration of surplus in few
hands and eventually metamorphosed into a handful of
corporations controlling a vast array of production relations.
This constituted, in the former colonial nations, a radical
departure from the economic system of the nineteenth century,
5 James D. Wolfensohn [former President of World Bank] ―West must
prepare for Chinese, Indian dominance‖ 2006 Wallace Wurth Memorial
Lecture at the University of New South Wales, Sidney, The Hindu,
November 25, 2006 6 Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American
Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966)
14 theologies and cultures
in which the economy had been mostly made up of small,
family-based firms. Monopoly over production and markets
enjoyed by these giant corporations, what Sweezy and Baran
called as oligopolies, helped them to thwart any threat of
competition in the market space [in pricing or product selection]
and whereby concentrated on the surplus growth through cost
reduction and different sales techniques. When production was
made as a mega activity, the objective of production was
reconstructed from consumption to market. Needs of
consumption has no role in deciding the nature and volume of
production. Production freed itself from the social bondage of
need of consumption.
Corporate control over production cohabited with the
growth of a market for securities, shares and currencies. The
text book economics suggests that the role of stocks and shares
is to pool the savings for more productive investments.
However, very seldom is it a reality. Capital circulated in the
financial market has very little to do with production or trade.
―The development of a massive and sophisticated system of
finance associated with corporate finance and banking, centered
on the stock market was a product of the desire of investors to
limit their risk associated with investment within production by
the holding of ―paper‖ claims to wealth. Such paper claims were
liquid and easily transferable, and thus separate from the ―real‖
assets that resided with the corporation.‖7
Hardly two percent of transferable liquid capital
exchanged in the global financial market accounts to production,
distribution, and services.8 Capital in speculative form travels
from one place to another in a matter of seconds to gather the
already created surplus in respective countries. It has the
function of a big broom, a big dirty broom, not gathering dirt,
but sucking blood of the innocent producers around the world.
7 John Bellamy Foster ―Monopoly-Finance Capital‖ Monthly Review, Vol.
58, No. 7, December 2006 8 Kavaljit Singh Globalization of Finance (Delhi: Madhyam Books, 1998)
Myth of Globalization 15
It avoids people and products yet takes away the surplus that
people generate through hard labour in a matter of seconds.
Growth of information technology is accelerated by the
ever expanding need of the speculative capital. Speed of the
Information technology remains perpetually unsatisfied since
the volatile nature of the speculative capital is so explosive. A
simple mistake within a fraction of seconds could cost a fortune
for those who create wealth from this global casino of
speculative capital market. Information technology thus is in the
search for renewing and modernizing itself to satisfy the
interminable urge of the speculative finance capital to expand.
Technology is at the service of capital, but used as a means to
gain legitimation to the rule of finance capital.9
Wealth is now created in the speculative market alone.
And massive volume of wealth is formed within a short span of
time in the fluid space of speculative market alone. Those who
failed to participate in the speculative capital remain
marginalized from the world of wealth. The reality of the matter
is that the huge majority of the people have no participation in
the speculative market and their non-participation in the
value/wealth creating speculative domain keeps them in the state
of poverty.
The market of speculative capital has defeated all the
given economic theories. It was traditionally considered that,
value was created through a complex interaction between varied
forms of raw material, capital and labour. Since raw material
and capital is fixed, the role of labour in the creation of value
was hailed as cardinal. Invalidating this traditional view,
transnational capital creates value from nothing, from the void
[considered as the exclusive domain of God]. Living labour lost
its capacity to create value, only money does. Thus living
labour became redundant, expendable. Living labour is seen as
9 It is important to note that technological development in the last few years
are restricted only in few areas tied up with the growth of capital. In the
areas that affect the life of the majority, technology remains stagnant.
16 theologies and cultures
a problem. While capital is an asset, or a cause for celebration,
labour is viewed as a curse, a source for distress.
Capital [or mammon] is deified and living labor [the true
image of the divine] is demonized.
The deified capital entrusted with the ability for absolute
domination over the prevailing social modes of production, in
reality, leads to a total subsumption of all realities of life. The
mechanism of globalization assists ‗C‘apital to extend the
subsumption to include nature and people in every corner of the
globe to its logic and interest. And this process coincides with
the interiorization of the outside. Unlike the old colonial
expansion where empire went to the out side, now the outside is
interiorized in the empire.
On the ethical level there are two ramifications for the
total subsumption of the logic of life to the logic of capital. (a)
Through the total subsumption, capital has become an
ontological expression of the imminent materialism in human
consciousness. As part of this scenario a mathematical science
and rationality has taken hold as the only logical explanation of
truth. Truth and value are forced to seek empirical explanation.
Meaning that to be counted as valuable it should be within the
realm of quantifiable things, and should be assessed within the
rubrics of measurable standards.
That means, what is rational is those realities which have
an objective existence. Anything outside the nature of object or
matter is not rational. The changes in the concept of and the
worship to the Divine accounts this imperative suggested by the
logic of capital. Countable variables alone are used to iterate the
power and relevance of the Divine.
(b) Secondly, total subsumption has made the law of
capital a universal principle. Interest of Capital becomes
synonymous with general interest, epitomizing the interest of the
state and the interest of individuals. All forms of interest find
their ultimate justification in the interest of capital. State and
other social formations, which certainly include the academy
and the church, are transformed themselves as an executive or
Myth of Globalization 17
cultural agency of capital and assist it to reaffirm its logic as the
only and absolute universal truth.
Ramifications of these changes are many. One may
argue that, everything that touches human life, from spirituality
to sexuality is controlled and changed by the logic of capital.
Organization of social and political life certainly needs more
systematic enquiry. However, we attempt to locate the
ramification of the subsumption of capital in three areas of life,
namely, agriculture, environment and migrant labour.
Agriculture
When agriculture was subsumed under the rule of
capital, agriculture, like wealth, was removed from its social
responsibility to contribute towards the reproduction of life.
Wealth and resources are detached from the need to sustain life.
Wealth freed itself from the having to be committed to a purpose
outside of its own urge to grow. Life is not a reason for
production.
Capital in accordance with support of patriarchal social
relations has created a hierarchy in which production of
commodities assumes a higher status than the reproduction of
life, with the support of patriarchal social relations. Production
that sustains life is not valuable, at times, considered as an
obligation or a responsibility, while the industrial productions
for market infer value. In the market mediated hierarchy, value
is reduced to countable terms, and thus production for money
only qualifies for being considered as valuable. While child
birth in a normal family relationship invites disdain, [a burden
for the economy and environment] in the ―value‖ driven market
relations, ―rent-a-womb‖ is celebrated as a major breakthrough
in production relations.
Agricultural production lost its spiritual strength in the
creation of a hierarchy. All engagements orientated towards the
sustenance of life are ―devalued.‖ Child birth and mothering
unfortunately assume no quantifiable value in the market
18 theologies and cultures
dynamics, though the ―living labor‖ is contributed to the
production line through this supposedly value-less ―obligation‖
of women. Agricultural production is not different. Food
production for the sustenance of life usurps no value, while
productions of cash crop for market, or food crop by agri-
business companies for global market command value. In other
words, production for life invokes derision, production for
market, where capital exchange is promoted earns respect.
Dominance of a few agri-business corporations,
including the tobacco giant Phillips Morris, Monsanto and
others has turned the food needs of people into gamble for
profit. Thorough their control over seeds, fertilizer, production
and market, small farmers have been eliminated from the ability
to produce. As a result we are left with what Vandana Shiva
called as genocide of farmers, the suicide of 150,000 farmers in
a decade.10
The dominance of corporation on agriculture has
functioned as a countervailing force against the interest of
farmers and rural population in developing food security. Nation
states are not an exception in this respect. They are deprived of
their right to ensure food security to their own population. Under
the rubrics of the international regulations signed at the interest
of the corporations, nation states has converted itself to a
policing agency to provide protection to the transnational capital
and the production facilities of the transnational corporations.
Concepts such as self-determination, democracy, sovereignty
have become meaningless myths. Decisions regarding the life of
the people, what to eat, how to eat, how to produce, and other
fundamental issues of life are made by profit hungry corporate
heads of the global corporations.
People and nations are devoid of the right to self-
determination by having them to believe that corporations are
the real saviors of the world providing necessary jobs, bringing
10
Interview with Amy Goodman, ―Micro-credit: Solution to Poverty or False
'Compassionate Capitalism?‖ Democracy now, December 13, 2006.
Myth of Globalization 19
capital and technology, beside the assumed responsibility to feed
the world population. Our Economic reality however informs us
that when profit alone functions as the reason for production,
maintenance of life will be excluded from being an objective.
The poor are not the only victims of this process. The
promotion of genetically modified food, cloned meat and milk
which scientists have warned to have potential harm to the
health of the people, points to the fact that life in general is in
the shadow of calamity.
The poor and the marginalized of course bear the major
neglect. Since the corporations function with the sole objective
of increasing their profit margin, their production is only aimed
at those who have the ability to purchase, and in goods that
bring the highest margin of profit. The poor and their needs
never became a reason for production. Albeit the fact that
markets in every corner of the world is flooded with all types of
food, poverty death are increasing unabated due to this
dynamics of profit.
Further, being devoid of the ability to be self-sufficient,
farmers are pushed out of their domain of agriculture and left in
the mercy of seeking means for life as daily wage laborers. As a
result, poverty has increased. Alienation of peasants from the
process of production prods us to the painful stories of poverty
related deaths in the midst of abundance.
Along with these changes the recent innovations in
genetic manipulation of food have aggravated the problem of the
alienation of peasants from agriculture. It has changed the basic
character of agriculture and procured the entire process in the
hand of corporations. However, it also reiterates the fact that
life is no longer the primary concern for production.
Environment
The World Wildlife Fund [WWF] conservation group
has recently warned that humans are stripping nature at an
unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural
20 theologies and cultures
resources every year by 2050 on current trends.
‖Populations of many species, from fish to mammals, had
fallen by about a third from 1970 to 2003 largely because of
human threats such as pollution, clearing of forests and over-
fishing. For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's
ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable
and we cannot afford to continue down this path. If everyone
around the world lived as those in America, we would need
five planets to support us."11
Although the attempt of stripping nature of its life and
converting it to be a means for human satisfaction has a long
history, under the rules of capital, the process of destruction
becomes exacerbated. The ideology of modernity that the logic
of capital used for legitimation suggests that ―growth‖ is the
foundation of development and prosperity. Growth is the
soteriological principle of modernity. As a one-for-all cure to all
the problems in society, from malnutrition to illiteracy to female
infanticide, to poor infrastructural facilities, growth is promoted
as the only way towards redemption. Unending growth, except
in the category of population is seen as normative. This is the
creation of an economic logic that had tried to define ‗under-
development‘ as the source of all malice in society. The only
panacea for a better, healthy society lies in its ability to counter
under-development. The attempt to turn the tide of under-
development led to the logic of growth. Further, ‗growth‘
received moral support when Rostow‘s theory of modernity
identified a high consumption society as the pinnacle for
modernity. It implies that communities that consume less and
lead a simple life are relatively primitive while communities and
people who maintain an unending thirst for consumption is
11 Ben Blanchard ―Humans Living Far Beyond Planet's Means‖ Reuters, 25
October, 2006
Myth of Globalization 21
qualified to be respected as modern. This perverted morality of
modernity allows the devouring of the planets own children.12
The logic of capital has also placed social subjectivity to
commodities. People gain subjectivity only by consuming
commodities which assume social status [homo consumptors]. It
is therefore a rat race for people to consume, and consume in
order to gain subjectivity. Consumption is heaven.
Further it assumed that satisfaction of life is attained by
ones proximity to commodities and money. Things and money
alone has the ability to bring happiness and meaning in life.
Therefore the very foundation of the being is attached to the
proximity to commodity and money.
This erroneous theory jeopardizes the carrying capacity
of the earth. This also goes with our theories of redemption. the
Enlightenment tradition holds the assumption that we have a
mandate to save the world. The Saving act is not possible
without destruction. A sacrificial destruction is imperative for
salvation. In recent terms, capital has developed new
terminologies such as collateral damage, the necessary
dislocation for growth and many others to justify sacrifice.
However the moral dilemma now is that the earth is destined to
be sacrificed for the growth of capital, without realizing that ‗we
are not owners of it but only borrowed the earth from our future
generations‘. The crisis is a deep spiritual crisis, because, as
Rasmussen reminds us, the environment is an expression of us.
―We are made of it; we eat, drink, and breathe it. And someday,
when dying day comes, we will each return the favor and begin
our role as a long slow meal for a million little critters. Earth is
bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.‖13
In the sublime view of religions, the nexus of people,
land and the divine was the pivot in which order is maintained.
12
Larry Rasmussen Earth Community Earth Ethics (New York: Orbis Books,
1996), 8 13
Ibid. p. xii
22 theologies and cultures
Disruption of this nexus was the disruption of the very meaning
of life.14
Disposable Labour
The third issue that invites critical attention is the life
and struggles of the migrant labour. There are two opposite
concerns regarding the role of migrant labour under
globalization. Without achieving total freedom of mobility for
labour, the market remains truncated. Commodities and capital
have achieved total freedom with the ability to enter and exit
anywhere as it wishes. But labour is under strict control. Walls,
not as a metaphor, but as a physical reality are constructed to
prevent labour movement. With the lack of freedom in mobility
of labour, free market is a myth.
But on the other hand, the number of migrant labourers
is increasing unabated. This contradictory reality exists due to a
perennial struggle for autonomy between capital and labour. To
maximize profit, autonomy of capital over all other economic
forces is considered to be an imperative in neo-liberal economic
theory of globalization. The two forces that demonstrate a threat
to the autonomy of capital are the national governments and the
unionized workers. IMF policies supervised effectively to limit,
or to eliminate state power to govern economic variables.
Adrian Salbuchi‘s definition of globalization reiterates this
point. He observed that ―globalization can be defined as the
ideology that identifies the Sovereign Nation-State as its key
enemy, basically because the State's main function is (or should
be) to prioritize the interests of the Many - i.e., "the People" -
over the interests of the Few. Accordingly, the forces of
globalization seek to weaken, dissolve and eventually destroy
the very foundations of the Nation-State as a basic social
institution, in order to replace it with new supra-national
worldwide social, political, economic, financial and military
14
Jeremiah 23:10
Myth of Globalization 23
management structures. Such structures tie in with the political
objectives and economic interests of a small number of highly
concentrated and very powerful groups and organizations which
today drive and steer the globalization process in a very specific
direction.‖15
To debilitate the autonomy of labour, two approaches
appear to be employed; (i) creating international conditions to
ensure mobility of capital [and industries] to any corners of the
world. If labour claims autonomy over capital, industries keep
their rights and ability to move to another location, possibly in
another country. The freedom of mobility enjoyed by the owners
of capital is a threat to the very existence of labour. And (ii) by
promoting (non-unionizable) aliens to flock into the national
labour market. These two measures helped to weaken the power
of the unionized workers and granted total autonomy for capital
over the entire economic process. The stories of the defeat of the
labour struggle from Detroit to Seoul to Mumbai and Sao Paulo
reiterate this fact.
As a strategy, the flocking of migrant workers is
promoted; they are cheap, but more importantly, their status as
aliens or their lack of membership among the citizens of
respective countries where they are situated, deprives them of
any claims of autonomy and basic rights. Since citizenship is a
criterion for the right of certain privileges, the prevention of
native workers who enjoy citizenship rights from the work place
by promoting alien workers is a preemptive strategy of the
capital to maintain its autonomy over the workers. To maintain
this balance, migration is promoted with a political design to
keep the aliens as aliens and strangers for their entire life.16
From the history of slavery onwards, capital learned that
while vulnerability of labour increases, consequently the power
and autonomy of capital also increases. The logic of
15
Adrian Salbuchi ―The World's Mastermind: The Hidden Face of
Globalization: A view from Argentina‖ Global Research, December 2, 2006 16
Korans in Japan, for example, remain as aliens for generations without
proper rights offered to the citizens.
24 theologies and cultures
transporting labour to the colonies and to the newly invaded
countries when local labour was abundant in the new [invaded]
settlements and in the colonies lies in the urge for colonial
capital to establish autonomy. The uprooted labour abetted
colonial masters to maintain total control over production and
resources. At the present time, the lack of any legal framework
to protect the migrants helps the capitalist production
relationship to keep labour as a totally dependent and
subservient lot who assume that their lives are depended upon
the goodwill and generosity of their masters. The rule of the
game of survival dictates that they shall compete with each other
to express their total and unflinching loyalty to their capitalist
masters.
Under the present conditions of globalization, labour has
become disposable, like the disposable plastic cups, syringes
and ball point pens, subjected to the principle of ―use and throw
away‖. Migrant labour corresponds well to this status of ―use
and throw away‖ in its fuller sense. The disposable nature of
labour becomes more evident during the financial crisis of 1997-
98. Migrants were thrown out from those countries which
experienced the brunt of the financial crisis. However, use-value
returned to the ―disposable things‖ when the crisis started to
wane.
Though labour is only a part of the human activity, the
act of transforming labour as a disposable commodity equals the
disposable-commodification of human beings. Our theological
consciousness may suggest that it is God who is made
disposable under globalization, since in the face of the labourer
we find the face of God, and furthermore, through the faculty of
labour people becomes co-creators with the Divine. Borrowing
the phrase of Michael Moore, we live in a fictitious world. By
converting human beings - the very point of incarnation where
the Divine revealed herself/himself in history – to a disposable
commodity, the moral foundations of our world become
fictitious. We live a lie.
Myth of Globalization 25
The Empire
The subsumption of the logic of life to the logic of
Capital however has far-reaching ramifications in society. It is
argued convincingly by critical economists that rule of capital is
incompatible with the notion of universality in any meaningful
sense of that word. Universality and globalization are two
different concepts, therefore reaching universality within the
globalization logic is simply a myth.
That is because the decisive nature of the rule of capital
is the vertical ordering of society and people. Whatever freedom
capital and market offers in relation to horizontal social
relations, [for example the claim that in the market place the
race or nationality of a person is not sought before supplying
commodities], will be negated by the dominant vertical ordering
of social relations.17
This is true on the global scale as well as in
the regional and local categories. Moreover, the expansion and
rule of capital has created enclaves of capital and many ghettos
of poverty, reminding us of the observation of Samir Amin, ―the
blocked capitalism of the periphery‖. There is no longer any
promise for the blocked capitalisms of the underdeveloped
world as a whole to ―take-off‖ and ―catch-up‖ economically
with the auto-centric and advanced capitalist countries. The
living conditions of the vast majority of people in the blocked
capitalisms are declining, and as a consequence suicide deaths
among the traditional communities are escalating in the past few
years.18
The Creation of ghettos of poverty along side the
enclaves of richness creates a ―jungle-like net work‖ of
contradictions ―that can only be more or less successfully
managed for some time but never definitively overcome‖19
Under the market dynamics, capital has shown its ―destructive
17
István Mészáros, Socialism or Barbarism: From the “American Century”
to the Crossroads, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002). 18
see P. Sainath ―Where Stomachaches are Terminal‖ in The Hindu, Sunday
April 29, 2001 19
István Mészáros, op. cited.
26 theologies and cultures
uncontrollability‖— its destruction of previous social relations
and its inability to put anything sustainable in their place.
The Emergence of an empire is to be identified in this
context. Within the logic of capital the contradictions could
never to be amicably resolved, and thus the need for managing
contradiction increases. The so called war on terror indeed
provided legitimacy for the empire to violently engage in the act
of managing the contradictions. Besides, the war offered the
Empire the right to expand its domain to all the corners of the
world.
The concept of war comes with an offer of redemption.
The promoters of war have never failed to remind us that the
war alone has the ability to redeem good people from the evil
ones. War is in service of peace and the language of war is the
language of peace. The absurdity sometime goes to the extent of
declaring that the massacre of people is to ensure the safety of
those being killed. Unashamingly these proponents argue that
―throughout human history, empires have promoted both peace
and prosperity. This is because their Pax has fostered the order
required for any social life to exist in an otherwise anarchical
international society of states. This Pax has also engendered
prosperity through what is today labeled "globalization," linking
areas of disparate resource endowments into a common
economic space. The collapse of empires has led both to the
destruction of prosperity and the breeding of disorder….For
world stability, order, and economic growth, US-Lead
globalization, [to read perpetual war against common people] is
the only viable course‖20
Apartheid of resources
Much political literacy is not needed to identify that the primary
objective of war is to loot the people of their resources. This was
20
Deepak Lal ―An Imperial Denial‖ Yale Global January 6, 2005
Myth of Globalization 27
the objective of the war almost entirely throughout history
dating back from the ancient period.
The results are obvious from the Helsinki report
published on December 5, 2006. It observed that the logic of
capital helped 1% of the richest people in the world to own 40%
of the planet‘s wealth.21
However, an alternate report suggested
that if wealth in the speculative capital is also properly
accounted for, then the sum total of the wealth of 1% of the
global rich comes to 80% of the global wealth.22
Wealth at the
present time is an abstraction, an abstraction that remains as an
idea in the level of papers and bonds and securities. However,
the symbiosis between the financial [abstract] capital and the
transnational corporations provides a potential edge for the
owners of the capital to realize their capital as real resources; as
land, water sources, minerals and others. Even space is not a
limit for the investment hungry owners of finance capital. This
threat is fast becoming a treacherous reality and people are
being evicted from natural resources, from their access to water,
to land and to life giving systems of nature. The reality is the
growing apartheid of resources. Thus the struggle against
globalization is the struggle to reverse this practice of apartheid
and to re-establish an ‗earth based democracy‘ that ensures
equal participation of all in the bounties of nature.
The logic of capital has discarded all discourse on ethics
as a counter-productive process to growth and prosperity. To
avoid ethical considerations, the logic of capital argues that de-
embedding economic relations from societal and religious
values is necessary for creating prosperity. The independence of
the market from any moral and ethical critique will dictate its
level of freedom. Religion and faith, it was argued, needs to be
kept away from people‘s participation in economic activity. Or
21
―World's richest 1% own 40% of all wealth, UN report discovers‖
Guardian, December 6, 2006. 22
Vandana Shiva in an interview with Amy Goodman of ―Democracynow‖
on 13 December 2006.
28 theologies and cultures
simply reiterated, religion and faith need not have to interfere
how people participate in economic, political and cultural life.
The demand for the independence of economics from
faith also eradicates the concept of sociality of our being from
the public consciousness. The personal has replaced the public
and as a consequence the problem of the self has become the
most serious concern. In this process religion has reduced to a
private matter of the private individual to be perused in the
privacy of their self.
Exteriority of the Divine from the collective life is the
immediate result of the process of de-embedding that which
capital is promoting.
Re-embedding economic systems into societal values
and ethics is an immediate challenge that people face now. A
Jewish social critique Michael Learner advises that society
needs to embark a new politics, a politics of meaning; politics of
meaning where society attempts to strengthen the face of God in
the face of the people around us.23
The deformed faces around
us - deformed by poverty, structural violence, racial, gender or
class discrimination - reminds us of a deformed God. Politics of
meaning is to rediscover the divine in history, divine around us.
And that may be our greatest challenge yet.
23 Michael Lerner, The politics of Meaning (New York: Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company, 1996) p. 4
theologies and cultures,Vol.3, No.2
December 2006, pp. 29-53
Embodying Climate Change:
Biogeochemical Limits to Trade and the
Contradictions of Liberalism
Michael S Northcott1
iberalism as summarised by John Rawls in his
Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism has one
defining characteristic which may be traced back through Adam
Smith, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and this is the division
of labour that Hobbes, Locke and Smith erected, and that Rawls
sustains, between the individual and the body politic. From
Hobbes to Rawls the individual is described as an autonomous
creature of her own making who is guided by desires and
projects which are the outcomes of her own self-construction.
The role of the body politic is not so much to create the
conditions for virtuous individuals to develop and flourish as to
impose minimal conditions of order, such that for example
1 Dr. Michael Northcott is a Reader in Christian Ethics at New College,
University of Edinburgh. Northcott is a leading authority in Environmental
Ethics and has written various books including Environmental and Christian
Ethics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), Urban Theology: A
Reader (London: Cassell, 1988), Life After Debt: Christianity and Global
Justice (London: SPCK, 1999), An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic
Religion and American Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004) and A Moral
Climate? The Ethics of Global Warming (forthcoming- 2007)
L
30 theologies and cultures
property rights are respected, on the differing desires and
sometimes competing projects that individuals construct. 2 In
effect liberalism conceives of desire in terms of a market
analogy. The function of the body politic is to sustain a realm of
relatively unconstrained interaction where minimal conditions
for civil peace and social order are maintained. The modern
condition of liberty is one in which individuals are not
constrained in their pursuit of their desires by the needs of others
who are less successful than they in pursuing and achieving their
desires and projects: the market will act to direct individual
desires towards a collective state in which all achieve greater
utility. The body politic is left with the task of siphoning off a
portion of market goods to enable the construction of public
institutions in which property rights are respected, and where
necessary defended, and the minimal conditions of bodily life
are granted to those who are less successful in pursuing their
own projects of self construction. This division of labour
between individual desiring agents and the body politic means
that for liberalism, provided the body politic functions
minimally to sustain the conditions for respect of individuals
and property, individuals do not themselves have to pursue
justice in their own projects; they can defer the moral
requirement of the pursuit of the common good to the invisible
hand of the market, and to the public institutions that, via
taxation, their activities fund and sustain.3
This division of labour between individuals and the body
politic in liberal political theory, and in the economic and
2 For a critique of Rawls along these lines see further L. Murphy, ‘Institutions and the
demands of justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs (Fall) 27 (4), pp. 251 – 291. 3 Jon Garthoff defends this Rawlsian division of labour in his essay ‘Zarathrustra’s
dilemma and the embodiment of morality’, Philosophical Studies 117, (2004) pp.
259 – 274: Garthoff’s thesis is that social institutions which, for example, address the
needs of the homeless, are the collective embodiment of morality such that individuals
are able to pursue their own goods without directly intervening on behalf of the
homeless. On this view morality conceived in terms of institutional embodiment
sustains the duality between the autonomous desiring individual – who is conceived
as essentially disembodied – and the collective pursuit of a minimal degree of justice
in the body politic.
Embodying Climate Change 31
political arrangements of the modern nation state and the market,
was first decisively criticised by Leo Strauss in the 1960s in
Chicago. For Strauss the problem with liberalism was the idea
that it was possible to construct a good society through
institutions and procedures while not requiring the individuals
within it to be good. Instead of this Strauss proposed a revised
Aristotelianism in which intelligent and wealthy individuals
need again to be instructed in the virtues so that they can act out
of their own superior accomplishments and largesse to better the
condition of the poor with the beneficial corollary that both
elites and masses might then be freed from the undue constraints,
and moral hazards of an over-weaning and interventionist nation
state.4
Strauss’s neo-Aristotelian critique has been highly
influential among Anglo-American politicians. There are clear
echoes of Strauss in the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism
first mobilised by Margaret Thatcher in Britain in the 1970s, and
again by George W. Bush since 2002.5 Both advanced tax-
reduction and avoidance strategies for the rich – reducing the
numbers of tax inspectors as well as cutting wealth taxes – while
reducing welfare for the poorest on the basis that compassionate
individuals and the charities and churches they support are
putatively better able to respond to the needs of their poor
neighbours than the bureaucrats or public servants of the nation
state. Added to this account of the compassion of the wealthy,
famously advanced by Margaret Thatcher in her exegesis of the
parable of the Good Samaritan in a speech to the General
Assembly of the Church of Scotland,6 is a critique of welfare
and the nation state whose largesse to the less fortunate is said to
be morally hazardous because it rewards laziness and other vices
among the poor while at the same time, because of the taxation
4 Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995). 5 See further Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion
and American Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 80 – 84. 6 See further Michael Northcott, ‘The Parable of the Talents and the Economy of the
Gift’, Theology, 107 (2004), pp. 241 – 249.
32 theologies and cultures
required to sustain it, undermining the motivation of the wealthy
to create wealth.
The critique of the nation state as morally hazardous
when it tries to embody morality in institutions that promote
equity and justice has been taken up not just by political leaders
from the right but by economists and others who advocate
economic globalization. In this project the nation state is said to
take a back seat while economic actors under the new libertarian
conditions of international trade, guided by international
institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, become
principal drivers of increases in human welfare. Against the
consistent critique of the globalisation project from civil society
groups, feminists, philosophers and theologians, publicly
embodied in the form of the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign
around the G8 meeting in Scotland in June 2005, the WTO, the
European Commission, and the American Federal Government,
as well as economic corporations and most corporately owned
media, continue to press on wealthy and poor countries alike the
instrument of borderless international trade as the principal
means of achieving progress in prosperity and welfare for rich
and poor alike in the twenty-first century. In the globalization
project the division of labour between individual actors and the
body politic reaches a new extreme of alienation where the
principal function of the body politic is no longer to ameliorate
market failures so much as to promote the invasiveness of the
market even into those areas of human life where in the past
public institutions have been constructed to resolve market
failures. This is what the Private Finance Initiative, sometimes
called ‘Public Private Partnership’, represents in Britain. Its
international form is the larger project of privatisation and trade
in services under which the intention is that everything from
education and health care to energy and water utilities are
ultimately run on the market model of private provision and user
chargers.
Given the extreme libertarian outcomes of the Straussian
critique of liberalism it would appear that this critique was in
Embodying Climate Change 33
some respects crucially flawed even on its own elitist terms.
There is little evidence that the new more extreme conditions of
liberty for capital and property owners have actually produced a
social condition in which individual morality has clearly
advanced in terms of its impact in ameliorating social ills. On
the contrary both Britain and America, the two societies which
more than any other have embraced the Straussian critique of
liberal social contract approaches, have suffered dramatic
increases in crime and disorder in the last thirty years. Many
town and city centres in England in the present decade are
characterised by mass drunkenness and disorder at night, while
in the United States many inner city areas are no-go areas even
for the police at certain times of night. Far from liberating
individuals to behave more morally, the increasing pursuit of
market solutions to social ills, for example the unfettered growth
of alcoholic beverage and entertainment venues as means to
regenerate city centres in Britain,7 has produced a situation in
which millions are deprived of civil peace and social order on
their own streets. Though he cannot see it, what Tony Blair
identified at the General Election in Britain in 2005 as a crisis of
‘respect’ has deep roots in the libertarian project of freeing
individual actors – consumers and corporations – from social
constraints which his government, like Thatcher’s, has done so
much to advance.
In the midst of this ideological and political condition of
late liberal capitalism emerges the spectre of anthropogenic
climate change. Sea level rises of 20 centimetres are the most
visible sign of the effects of global warming but predicted sea
level rises from polar ice melt range from 1 to 7 metres.8 But
7 I am grateful to a conversation with Philip Blond for this insight on the social origins
of the culture of wanton excess that currently ails the British body politic. 8 The International Panel on Climate Change estimates a 1 metre sea level
rise by the end of the twenty-first century but they assume that Greenland and
the Antarctic ice shelf will remain largely intact; IPCC, Synthesis Report
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). New evidence reveals that
Greenland glaciers are moving, and melting, much faster than the IPCC
34 theologies and cultures
alongside sea level rises, changes in land and ocean
temperatures are producing dramatic effects in terms of the
movement of species, and the spread of deserts. In 2005 locusts
were for the first time in recorded history breeding in Southern
France, while temperatures in the heavily populated state of
Orissa in the Indian sub-continent now regularly exceed 40
degrees centigrade.9 Climate change challenges the foundations
of liberal political economy, and in particular the liberal division
of labour between the amoral desiring individual and social
institutions which embody and promote the common good,
because it suggests that under conditions where individual
consumers and corporations maximise their preferences with the
minimum of moral constraints the long-term health and stability
of the planet and all its inhabitants are threatened. It should not
surprise us then that Straussian influenced globalizers, including
American Senators and Presidents as well as Australian and
British politicians, have opposed government-led efforts to
conserve energy and have for many years denied or ignored the
scientific evidence for climate change: climate change more than
any other modern phenomenon represents a radical challenge to
political liberalism, and to its neo-liberal recasting in the guise
of the ‘free’ market, globalization, and the minimalist state.
The collective pursuit of the project of economic growth
through unfettered consumption has been advanced on the basis
of the release of seemingly limitless quantities of energy from
the earth’s crust, first in the form of coal to fuel the earliest
steam-driven machines of the industrial revolution, and latterly
oil to fuel internal combustion engines, electricity generators
and jet engines. These fossil fuels represent the prehistoric
warmth of the sun laid down as carboniferous biomass in the
earth’s crust as plants and sea creatures turned this energy into
oxygen and carbon in the course of geological time. Until the
discovery of anthropogenic climate change there appeared to be
predicts: Steve Connor, ‘Melting Greenland Glacier May Hasten Sea Level
Rise’, The Independent, July 25th
2005. 9 ‘Orissa Heat Wave: Death Toll to Rise’, Deccan Herald, June 19
th 2005.
Embodying Climate Change 35
no biophysical limits to the amount of stored energy that could
be released into the earth’s atmosphere and hence to the size of
the energy-driven human economy.10 But with a current net
annual output of 7 billion tons of carbon per annum into the
atmosphere, the modern human economy is seriously exceeding
the capacity of atmosphere, forests, oceans and soils to absorb
its energy emissions. The oceans are already replete with the
excess carbon output of the industrial era which they have taken
up in the last 100 years11 and as they are unable to absorb CO2
at the same rate, fossil fuel emissions now increasingly end up
in the upper atmosphere, enhancing the greenhouse effect and
driving up oceanic and air temperatures and thus fuelling more
extreme weather events and ice melts of a kind never before
experienced in the 15,000 year span of the present Holocene era.
Climate extremes were common before the Holocene era and it
was precisely the new stability of CO2 levels, and hence of
relatively stable land and ocean temperatures, which enabled the
development of human agriculture and cities, and the dramatic
expansion of human numbers, in the present geological era.12
Climate change shakes the foundations of liberalism
because it posits that the sum total of the effects of the
individual actions of consumers and corporations acting freely
in their own interests in the long term have deleterious effects on
the planet which the minimalist body politic, with its
unwillingness to regulate capital flows and market trades, is
unable to mitigate. In other words the division of labour between
self-interested individuals and corporations and the limited
10 On the discovery of global warming see Spencer R. Weart, ‘The discovery of
the risk of global warming’ Physics Today, 50 (1997), pp. 34 – 40. 11 CO2 persists for just over 100 years in the atmosphere and oceans and so excess
CO2 produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the onset of the industrial
revolution is no longer chemically present in the earth’s atmosphere, though some of
it will have been taken up by forests and soils in more bio-stable, and hence longer
lasting, forms. 12
See further Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores,
Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2000).
36 theologies and cultures
moral constraints and collective ends of liberalism’s public
institutions, which individuals contract to sustain through their
taxes, is in conflict with the common good of all beings. The
alleged gains of liberty represented by the lifting of moral
constraints on avarice, greed, trade, and wealth accumulation are
more than offset by the harms that the exercise of these liberties
are visiting on those in the poorer sub-tropical and tropical
regions of Africa and South Asia who are already experiencing
the deleterious effects of climate change in terms of long term
drought, exceptional heat-waves, and reductions in crop
production.
Climate change represents a challenge not only to
energy-led consumerism and unfettered capitalism, and its latest
guise in the form of borderless global trade, but to the
epistemological and ontological foundations of modern
liberalism. At the heart of Rawlsian liberalism, and its neoliberal
offshoots, lies the assumption that individual actors are seats of
consciousness, desire and rational decision-making who are
intrinsically autonomous from other bodies and from the
biophysical environment. It is this assumption which explains
the liberal division of labour between individual agency and the
body politic; political institutions embody morality in the
relational world of public space but individuals are conceived as
essentially independent of this bodily domain, their actions
determined by their inner desires and rational choices rather than
by their biological relations to other agents and to the
environment.
Criticism of this essentially disembodied conception of
agency and consciousness, which is rooted in the Scottish and
German Enlightenments, has come from various quarters and
nowhere more powerfully than in the ground-breaking
phenomenological critique of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.13 A key
13 I say rediscovery because Aristotle’s moral and political philosophy, and its
medieval recovery by Thomas Aquinas, had a strong account of the interpenetration
of individual virtuous bodies and the body politic, and in its teleological account of
natural ends clearly connected human moral goods with the biophysical natures of
Embodying Climate Change 37
element in Merleau-Ponty’s ontological move is his attempt to
re-inscribe community and time upon the acts and gestures of
individual bodies:
What is alone true is that our open and personal
existence rests on a primary basis of acquired and
congealed existence. But it could not be otherwise if we
are temporality, since the dialectic of the acquired and of
the future is constitutive of time.14
In this account the perception and effect of every individual
action or gesture already involves an unconscious but real
projection of the self into relations with other bodies in the past
and the future in such a way that they are taken up into a larger
embodied pattern which Merleau-Ponty characterised as
‘existential rhythm’. 15 Also in the French philosophical
tradition, Marcell Mauss proposed in his essay ‘Techniques of
the Body’ that the body is the primary tool through which
humans give shape to the biophysical world, and that it is at the
same time from the body that the human world – or what I
above called public space – is also constituted, hence the very
term ‘body politic’. 16 Mauss and Merleau-Ponty directed
anthropologists and philosophers to a reconsideration of the
place of the body in human cultural and social construction as
well as in human consciousness and their insights have been
taken up in ecological thought, psychology and philosophy.
Thus quantum physicist David Bohm posited what he called an
bodies and the earth: Augustine’s City of God also represented a deeply embodied
moral and social philosophy and had enduring influence on Christian accounts of
agency, community and knowledge. 14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la Perception, pp. 493 – 4, trans. and
cited in Richard M. Zaner, The Problem of Embodiment : Some Contributions to a
Phenomenology of the Body (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 191. 15 Zaner, Problem of Embodiment, p. 191. 16 Marcel Mauss, ‘Les Techniques du Corps’ cited in Thomas J. Csordas,
‘Introduction : the body as representation and being-in-the-world’, in Csordas (ed.),
Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1 – 24.
38 theologies and cultures
‘implicate order’ in the substructure of atomic life which
connects individual acts and the biophysical structure of the
world, while Gregory Bateson constructed an ecological account
of consciousness, and John Gibson proposed an ecological
account of visual perception.17 For Bateson and Gibson human
consciousness and perception are constituted by their location in
the body and by relations with other bodies, human and
nonhuman; this recognition involves the rejection of reductionist
and atomistic accounts of rationality which have achieved
widespread currency under the influence of René Descartes and
Immanuel Kant. Advocates of a more embodied approach to
epistemology and perception argue that both philosophers failed
to take account of the multi-sensory and ecologically situated
character of human being.18
The recovery by phenomenologists, philosophers, and
more recently natural scientists,19 of the embodied character of
human identity and perception also finds echoes in the turn
among some modern moral philosophers and theologians to
narrative, story and tradition as key elements in human
development and rationality. 20 The life projects, desires and
decisions of individuals in a narrativist perspective cannot be
understand apart from knowledge of the life-story, and cultural
memes, that have shaped an individual in her development,
17 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, (London and Boston: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1980), Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected
Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (St Albans: Paladin,
1973) and J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin, 1979). See also Ian Burkitt, Bodies of Thought: Embodiment,
Identity and Modernity (London: Sage, 1999). 18 Burkitt, Bodies of Thought, pp. 34 – 38. 19 On the growing role of embodiment in Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science
see A. Clark, Being There – Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997). 20 See further Stanley Hauerwas and David Burrell, ‘From system to story: an
alternative pattern for rationality in ethics’ pp.158-190 in Stanley Hauerwas and L.
Gregory Jones (eds.) Why Narrative: Readings in Narrative Theology (Grand Rapids,
MI: William B Eerdmans, 1989); see also Alastair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in
Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981).
Embodying Climate Change 39
including relations with significant others, and with particular
bioregions, communities, places, practices and traditions.21
In this perspective climate change is the exposure of this
deep biophysical and storied structure underlying individual
agency in the biogeochmistry of the earth and of the mutually
constitutive relations between animals, atmosphere, oceans,
plants and rocks first theorised by James Lovelock in his ‘gaia
hypothesis’.22 Interactions between organic life and planetary
biogeochemistry memorialise the record of past actions,
particularly in the industrial era, in present and future time. On
this perspective the narrative of climate change begins not with
the discovery at the Mona Loa observatory in Hawaii of raised
atmospheric levels of CO2 in the 1970s, nor even with Svante
Arhenius’ original proposal in 1896 that industrial carbon could
enhance the greenhouse effect, 23 but with the eighteenth
century invention of the steam engine by Thomas Newcomen,
used as it was to facilitate the mining of coal at the origins of the
English industrial revolution.24
Advocates of a phenomenological approach to human
being and knowing have for more than fifty years attempted to
unseat the regnant constructivist and rationalist assumptions in
Western political and philosophical thought which underlie the
project of liberalism. But they have been largely unsuccessful in
dethroning the cultural power of these assumptions given the
21 The significance of narrative is beginning to emerge as a key theme in cognitive
science as researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics attempt to
chart and describe, so that they may ultimately be able to replicate, all that makes
human mental and physical agency possible; see further Chrystopher L. Nehaniv and
Kerstin Dautenhahn, ‘Embodiment and Memories: Algebras of Time and History for
Autobiographic Agents’ at http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqkd/em6pp.ps. 22 James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). On the
nature and origins of the discipline of biogeochemistry see William H. Schlesinger,
‘Better living through Biogeochemistry’, Ecology, 85, (2004), pp. 2402 – 2407; also E.
Gorham, ‘Biogechemistry: its origins and development’ Biogeochemistry, 13 (1991),
pp. 199 – 239. 23 Svante Arhenius, ‘On the influence of carbonic acid in the air on the temperature on
the ground’, Philosophical Magazine 41 (1896), p. 237. 24 See further David S. Landes Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969).
40 theologies and cultures
strength of the modern commitment to the ethereal economy of
unfettered desire and the ‘free’ market, and the relative
inattention to the biophysical economy of organic bodies in the
‘great economy’ of the earth.25 It may be that climate change
offers not only a decisive moment in the earth’s history, but a
radical challenge to the transformation of the earth that modern
industrialism has presaged where the rhythm of the earth and the
bodies, both individual and collective, of humans are brought
into a new alignment.
Attempts to mitigate climate change have so far however
failed to evince or manifest the kind of radical rethinking of the
liberal project that an embodied approach to climate change
would suggest. There are many reasons for this, not least the
continuing influence of the disembodied account of desire and
individual agency that modern Western philosophy has
sustained. Equally important is that climate change mitigation
depends upon collective action by a whole host of actors
including consumers, corporations, governments and
international agencies such as the WTO. For the behaviours of
such a diverse range of actors to be directed towards the shared
goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions, so stemming the future
consequences of climate change, requires a degree of
coordination and cooperation which is would at first hand seem
hard to achieve although the current neoliberal economic project
of global borderless trade in goods and services does represent
just such a form of global cooperation and coordination. But this
neoliberal project is in direct opposition to the goal of limiting
global carbon emissions. When Africans are encouraged by the
current regime of world trade to grow mangoes for export to
25 I refer to Wendell Berry’s account of the ‘great economy’ in his ....Jean-Pierre
Dupuy argues that the collective modern commitment to the ethereal economy of
market relations, despite its relative detachment from the real relations and welfare of
bodies in society, arises from an idealist strain at the heart of modern economics
which he exposes through an examination of inconsistencies between anarcho-
capitalist and morally conservative tendencies in the work of Ferdinand Hayek: Jean-
Pierre Dupuy, ‘Intersubjectivity and Embodiment’, Journal of Bioeconomics, 6 (2004),
pp. 275 – 294.
Embodying Climate Change 41
Northern Europe, while American and European farmers use
government subsidies to purchase energy-intensive fertilisers
and farm machinery so they can export wheat to Africa, then the
industrial food economy is given over to a model of carbon
consumption which is clearly a major progenitor of rising
carbon emissions.26 But far from abandoning the current world
trading regime, because of its inconsistency with the
biogeochemistry of the earth, the international Climate Change
Convention inaugurated in Bonn in 1998 replicates the
international global trading economy in goods and services with
respect to atmospheric emissions.
Under the negotiations at the Climate Change
Convention which led to the Kyoto Protocol representatives
from the United States, with backing from Britain, proposed the
creation of a new global market in carbon emissions and carbon
sinks as the principal means to address climate change
mitigation.27 This proposal was eventually adopted, with the
consequence that the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol are in the
process of creating a new global financial regime in carbon
credits which may be bought and sold on international markets
much like stocks or futures. In 2005 500 million pounds of
carbon credits were handed out gratis by the UK government to
energy utilities and oil companies. The idea is that these
companies will eventually be able to sell their carbon credits on
the international carbon credit market should they achieve
reductions in fossil fuel use, or else purchase more carbon
credits from other countries or companies who do not meet their
targets for carbon reductions under Kyoto. However the
construction of this new market in carbon credits simply defers
real reductions in carbon emissions which might otherwise be
26
See further Robyn Eckersley, ‘The big chill: the WTO and multilateral
environmental agreements’, Global Environmental Politics 4.2 (May 2004),
pp. 24 – 51. 27
See further Heidi Bachram, ‘Climate fraud and carbon colonialism: the
new trade in greenhouse gases’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 15. 4,
(December 2004), pp. 5- 20.
42 theologies and cultures
obtained through energy conservation measures and a shift
towards renewable energy sources.
The Kyoto Protocol inaugurates two schemes of carbon
trading. The first is called Joint Implementation and under this
mechanism carbon producers can trade permits to produce
carbon with carbon credits conferred on nations who produce
less carbon than their allowances under the CCC. Russia will
initially be the owner of the largest quantity of carbon credits
because of the shrinkage of the Russian economy since the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990; Russia’s reduced
economic activity on 1990 levels gives it approximately $10
billion of ‘avoided emissions’ under JI. Consequently Country A
which plans to exceed its CCC carbon allocation will be able to
purchase carbon credits from Russia and so fall short of its CO2
reduction target under Kyoto with the consequence that neither
Russia nor Country A will have physically to reduce its carbon
output by the amount of the trade. Under JI countries are given
headline carbon output figures and must decide for themselves
how to allocate carbon allowances within the country. The
British government, under the European Union Emissions
Trading Scheme, handed out for free 500 million Euros worth of
carbon credits to its most heavily polluting corporations, with
over half going to electricity and gas utilities and the rest to
offshore oil and gas companies, cement, ceramics, glass, metal
and paper producers. If these companies reduce their carbon
emissions they will be able to trade their carbon allowances with
companies which have not done so; at the time of writing a
tonne of carbon was worth around 8 Euros.28
The second form of the CCC carbon trading scheme, the
Clean Development Mechanism, allows companies to acquire
carbon permits by investing in energy reduction technologies
and new carbon sinks in developing countries. Thus a company
such as Royal Dutch Shell, among the top ten heaviest carbon
producers in Europe, could fund a new forest plantation of fast
28 Pratap Chatterjee, ‘The carbon brokers’, Guerilla News Network, 23 February 2005.
Embodying Climate Change 43
growing eucalyptus trees or a solar electricity production facility
in a tropical country such as Belize or Brazil and use this
investment to acquire permits for carbon pollution in Europe.
Eucalyptus are notorious for their negative effects on tropical
ecosystems since they dry out the soil and draw water from
undergrounds reservoirs and hence impact both on human and
other species water use. But protests by local people and NGOs
against one such forest in Brazil, funded by the World Bank,
which not only damaged local water sources but involved the
clearing of rainforest – which was before it was cleared a more
effective carbon sink than the monoculture eucalyptus forest –
did not prevent it being accredited by auditors as a valid project
under the Clean Development Mechanism. 29 Allowing a
company to trade its carbon emissions for an agroforestry
project, which will putatively absorb carbon, rests on highly
dubious assumptions about the role of agroforestry in carbon
biogeochemistry. When existing forests are cleared to make way
for fast growing eucalyptus and other monocrop varieties most
of the carbon contained in the existing forest is released when
the timber is burned in situ and decomposes, or is incinerated
after being used as plywood in the construction industry.
Similarly the new forest will only act as a carbon sink provided
the trees grow to maturity and are not then in turn harvested and
utilised in a similar way to its predecessor. Although the
emissions trading scheme cannot guarantee any of these
conditions it nonetheless treats new forest schemes as carbon
sinks with the capacity to absorb real carbon emissions. The
Kyoto Protocol envisages rich developed countries in the first
period of operation of the Treaty to 2012 purchasing an area of
land up to the size of a small country as set aside for forest
plantations against which they can offset carbon emissions. This
is leading to a new form of imperialism which Heidi Bachran
calls ‘carbon colonialism’ and which effectively commodifies
and privatises the earth’s atmosphere and forests by turning
29 Bachram, ‘Climate fraud and carbon colonialism’, p. 6.
44 theologies and cultures
them into carbon credits to be traded between wealthy
corporations. 30 And as if this were not bad enough,
governments, as in the case of the UK, are handing out shares in
this new privatised resource for free to the richest corporations
on the planet, an approach given the curious name of
‘grandfathering’ because permits to pollute originate in a
corporation already having polluted for many years previously.
Given the practice of grandfathering, the new market in
carbon has so far provided few incentives for heavy energy
users to physically reduce their carbon outputs. Dieter Helm
suggests that in the early days of carbon trading it should be
expected that the price of carbon remains low.31 However if
corporations reduce their emissions faster than the carbon credit
scheme allows they are actually penalised, and governments
have handed out so many carbon permits to corporations that
their market value is in any case too low to provoke serious
energy reductions. Estimates of real reductions from Kyoto are
as low as 0.1 per cent because so much offsetting is allowed
under permit trading that few countries or corporations will be
forced legally to reduce their physical emissions.32
If the intention of the Kyoto Protocol was to incentivise
individual firms and householders to reduce emissions through a
decentralised market driven approach this could have been
achieved far more equitably by giving carbon permits to poorer
developing nations who could then have sold them on to
corporations, or to the poorest citizens of industrialized nations
who with the proceeds of the sale of these permits could have
been required to insulate their homes or buy advance quantities
of energy from energy corporations to reduce their future bills.
The current scheme simply rewards the heaviest polluters with a
large injection of transferable wealth in permits to pollute
atmospheric carbon sinks even although they have already
30
Bachram, ‘Climate fraud and carbon colonialism’. 31 Dieter Helm, ‘The assessment: climate-change policy’, Oxford Review of Economic
Policy 19.3 (2003), pp. 349 – 361. 32 Bachram, ‘Climate fraud’, p. 6.
Embodying Climate Change 45
profited in many cases for decades from this same common
good without having paid for it.
It is instructive to discover something of the history of
carbon trading. It turns out that the early research on this
approach to climate change mitigation was funded by United
Nations research bodies with a strong bias towards market
approaches to climate change while alternative mitigation
schemes were never investigated.33 The bias of the UN towards
market solutions reflects extensive lobbying by the United
States and by Western corporations, even though many
mainstream economists consider that carbon trading is a far less
efficient device than carbon taxes. The reasons for preferring
market solutions to taxation are not in the end economic ones
but political, institutional and cultural. Powerful lobbies in the
energy, financial and industrial sectors strongly resist taxation of
any kind even as a way of mitigating human welfare problems
associated with advanced capitalism. It is hardly surprising then
that these same forces were at work in the negotiations which
led to the creation of the Kyoto Protocol.
Despite the urgency of the problem, and despite the fact
that alternatives to fossil fuels, and conservation measures,
could between them already deliver dramatic reductions in fossil
fuel dependence without excessive cuts in economic
development, the nations and corporations who negotiated and
lobbied around the Kyoto process preferred a business as usual
scenario which, if it continues until 2050 will see carbon levels
rise above 500 parts per million in the upper atmosphere, and
likely reaching 700 ppm at some point later in the century at
which point the most extreme of the IPCC’s climate change
scenarios are likely to be realised.
Given the epistemological and ecological inadequacies
of the liberal and neo-liberal narratives of (disembodied) private
rational choice and (embodied) public morality it is unsurprising
that institutional procedures influenced by this narrative have
33
46 theologies and cultures
produced an international climate change treaty which is
ineffective in promoting real carbon reductions in the short or
medium term. But the other principal root of the ineffectiveness
of the Kyoto Protocol is the idealistic character of the cost-
benefit calculations which economists apply to the problems of
either adapting to or mitigating climate change. Bjorn Lomborg
articulates a widespread bias amongst economists and
industrialists, also shared by the present Bush administration,
when he suggests that the costs of mitigating the future effects
of climate change are so great, and the nature of these effects so
uncertain, that it is more economically beneficial to plan to
adapt human behaviours and procedures to climate change when
it occurs than to regulate economic activity so as to reduce
present carbon emissions so that these potential future costs may
be reduced. 34 This argument is predicated on the economic
practice of social discounting which compares present and
future economic activity and, on the basis of the existence of
interest rates and hence the growth in value of money saved,
argues that future activities costs less than present ones.35 The
problem with such economistic dismissals of the need to
mitigate climate change in the present is not just that it
undervalues costs to future generations of climate change but
involves measurements of cost and benefit which are so
theoretical as to misrepresent the real world of biogeochemistry.
The reason is simple; cost benefit calculations are conducted on
the basis of theoretical economic rules of supply and demand,
and monetary accounts of profit and loss, both at corporate and
at national level. But these rules and accounts notoriously fail to
count as costs many of the environmental and social costs,
dubbed ‘externalities’ by economists, which economic activities
impose upon individual and collective bodies in the real world.
34 Bjorn Lomborg, ‘Global warming’ in Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 258 – 324. See also the
discussion of this issue in Stephen Gardiner’s useful survey article ‘Ethics and global
climate change’, Ethics, 114 (April 2004), pp. 555 – 600. 35 For a philosophical defense of the practice of social discounting see further John
Broome,
Embodying Climate Change 47
Climate change is of course the most dramatic and long-lasting
of all such ‘externalities’ but as yet neither corporate nor
national accounting systems include climate change effects in
monetary measures of economic activities. Again we are dealing
here with the problematic outcomes of the disembodied
character of modern Western accounts of rationality and rational
choice behaviours, and in particular their influence on the way
in which economists model, and accountants measure, the
behaviours of individuals, firms and governments.
There is a further feature to the problem of
disembodiment in the procedures by which liberal and
neoliberal economists and politicians respond to signals from
the biophysical environment, and in particular climate change,
and this concerns the thorny philosophical problem of time. A
fully time sensitive narrative of climate change would start not
at the invention of Newcomen’s steam engine but way back in
prehistory for it would involve the narration of the way in which
myriad creatures in the oceans and on terra firma absorbed the
prehistoric warmth of the sun through photosynthesis and
eventually drew down the resulting carbon biomass in the form
of fossil fuel deposits in the earth’s crust or under the ocean
floor. The extraordinary growth of the industrial economy in the
last 150 years effectively rests upon the sudden release of this
geological record of millions of years of solar warmth into the
planet’s present biogeochemistry in the form of carbon
emissions. In other words the great range of goods and services
that the modern consumer is encouraged and stimulated by a
vast advertising industry to enjoy and expend rests upon a
hidden history of organic life which is hundreds of millions of
years old. But this biophysical exchange of organic heritage for
present consumption takes place in a cultural context where
there is an increasingly attenuated sense of the connection
between past, present and future generations, practices, stories,
and traditions. Again the disembodied conception of the desiring
and choosing rational self is implicated here for, as Edmund
Burke argued, the desire and willingness to conserve a state of
48 theologies and cultures
affairs for future generations rests upon a consciousness of
connection between present and past which the revolutions that
inaugurated the modern age, explicitly rejected; as he wrote in
his reflections on the French Revolution, ‘people will not look
towards posterity when they fail to reflect on past
generations.’36
The strange timelessness which informs present cultural
consciousness may be said to originate in philosophical
problems with time in theology and philosophy which precede
the birth of the modern era. The origin of these problems was in
the Scholastic notion of occasionalism by which late medieval
theologians posited that an omnipotent God could act in the
world so as to disturb the laws of nature and thus that the
physical appearance of order in nature, as present humans
observe it, may be illusory. To put this another way medieval
theologians argued that there was an unfathomable gap between
the purposes of God in creating the world, and in continuing to
intervene in that world, and the physical appearances of things
and that therefore there is a capricious instability to physical
appearances, and cause-effect relations such that divine
purposes cannot be read off from the material creation. This
move in Christian metaphysics is often described as the
nominalist move and it is of relevance here because it represents
a real rupture in the relations between inner consciousness and
outward appearances, and between past, present and future in
Western ontology, and ultimately Western culture, that efforts to
retrieve embodiment and narrative in philosophy and theology
are only now beginning to address.
The narrative theologian addresses this problem by
arguing for continuity in the relations between past and present
such that the present possibility of Christian existence issues
from the prior calling of Abraham, Moses, and above all the
calling of Christ himself, upon which Christian identity,
practices and traditions ultimately rely. So for example when the
36
The Portable Edmund Burke, edited by Isaac Kramnick.
Embodying Climate Change 49
Apostle Paul claimed that Jesus Christ is the same ‘yesterday,
today and forever’, he was arguing for continuity in this new
religious tradition with prechristian and future time, and this
continuity in Christian history takes a number of institutional
forms: these include practices such as the Christian sacraments
of baptism and Eucharist which Christians believe were
inaugurated by Christ, the public reading of the scriptures in
which the stories of God’s ways with God’s people are recorded
and rehearsed, and the recording and remembering of the lives
of the saints. In a narrativist perspective what connects present
Christian actions with past inheritance are these shared practices
and stories, as well as a shared spiritual relation, expressed in
private prayer as well as public worship, to God. How though
might this sense of cultural and spiritual continuity be said to
relate to the problem of disconnection between past, present and
future in relation to energy consumption and climate change?
One approach is to argue for a new consciousness of the
moral claims of future people on presently existing people, a
claim which would involve a redefinition of the command of
Christ to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ in which the
category neighbour includes future persons who, though distant
from present persons in time, are nonetheless connected to them
by the planet’s biogeochemical memory which visits the effects
of present actions on future people.37 This idea of connection
between past, present and future actions and generations is also
encapsulated in the Christian conception of original sin, most
fully elaborated by Augustine in the fourth century, and with
antecedents in St Paul, and in Jewish reflection on the ‘sins of
the fathers’ which the Torah represents as being visited on ‘the
third and fourth generations’. The Christian claim to find in the
Christ events liberation from the inheritance of the ill effects of
the actions of previous generations is that Christ displayed in his
incarnation, dying and rising a new form of creaturely being – a
‘new creation’ – in which the body is at last liberated from its
37 See for example Rachel Muers, ....
50 theologies and cultures
captivity to sin and death which are represented by St Paul as
the inheritance of the actions of previous generations from
Adam and Eve until the birth of Christ. This liberation takes the
bodily and social form of new community, the ‘body of Christ’
in which individuals are joined in a common quest for peace and
reconciliation in which past sins are forgiven and just relations
between rich and poor, weak and strong, are pursued and
sustained. However there are many who argue that far from
advancing a conservationist ethic with respect to the earth, this
religion of liberty in fact eventuated in a desacralisation of the
biophysical world such that the mortal world became amenable
to its transformation by humans in their expression of their new
spiritual freedoms. Those who mined coal from the crust of the
earth had already overcome any fears they might have had that
such an act would be irreverent to the spirits of place that might
be said to reside in the earth and its particular bioregions. Does
not the Christian story of liberation from the law of sin and
death in fact mean that Christians attend less to the biophysical
consequences of their actions than those of other traditions –
such as animists or Hindus – who continue to believe in
something like earthly Karma or ‘what goes around comes
around’?
These arguments have been played out extensively in the
growth of ecological theologies in the last forty years, and
especially since the famous lecture given by Lynn White to the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1966.
What I am claiming here is that the problems I have identified
with respect to embodiment, the ethereal economy, and
emissions from energy consumption, require some rethinking of
our Western cultural traditions around what constitutes selfhood,
rationality, and public morality. In particular I am arguing that
the problem of climate change requires a renewed appreciation
of the narrative relations between past, present and future
generations, and between past, present and future ages of the
earth, of the kind sustained in the Christian tradition through
such practices as scripture reading and remembering the lives of
Embodying Climate Change 51
the saints. I am also suggesting that these narrative relations take
a distinctive political form in the idea of the ‘body of Christ’
which is a political metaphor for the relationships between rich
and poor, weak and strong, who belong to particular
communities of Christians in different parts of the world and
who are united in their communion by their common devotion to
the sovereignty of Christ as the ‘head of the body’. This idea of
the ‘body of Christ’ carries with it for St Paul a clear moral
implication that Christians in one part of the world have
obligations to Christians in other parts of the world who may be
suffering from famine or some other kind of need. As St Paul
suggests to the Christians at Corinth, their abundance finds its
correlate in the need of Christians in Judea who, after the Jewish
rebellion and its vicious putting down by the Romans, were
suffering from famine.
How though might this ancient and idealised picture of
the body of Christ interact with the modern problem of
international relations, and intergenerational relations, presented
by climate change? Clearly the implication is that the primary
generators of climate change – Western consumers and
corporations – have moral duties to the people who are already
experiencing the effects of climate change in other parts of the
world, and to future persons who will experience these effects in
ever larger numbers. But the energy economy, with its
electricity generators, connective grids and pipelines, petrol
pumps, and electric switches, distances energy users from the
effects of their energy consumption. And hence the title of this
paper; the urgent need is to recover ways in which households
and corporations can reconstitute their daily embodied rituals
with regard to energy use so as to reconnect them with their
source in the creation story from the beginning of time, and
hence with posterity.
The ancient Celts had a particular set of practices with
regard to energy use which contained something of what I am
getting at. When they went out to dig peat, and when they laid it
on the fire each morning to warm the household and cook its
52 theologies and cultures
food, they undertook these actions in the sacred name of the
Holy Trinity, accompanying these actions with prayer and
reverence to the creator God. They saw the fire, which they
would make from three pieces of peat, as in some sense holy, as
a physical analogy of the Sacred Trinity, and as a manifestation
of the fire of the Holy Spirit, who is the immanent presence of
the Trinity and who warmed their hearts in worship even as the
hearth warmed the household. Medieval architects had a similar
reverence for the light of the sun which they expressed in the
design of the great European cathedrals which were constructed
in such a way as to draw down the light of the sun onto the floor
of the chancel, nave and sanctuary through the great high
windows which the new gothic building techniques enabled
them to construct. Similarly William Blake in the nineteenth
century called the energy which all around him was being
released and mobilised in the industrial revolution ‘divine
energy’ and so reminded his readers that this energy was not
purely physical; it originated in the divine light which first
shone on a dark and formless universe to bring forth life from
the oceans. Embodying climate change means recovering
something of this sense of reverence and awe that Blake
experienced in the release of the primeval power which fuelled
and built the great cities and furnaces of the industrial revolution.
A new embodied reverence for the energy of the earth
requires not only a narrative sense for its origination in the
earth’s prehistory, but a sense of ecological connection between
a furnace, or an air conditioner, and the fossils which fuel them.
But the problem is that the machine age and the ethereal
economy encourage precisely those habits of forgetfulness and
waste which mean that modern consumers and corporations
listlessly consume without heed for the past or future life of the
creatures which composed, and will eventually have to deal with,
the energy so used. A narrative and embodied ethic requires not
only reverential rituals but a recovery of old virtues such as
those of prudence and temperance, justice and patience, such
that saving energy, consuming lower down the energy and food
Embodying Climate Change 53
chain, substituting human labour for the machine – for example
cycling or walking instead of driving – again appear hip and
wise rather than old-fashioned and irrational. The virtues, as
Aristotle first suggested, are those moral excellences which,
when they become habitual, help to train the individual in
relationships and roles which make for flourishing or what
Aristotle called eudaimonia. The central and ordering virtue
according to Christ and St Paul is love, love of God and love of
neighbour. For Saint Augustine love is central and gives order to
all other human desires, ends and virtues because when
individuals love the being who has given them life, they turn
their minds to the source of life. This source of life is the divine
light which as St John put it in the prologue to his Gospel
‘lightens everyone’ and this image of divine light and energy
provides the Christian account of the virtues with much of its
metaphorical force. For Christians the ability to express the
virtues arises not, as Aristotle has it from aristocratic upbringing
and prowess on the battlefield, but from closeness to the
ultimate source of goodness.
We rarely conceive of light from an electric bulb as the
physical product of the light of the sun on the prehistory of the
planet but this is precisely what it is. Embodying climate change
will require us to behave more virtuously with respect to our
individual and collective use of this divine light; it also requires
us to reconnect the machine-enabled rituals of our lives with the
ecology of our fragile and ancient earth home. Renarrating
energy as divine light, recovering the value of the traditional
virtues, rehearsing the past lives which make our present ones
possible, are practices which embody climate change and which
may enable those who engage in them to give more cognisance
to biogeochemical posterity.
theologies and cultures,Vol.3, No.2
December 2006, pp. 54-88
Ecumenical Spirituality
Overcoming Violence: Globalization, Violence, Cosmopolitanism
And Transmodernity
Lawrence A. Whitney, LC+1
Introduction
lobalization is nothing new. This should not be a
surprising assertion for members of a 2000 year-old
globalizing movement. In fact, it might be possible to make the
assertion that globalizing tendencies are part of the human
condition. To some extent we are all aware of this. In the 1999
movie The Matrix, the computer program character Agent Smith
says to Morpheus while torturing him,
I'd like to share a revelation I had during my time here. It
came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized
that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this
planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the
1 Lawrence A. Whitney, LC+ is professed and ordained to the diaconate in
the Lindisfarne Community and an MDiv candidate at the Boston University
School of Theology. He is also a Chapel Associate at Marsh Chapel and the
facilitator of the International Mission and Ecumenism Committee of the
Boston Theological Institute.
G
Overcoming Violence 55
surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You
move to an area and you multiply until every natural
resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to
spread to another area. There is another organism on this
planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it
is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this
planet and we are the cure.2
Perhaps the most haunting part of this monologue is its ring of
truth.
And yet, when spoken of by pundits and “scholars” of
popular culture, globalization is often referenced as a late 20th
century, and now 21st century, phenomenon; the particular mark
of modern, or perhaps postmodern, life. While globalization
may not be new, it is true that there are certain factors in its
current expression that reflect the particular context of our
present historical moment. Strangely, it is not the economic
factors that give globalization its new cast but the cultural
confluences and the physics of the historical moment itself. All
of these factors, taken together, lead to violence.
This paper will unfold along a threefold path beginning
with a brief exploration of the globalization phenomenon and
why it can lead to violence. Second, the similarities between the
present global situation and the situation of nascent Christianity
in the Roman empire will be investigated. Finally, a proposal
will be made for an ecumenical spirituality to address the
complexities of life in a global and often violent world. This
last will be derived in conversation with theories of
cosmopolitanism and transmodernity.
Globalization and Violence
What is Globalization?
2 The Matrix. dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski, prod. Groucho II Film
Partnership, Silver Pictures, Villiage Roadshow Pictures. (Burbank, CA:
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 31 March 1999).
56 theologies and cultures
All too often globalization is defined narrowly in
economic terms, probably in part due to an overly narrow
definition of economics. The problem with such a definition is
that it tends to focus the discussion on issues of finance,
presuming that the amount of tangible goods one possesses is
definitive for wealth even when the stance taken on
globalization as a process is primarily negative. I prefer a
definition of globalization that successfully theorizes the
phenomena being experienced in our 21st century world without
taking on itself the burden of a possessive economic metaphysic
even as it seeks to describe experience rooted in such.
Globalization could thus be described as “the unfolding
resolution of the contradiction between ever expanding capital
and its national political and social formations.”3 Put differently,
it is “the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the
world which has been brought about by the enormous reduction
of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking
down of artificial barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital,
knowledge, and (to a lesser extent) people across borders.”4 For
a definition completely devoid of economic jargon, we might
say that globalization is “the expanding scale, growing
magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of
transcontinental flows and patterns of social interaction.”5
Furthermore, this process of expansion and integration is
always contextualized by the happenstances of its historical
moment. Thomas Friedman, in his New York Times bestselling
book The World is Flat, delineates an historical typology for
3Stephen McBride and John Wisemen, eds. Globalization and its
Discontents. (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2000): 9. This definition
holds as long as capital is understood more broadly than financial and market
capital. 4Joseph E. Stiglitz. Globalization and Its Discontents. (New York, NY:
W.W. Norton and Company, 2002): 9. 5Neil J. Smelser. Uncertain Connections: Globalization, Localization,
Identities, and Violence. (Ohio State University, Oct. 3-4, 2003): 2.
Overcoming Violence 57
globalization.6 “Globalization 1.0,” (1492-1800), describes this
process as carried militarily and politically by nation-states and
is more typically known as colonization. “Globalization 2.0,”
(1800-2000), is what many contemporary theorists of the
phenomena in question are seeking to describe and it describes
this process as now being carried out economically by
multinational, international, and eventually transnational
corporations. Finally, “Globalization 3.0,” (2000-?), indicates
that this process is now accessible to individuals collaborating
and competing as independent actors or as small, loosely
connected groups. While I will make the case momentarily that
globalization is a process much older than the age of discovery,7
the characteristics Friedman assigns to each era help to refine
our definition in terms of actors and how they relate to one
another.
Ultimately, the most helpful framework for
understanding globalization, for the purposes of this
presentation, is what Leslie Sklair denotes a “global culture
model,” which seeks to understand identity as it is being acted
upon by increasingly accessible and interactive
communications.8 Also helpful to the discussion is the view
added by globo-localist theorists that there is an important
reactionary heterogenizing counterforce rooted in local identity
to the homogenizing potential of expanding communications.9
Finally, the understanding that globalization predates modernity,
one side of the discussion in the global society model, will be
presented in the second section of this presentation. This last is
important because, as Sklair points out, “if we want to
understand our own lives and the lives of those around us, in our
6Thomas L. Friedman. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21
st Century.
(New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005): 9-10. 7For different perspectives on the history of globalization, see Leslie Sklair.
“Competing Conceptions of Globalization.” Journal of World-Systems
Research 2 (Summer 1999): 155. 8ibid: 151-4.
9ibid and Peter Geschiere and Birgit Meyer. “Globalization and Identity:
Dialectics of Flow and Closure.” Development and Change 29 (1998): 602.
58 theologies and cultures
families, communities, local regions, countries, supra-national
regions and, ultimately how we relate to the global, then it is
absolutely fundamental that we are clear about the extent to
which the many different structures within which we live are the
same in the most important respects as they have been or are
different.”10
The Context of Globalization
Globalization is commonly expressed in terms of the
loosing of the boundaries of the world so that the modern person
is living in unbounded space.11
This is the sentiment Friedman
seeks to express in his pithy statement that “the world is flat,”12
indicating that communications and technology have virtually
(pun intended) eliminated the relevance of political, cultural,
and societal boundaries. Neil Thurnbull expresses this
philosophically, in agreement with Nietzsche and Heidegger,
when he says, “For when the earth is seen from an astronautic
point of view, all traditional human concerns are
deterritorialized and strangely diminished to the extent that
interplanetary representations of the earth threaten to sever the
connection between humanity and its traditional ontological
supports.”13
This is continuous with the side of the discussion in
the global society model that seeks to identify globalization as a
distinctly modern phenomenon14
because both root the
psychological potential for conceiving the globe, let alone a
global order, in a post-Copernican Weltanschauung. This
conception is accurate insofar as it describes intra-planetary
10
Leslie Sklair. “Competing Conceptions of Globalization:” 155. 11
Peter Geschiere and Birgit Meyer. “Globalization and Identity: Dialectics
of Flow and Closure:” 603. 12
Thomas L. Friedman. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st
Century. 13
Neil Thurnbull. “The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus: Global
Being in the Planetary World.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.1 (2006): 126-
7. 14
Leslie Sklair. “Competing Conceptions of Globalization:” 155.
Overcoming Violence 59
experience but becomes more problematic upon realizing that
the astronaut must eventually come back to earth.
Indeed, I wish to posit that the contemporary context of
globalization is precisely the opposite of this prevalent
conception. The process of globalization and the forces driving
it are effective only insofar as they are in fact geographically
bound to this planet. Despite visits to our satellite several
decades ago and relatively frequent mechanically piloted
expeditions to Mars, there is a greater resignation now that we
have one planet and we have to make it work. This planetary
boundedness intensifies the forces and process of globalization
because, as we were all taught in high school physics, density
increases as the amount of matter in a constant volume increases
and acceleration increases as the amount of force exerted upon a
constant object increases. Furthermore, the forces and processes
of globalization increase exponentially because they mutually
reinforce each other. This means that as goods, services, capital,
knowledge, and people expand, they burst their societal and
national boundaries, Friedman’s “Globalization 1.0,” and so
multinational, international, and transnational organizations and
corporations become the locus of control. Friedman posits that
now even these boundaries are being overcome, as malleable,
porous, and indefinable as they are, as the process and forces of
globalization grant increasing autonomy to the individual. The
question then becomes, if even these “soft” boundaries have
been set aside, what will happen when the forces of
globalization become entirely unchecked, if indeed they do as
this new paradigm seems to suppose?
Leaving this wider question aside for scholars better
versed in the field than myself, I return to the global culture
model to ask the more narrow question how is identity15
formed
in the tension between the intensifying homogenizing forces of
15
Note that the issue of identity is synonymous with the notion of the “local”
in much of the literature. See Neil J. Smelser. Uncertain Connections:
Globalization, Localization, Identities, and Violence: 14.
60 theologies and cultures
globalization and heterogenizing reactionary counterforces?16
In such a situation, identities must be “polyvalent.” On the one
hand, they bear the characteristics of “plasticity” and “poly-
interpretability” such that single labels effectively stretch across
groups of distinct persons and change can be successfully
integrated, giving a sense of openness and progress. On the
other hand, these same characteristics create an existential drive
for “clarification” and “fixing” toward a sense of veritable
commonality and locality in meaning and purpose.17
As I have argued elsewhere, when these two responses to
polyvalence are pushed to their extremes, they reach the
paradigm of inclusion and exclusion, respectively, and both are
highly problematic. Healthy identity formation balances the two
such that these extremes are never met.18
This becomes an
especially tall order when the forces to be balanced are
increasing exponentially in intensity. Thus it should not be too
surprising that all too often this balance ends up tilting and then
sliding in one direction or the other. When the identity moves
toward an absolute inclusivism, the accompanying loss of self-
sense and definition creates an existential reactionary need for a
more adequate balance. Moving toward an absolute exclusivism,
on the other hand, leads to a sense of increasing solidarity, at
least until it reaches its ultimate expression whence even its
proponents find themselves excluded to the outer reaches of
their own construction.
Whence to Violence
Inclusive identities are prone to violent interactions
externally when they seek to include despite a contrary will on
16
Note that I do not identify identity with the heterogenizing reactionary
forces as do Peter Geschiere and Birgit Meyer in “Globalization and Identity:
Dialectics of Flow and Closure.” 17
ibid: 10. 18
Lawrence A. Whitney, LC. “Ecclesiology and Identity.” unpublished
manuscript. (Fall 2004): 6.
Overcoming Violence 61
the part of the other and internally when exclusive subsets
develop and are interpreted as a threat. Thus, for inclusive
identity the particularity of localism is the problematic force that
results in violence. For exclusive identities, on the other hand,
their very solidarity provides a groundwork for violent
interaction, not in and of themselves but as they are challenged
and brought into contact with competing identities through the
exponentially increasing forces and processes of globalization.
Interestingly enough, both types of identity begin their
movement toward violence when their sense of stability and
balance within their particular worldview is shaken, more often
than not by interaction with the other type of identity.
For exclusivists, stability and balance require a carefully
controlled and regulated environment in order to survive, and
the ability to control and regulate becomes threatened when,
“global tendencies and events subtract from the ability of
[regulators] to meet demands from local and particularistic
constituencies, and this neglect heightens the political activity of
these constituencies.”19
This is particularly problematic when
western regulators (both states and corporations) have moved to
policies of pluralism and multiculturalism, making a
commitment to particularity and distinction and thus
engendering the hope in each identity that the environment will
be regulated with themselves in mind.20
Each identity thus
becomes an “us” in distinction to “them” who also reside in the
same environment with the same regulators.21
The “us” group
then legitimizes political (or other) activity in response to
environmental conditions that threaten their stability and
solidarity by rooting the identity in an ideology including
“references to the glory and dignity of the group itself, threats to
it, including its past and present mistreatment or victimization,
19
Neil J. Smelser. Uncertain Connections: Globalization, Localization,
Identities, and Violence: 10. 20
ibid: 12-13. 21
ibid: 14.
62 theologies and cultures
grievances, and a vision of a better world.”22
The potential for
violence is activated when activities are perceived to have been
ineffective for achieving the goal of enacting, protecting, or
recovering the potential for the ideology and the identity it roots
to flourish. This potential violence then becomes actualized
when the opportunity and access to means of violence present
themselves.23
Externally directed inclusivism is perhaps better defined
as imperialism. “Imperialism is a policy of extending control or
authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or
maintenance of empires. This is either through direct territorial
conquest or settlement, or through indirect methods of exerting
control on the politics and/or economy of these other entities.”24
This movement toward empire extends from the inclusive desire
for bringing others into the fold and can therefore be
promulgated as having the best interests of the entities being
assimilated at heart. “Generally, an empire is defined as a state
that extends dominion over areas and populations that are
culturally and ethnically distinct from the culture at the center of
power.”25
While the necessity of a state actor may be called into
question, this definition of empire successfully accounts for the
inclusive instinct to enfold the other. The inclusive identity can
become violent when this instinct toward the “global” (inclusive)
is resisted by the “local” (exclusive)26
and so force must be
exerted in order to effect the desired outcome. Internally
directed inclusivism is thus oppression of developing and
22
ibid: 16. 23
ibid: 20-22. 24
“Imperialism,” Wikipedia. 18 Aug 2006. [online]. available from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism. accessed 18 Aug 2006. 25
“Empire,” Wikipedia. 18 Aug 2006. [online]. available from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire. accessed 18 Aug 2006. 26
“The 'local' is not only regional as the term literally implies, but it subsumes
groups that are ethnic, racial, indigenous,ethnonationalistic, religious,
linguistic, cultural or style of life—often some mix of these.” Neil J. Smelser.
Uncertain Connections: Globalization, Localization, Identities, and Violence:
4.
Overcoming Violence 63
“included” particularities that threaten the desire for inclusion,
either of themselves or of others.
What, then, is violence? An appropriate definition will
be quite broad, analogous to the breadth of the definition of
globalization employed above, so as to adequately account for
the actions of both inclusive and exclusive actors in a
globalizing environment. Johan Galtung provides such a
definition when he says, “violence is present when human
beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and
mental realizations are below their potential realizations …
Violence is here defined as the cause of the difference between
the potential and the actual.”27
Galtung goes on to make six
distinctions that serve to clarify the breadth of the definition:
between physical and psychological violence, between negative
and positive influence, whether or not there is an object that is
hurt, whether or not there is a subject who acts, between
intended and unintended violence, and between manifest and
latent violence.28
Galtung is credited with thus having expanded
the notion of violence to include structural or indirect violence
as well as personal or direct violence.29
This distinction is an
important one for this discussion because of the accessibility of
various forms of violence to various actors and because it
expands the discussion of violence beyond the narrow concern
of terrorism.
The question remains as to the participation of religious
actors in such acts of violence. R. Scott Appleby explains this
beginning with Rudolph Otto's definition of “the holy” as “the
sine qua non of religion ... the mysterium tremendum et
27
Johan Galtung. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace
Research 6.3 (1969): 168. 28
ibid: 169-72. 29
“Structural Violence.” Wikipedia. 5 February 2007. [online]. available
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence. accessed 17 February
2007. Structural violence is often referred to as “institutional violence,”
although with somewhat different emphases. See Deane Curtin & Robert
Litke. Institutional Violence. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999.
64 theologies and cultures
facinans.”30
He goes on to define religion as encompassing all
of the potential responses to this first order experience because
the holy is ambiguous by definition, being “of more than one
interpretation or explanation ... of double meaning or of several
possible meanings.”31
Thus, the human response to this
ambiguity is ambivalence, “the coexistence in one person of
contradictory emotions or attitudes (as love and hatred) towards
a person or thing.”32
This means that it is entirely consistent for
different religious actors to interpret their experience of the holy
in sometimes contradictory ways, even though one or the other
must be wrong from the perspective of the will of God, which is
not subject to the same ambiguity as the experience by which it
is mediated.33
Legitimately religious actors may choose
inclusivism or exclusivism, violence or non-violence.
The Socio-Political Situation of Nascent Christianity
The claim that globalization is not merely a modern
phenomenon can be seen in the socio-political situation of first
century Judaism, Jesus' immediate context to which he was
responding. Since their return from exile in 539 BCE the Jews
had been under almost constant political control by foreigners
beginning with the Persians until 330 BCE and then under
various Greek dynasties until 141 BCE followed by a brief
period of independence under the Maccabees/Hasmoneans until
63 BCE when the Roman Empire reconquered the region. This
forced a radical reconception of what it meant to be Jewish
which included moving from a tribal to a non-tribal
30
R. Scott Appleby. The Ambivalence of the Sacred. (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2000): 28. 31
Ibid: 29. quoting The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994): 386. Note that I am not making the same distinction
between first and second order religious experience but group all religious
experience as first order to which the response is a second order
interpretation. 32
Ibid: 387. 33
R. Scott Appleby. The Ambivalence of the Sacred: 29-30.
Overcoming Violence 65
understanding of affiliation, from the temple to the synagogue as
the center of religious life, from authority resting with the kings
and priests to increased scribal power, and from a prophetic to
an apocalyptic theodicy. In addition, this period saw the rise of
somewhat divergent “schools” of Judaism including the
Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, each with their own
nuanced theology, spirituality, and attitude toward the political
situation.34
The apocalyptic worldview is especially important
because it provides the framework in which these globalizing
forces were interpreted. A prophetic theodicy says that sinful
people suffer due to punishment by God in order that they might
repent, turning away from their sin and back toward God.
Apocalypticism shifts the cause of suffering to evil cosmic
forces in the world opposing God and God's people, which can
only be overcome by divine intervention, so that the people are
required only to remain faithful to God and wait for the
intervention to happen. A strong sense of the immanence of
God and divine action toward the vindication of God's people is
prevalent and characterized both by a strong sense of pessimism
regarding the potential outcome of the present world order and a
dualistic temporal understanding. In this temporal dualism, the
present age is an old age where evil is dominant and the
righteous suffer whereas a new age of the realm of God will be
inaugurated by divine intervention as a new heaven and new
earth characterized by a reversal of fortune for both present
sufferers and evil dominant forces.35
The Apostle Paul shifts
this temporal dualism slightly to account for his Christology
such that the old and new ages overlap with the new age
inaugurated by the cross and resurrection but not yet fulfilled
until the παρουσια (second coming). The old age is already
34
James C. Walters. “Historical Context I & II.” New Testament
Introduction. Lectures given 19 & 24 Jan 2006. 35
James C. Walters. “Apocalyptic Setting.” New Testament Introduction.
Lecture given 26 Jan 2006. See also Richard A. Horsley. Jesus and the
Spiral of Violence. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1987): 32-3.
66 theologies and cultures
overcome but the new age is not yet fulfilled.36
It is important
to remember that this dualism is temporal, not cosmological as
has sometimes been asserted, and so sees the terrestrial situation
as continuous with the cosmic situation such that divine
intervention was expected within the historical moment.37
These changes in religious practice and theology were
brought about in response to globalizing forces exerted on Israel
by their Hellenistic rulers, especially in terms of culture,
knowledge base, economy, and polity. Training in the gymnasia
of Hellenistic philosophy became a mark of cultured life in
Jewish as well as gentile societies. The social structure itself
was adjusted, especially in terms of elite classes, as priestly
families (Oniads) and Judean elites (Tobiads) were replaced
with the Roman invested Herodian dynasty and Jewish religious
elites were replaced with Roman bureaucratic functionaries.
Building projects, maintenance of the military, and tribute to
ensure the passivity of Rome caused regional governments to
impose heavy tax burdens on the burgeoning social non-elites.38
These are all types of structural or institutional violence,
existing “when resources and powers are unevenly distributed,
concentrated in the hands of a few who do not use them to
achieve the possible self-realization of all members, but use
parts of them for self-satisfaction for the elite or for purposes of
dominance, oppression, and control of other societies or of the
underprivileged of that same society.”39
Richard A. Horsley employs a fourfold typology entitled
“The Spiral of Violence” to understand how this
structural/institutional violence develops into more overt forms
36
James C. Walters. “Paul of Tarsus.” New Testament Introduction. Lecture
given 2 Feb 2006. 37
Richard A. Horsley. Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: 138-9. 38
James C. Walters. “Historical Context I & II.” New Testament
Introduction. For a more extensive account see Richard A. Horsley. Jesus
and the Spiral of Violence: 29-33. 39
Report of the Consultation on “Violence, Nonviolence and the Struggle for
Social Justice.” (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1972): 6.
Overcoming Violence 67
of violence.40
After the first stage, the structural violence itself,
comes a second stage of protest and resistance by the oppressed
people, often as not nonviolent but sometimes violent.41
The
“established order” responds with the third stage, repression,
which could be anywhere from mild to brutal but was carried
out with special ruthlessness by he Roman army in the case of
first century Palestine.42
When the cycle of resistance and
repression becomes unbearable for a large number of people, the
fourth stage comes about: either violent or nonviolent revolt.43
Apocalypticism played three roles in the response of oppressed
Jewish people to structural violence and repression:
remembrance of God’s promise of blessing and liberation,
creative envisioning of potential life without these forms of
violence, and critical demystifying of the interpretations of the
violence imposed by the established order.44
A Cosmopolitan Theoretic
The theoretical approach to globalization and violence
undertaken to this point should be understood as expansive
regarding both categories. The discussion of globalization seeks
to expand the category from descriptions that are too often too
narrowly construed only in terms of economics to take in the
mutually influencing causal forces and dynamics that account
for the ways in which influence is exerted on identity. Violence
is expanded to include structural violence in order to account for
the effects globalization is having on both inclusive and
exclusive identity types in order to avoid a narrow discussion of
violence as terrorism. Both expansions are for the sake of
comprehensive accuracy and honesty. If these are to be the
norms of categorical definition then a theoretical construct of
40
Richard A. Horsley. Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: 20-28. 41
ibid: 24-25, 33-43. 42
ibid: 25, 43-9. 43
ibid: 26, 49-54. 44
ibid: 144.
68 theologies and cultures
cosmopolitanism must take an opposite approach, namely of
constricting the category, because “we are not exactly certain
what it is, and figuring out why this is so and what
cosmopolitanism may be raises difficult conceptual issues.”45
Nevertheless, “cosmopolitanism, in its wide and wavering nets,
catches something of our need to ground our sense of mutuality
in conditions of mutability, and to learn to live tenaciously in
terrains of historic and cultural transition.”46
While
cosmopolitanism is still a useful category, it needs to be
constrained due to lack of definition, in contrast to globalization
and violence that needed to be expanded due to overly narrow
definitions.
Actually, the notion that cosmopolitanism lacks
definition is imprecise because the real problem is not that there
is no definition but that there are too many contradictory
definitions that serve to deny cosmopolitanism any kind of
cultural or intellectual currency. The aspects of
cosmopolitanism to be developed here will seek to avoid the
pitfalls of many of these contradictory definitions and elucidate
a coherent and consistent cosmopolitan theory in response to the
contemporary experience of globalizing violence. The pitfalls to
be avoided include association “with ‘the revolt of the elites’,
the inability of upper and middle class groups to sustain a sense
of responsibility towards the growing numbers of the excluded
around the world”47
and the danger that cosmopolitansim “can
be seen as just an extension of the Enlightenment’s Eurocentric
humanism, retaining much of its sense of self-importance and
universalistic authority.”48
Avoiding these will mean
specifically taking up the very responsibility that
45
Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh
Chakrabarty. “Cosmopolitanisms.” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 577. 46
ibid, 580. 47
Mike Featherstone. “Cosmopolis: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture &
Society 19.1–2 (2002): 1. 48
Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh
Chakrabarty. “Cosmopolitanisms:” 3.
Overcoming Violence 69
cosmopolitanism is sometimes charged with reneging and
transcending modern western self-righteousness.
Cosmopolitan Virtue and Contextualized Detachment
One of the side effects of the hopefully more
comprehensively accurate and honest exposition of globalization
articulated here is that it also manages to highlight both the
problems and possibilities entailed in the phenomenon observed.
Bryan Turner draws upon the possibilities inherent in
globalization in articulating a theory of cosmopolitan virtue:
“As globalization brings about cultural hybridization,
globalism multiplies and brings into question the
‘plausibility structures’ that are competing for authority and
legitimacy. The speed and interactive capacity of
electronic communication imposes an endless reflecivity
about religious phenomena and subjectively undermines
the plausibility of an authoritative, compelling, or final
vocabulary of divinity … Globalization opens up the
possibility of an ethical concern (cosmopolitan virtue) for
the authenticity and survival of other cultures, and that
recognition of our common frailty and precariousness can
provide a foundational ontology to underpin a shared
community.”49
Of course, this leaves the question unanswered as to whether
concern for the “survival of other cultures” would be necessary
without globalization. Nevertheless, Turner points out, similarly
to the position taken here, that globalization is nothing new, at
least not for religion, if not inherent to the human condition.50
While Immanuel Kant is responsible for introducing the
concept “cosmopolitan” in its modern form, it was originally
developed by Greek Stoics philosophers and is etymologically
49
Bryan S. Turner. “Globalization and the Future Study of Religion.” in
Slavica Jakelic and Lori Pearson eds. The Future of the Study of Religion.
(Leiden: Brill, 2004): 106. 50
ibid: 120.
70 theologies and cultures
derived from the Greek words κοσμος (“the order of nature or
the universe”) and πολις (“the order of human society”),51
or
“being a citizen of two worlds.”52
It is easy to understand why,
in the face of such a massive appropriation of responsibility,
cosmopolitans often do not measure up to their own aspirations.
In order to avoid such reneging, Turner takes a surprising turn in
his articulation of cosmopolitan virtue by putting Socratic irony
at the center of his project. “The principal component of
cosmopolitan virtue is thus irony, because the understanding of
other cultures is assisted by some emotional distance from our
local culture.”53
He describes the ironic stance in terms of two
pairs of properties: hot/cool identity or loyalty and thick/thin
community or solidarity. Cosmopolitan virtue forms thin
communities characterized by anonymity, mobility, and
disconnection and cool solidarities characterized by
unidimensionality and high definition.54
For Turner, those who
adopt such a stance will “always hold their views about the
social world in doubt, because such views are always subject to
revision and reformulation.”55
The comprehensive components
of cosmopolitan virtue are as follows:
1. Irony, both as a cultural method and as a contemporary
mentality in order to achieve some emotional distance
from our own local history and culture.
2. Reflexivity with respect to other cultural values and a
recognition that all perspectives are culturally and
historically conditioned and contingent.
3. Scepticism towards the grand narratives of modern
ideologies.
4. Care for other cultures, especially Aboriginal cultures,
arising from awareness of their precarious condition
and hence acceptance of cultural hybridization.
51
Mike Featherstone. “Cosmopolis: An Introduction:” 2. 52
Ulrich Beck. “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies.” Theory,
Culture & Society 19.1–2 (2002): 18. 53
Bryan S. Turner. “Globalization and the Future Study of Religion:” 127. 54
ibid: 128-9. 55
ibid: 129.
Overcoming Violence 71
5. An ecumenical commitment to dialogue with other
cultures, especially religious cultures.
6. Nomadism, in the sense of never being fully at home
in cultural categories or geo-political boundaries, and
constant awareness of difference and otherness that
these categories and boundaries exclude.56
Socratic irony only half solves the problem though. To
complete the turn, Turner adds the concept of vulnerability as
motivating factor for positive cross-cultural interaction.
“Because as human beings we are vulnerable, we are dependent
upon one another for support in satisfying our needs and
securing our lives. Our vulnerability is an important component
of our dependency and interconnectedness with other people.”57
All of these components conform nicely to the definition of
cosmopolitanism from Ulrich Beck: “the central defining
characteristic of a cosmopolitan perspective is the ‘dialogic
imagination.’ By this I mean the clash of cultures and
rationalities within one’s own life, the ‘internalized other.’”58
One of the central problems with the cosmopolitanism
espoused by Turner is that it is not ironic enough regarding its
own socio-political situatedness. This becomes clear when the
question is posed, from what does irony provide distance? One
answer is contained in the first component of cosmopolitan
virtue: “our own local history and culture.” This is clarified
when Turner says “irony may only be possible once one already
has an emotional commitment to a place. Patriotism, in this
sense, may be not only compatible with irony, but its
precondition.”59
Turner is already revealing the continued
centrality of the nation-state in his frame of reference or
Weltenschauung that has not been challenged by the irony he
56
Bryan S. Turner and Chris Rojek. Society and Culture: Principles of
Scarcity and Solidarity. (London: SAGE, 2001): 223. 57
Bryan S. Turner. “Globalization and the Future Study of Religion:” 132. 58
Ulrich Beck. “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies:” 18. 59
Bryan S. Turner. “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism.”
Theory, Culture & Society 19.1–2 (2002): 55.
72 theologies and cultures
promotes when saying “ironists are homeless people who are in
some sense dislodged from their traditional worlds and find
themselves in new situation where old answers no longer work.
They are inclined toward reflexivity, because they get the point
of hermeneutic anthropology. In this anthropologically
reflexive context, the world is a site of contested loyalties and
interpretations.”60
While he is clearly inclined toward
reflexivity, his loyalty to the nation-state is not contested. He
clearly wants to avoid the pitfall of Eurocentrism: “My proposal
for cosmopolitan virtue is addressed to precisely those powers
responsible for genocide in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo and
Rwanda, and equally for global warming, the global narcotics
industry and the global sales of small arms. These virtues are
elitist in the sense that they are initially addressed to those in
power to exercise a set of obligations.”61
But would it be
possible for Turner to maintain his patriotism if the irony he
wants to bring to bear upon it traced the causal chain back to the
powers at least partly responsible for those genocides and it
turned out that his homeland was to be found at the source?
What would happen when the result of exercising irony
demonstrated that the very establishments of the states he lists
are due to the imperialist practices of his homeland? What will
be the object of ironic reflection when the rug of the nation-state
is pulled out from under?
Turner finally shows himself incapable of fully
theorizing a response to globalization when he says “classical
cosmopolitanism was a necessary product of Roman
imperialism, but contemporary globalization cannot be easily or
effectively dominated or orchestrated by a single political
power.”62
Turner admits that he focuses on cultural
globalization as opposed to the more comprehensive approach to
the term taken here. Nevertheless, his claim can only be true in
either respect of globalization if the nation-state is understood to
60
Bryan S. Turner. “Globalization and the Future Study of Religion:” 130. 61
Bryan S. Turner. “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism:” 61. 62
Bryan S. Turner. “Globalization and the Future Study of Religion:” 128.
Overcoming Violence 73
be the sole means of exercising political power. Friedman’s
“Globalization 2.0,” which began over 200 years ago,
demonstrates that political power can be and is being carried out
by multinational, international, and transnational organizations,
especially through economic means.63
This is not to say that the
nation-state is entirely irrelevant; the tension exerted between
these organizations and nation-states is part of what generates
the driving forces of globalization. Furthermore, the tension is
creative in the sense that actors operating under a single τελος
are manipulating it. There is not a single organizational
structure, but many organizational structures are unified in terms
of will by being oriented toward the same goals and by
exercising the same imperialistic means of achieving them.
There is, in fact, a single political power at work. Failing to
recognize this should not be surprising given an inadequate
theoretic of globalization coupled with a response that has not
been followed through to completion.
Nevertheless, it is never a good idea to throw the baby
out with the bathwater, and so we turn to Amanda Anderson to
rescue the irony Turner tried to establish. Anderson, working
out of the fields of literary and cultural theory, requires making
a shift from the language of cosmopolitanism to the language of
detachment, with the added benefit of clarifying the link
between cosmopolitanism and irony. “I favor detachment as an
umbrella term which, in my usage, can refer not only to the
more strictly cultural and internationalist practices found under
the rubric of cosmopolitanism, but also to those systemic or
objectifying critique of power that characterize social science or
critical theory.”64
The link between cosmopolitanism and irony
63
Note that I am expanding Friendman’s claim slightly to include more than
corporations and more than economic power. 64
Amanda Anderson. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the
Cultivation of Detachment. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): 31.
Note also that on this page and the subsequent one Anderston offers a
critique of cosmopolitanism in a different language but with the same point
as my critique of Turner.
74 theologies and cultures
is seen here because she uses the term detachment to describe
the same phenomenon of irony that Turner seeks to capture but
links it directly to cosmopolitanism itself. Furthermore, her
conception of detachment is going to display more humility than
irony in Turner right from the start because her project is to
describe “a prevalent Victorian preoccupation with distinctly
modern practices of detachment, a preoccupation characterized
by ambivalence and uncertainty about what the significance and
consequences of such practices might be.”65
Already, Anderson
is advocating a double reflexivity: first upon the object and then
upon the practice of reflexion itself. This approach might be
better termed a praxiological approach in that it includes a
reflection upon practice.
While recognizing the many critiques of detachment,
especially by postmodern critics, Anderson sets them aside as
having an inadequately narrow conception of the category,
instead asserting that different types of detachment have become
prevalent. “The emphases are simply reversed, as irony and
radical disaffiliation are elevated over the now disparaged ideals
of disinterestedness, objectivity, and reason.”66
It is not that
detachment has been abandoned; it is simply that some types of
detachment have been found to be inadequate to the
circumstances and so other types have been taken up. For
example, “Queer theory strongly valorizes certain forms of
detachment in its radical anti-essentialism, in its paradoxical
conception of communities of disidentification, and in its
political investment in parody and other subversive practices of
denaturalization.”67
Furthermore, she finds in the debates
between Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer that
“critical reflection or postconventional critique can take a
plurality of forms, including reflective return to tradition or
65
ibid: 3. see also ibid: 180. 66
ibid: 27. Note the inclusion of irony as a type within the category of
detachment. This is a more narrow use of irony than Turner whose usage is
equivalent to Anderson’s detachment. 67
ibid: 26.
Overcoming Violence 75
primary affiliations, a committed devotion to systemic analysis
and wholesale social transformation, or a persistent attitude of
rebellion or irony.”68
Ironically, it is precisely such an irony for
which Turner is unable to account in his exposition of the term.
Anderson ultimately rescues the relevance of detachment
in a tour de force explication including motivation by “various
aspirations and ambivalences”69
and also:
The cultivation of detachment involves an attempt to
transcend partiality, interests, and context: it is an
aspiration toward universality and objectivity. The norms
through which that aspiration finds expression may be
situated, the aspiration may always be articulated through
historically available forms, but as an aspiration it cannot
be reduced to a simple form of illusion, or a mere
psychological mechanism. There are practitioners of
detachment who are as certain of their achievement as Fish
is of his argument, but there are also practitioners of
detachment who are ambivalent, hesitant, uneasy, and
sometimes quite thoughtfully engaged in a complex process
of self-interrogation and social critique.70
Embedded in this explication is an important clue to the success
of her theory, especially as it answers the question, to where
does the subject detaching from the (as yet still undefined)
object detach? Whence does the detached observer project their
gaze? Many of the criticisms of detachment are really attacking
the notion of a “view from nowhere,”71
which “is always
actually a view from somewhere, a somewhere determined not
only by the social and cultural identity of the author but also by
historical and cultural horizons more broadly construed. Yet to
call a practice of detachment situated is not quite the same thing
as adopting a prevailing attitude of suspicion or dismissal
68
ibid: 29-30. 69
ibid: 177. 70
ibid: 33. 71
ibid: 5. Quoting Thomas Nagel. The View from Nowhere. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986).
76 theologies and cultures
toward it.”72
She admits that there is no such thing as a “view
from nowhere,” and so provides for a somewhere whence to take
the view. It is this somewhere as opposed to “nowhere” that
makes this theory a contextualized detachment.
The validity of the critique of “the view from nowhere”
without providing a somewhere is what makes Turner incapable
of articulating a relevant notion of irony. He is forced to cast his
ironic gaze only from within and so is never able to take the
truly critical stance that Anderson finds quite possible: “In
extreme instances, cultural conditions might even require the
social critic to become an exile, to radically separate him- or
herself from the reified customs and practices of a corrupt
society. In this conception, then, some form of disidentification
(as a radicalization of postconventionality) structures social
criticism itself and may lead in rare instances to actual or virtual
separation from a particular society.”73
Contrary to critics of
detachment who are “unable to imagine critical distance as a
temporary vantage, unstable achievement, or regulative idea: it’s
all or nothing,”74
Anderson carves out short-lived spaces whence
to engage the object of the detached gaze. This leaves three
questions as yet unanswered: what are these short-lived spaces?
how can one move into them? and what is the object of the
detached gaze?
Anderson does not answer the first question directly, but
it is hard to believe that she envisions the short-lived spaces as
purely fictive imaginings as they would be hardly more relevant
than “the view from nowhere.” Even though the literary works
she engages are fictional, they are meant to have meaning for
real people and so the relevance question is still valid. Instead,
it is more likely that she would encourage the critic to
imaginatively cross over into the life and context of a concrete
other. This is where Turner’s notions of dependency and
72
Amanda Anderson. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the
Cultivation of Detachment: 5. 73
ibid: 27. 74
ibid: 32.
Overcoming Violence 77
interconnectedness come into play by providing a relevant
motive for (value in) engaging the short-lived spaces of concrete
otherness: we are finally dependent upon the other to satisfy our
own needs and secure our own lives. The short-lived spaces are
people, places, things and ideas that are significantly different
from where the subject presently stands and so other. This leads
to the second question of means for moving into these spaces
but with the caveat added by the notion of dependency that such
means should achieve alterity while preserving the otherness of
the other.
Miroslav Volf offers a profound answer to this second
question, successfully fulfilling the caveat, in his theology of
embrace. Volf describes four movements that constitute an
embrace. It must be noted that all four movements must be
present for a successful embrace to occur. The first movement,
opening the arms, is not only an indication of willingness to
engage the other but an invitation borne in desire to do so. The
second movement, waiting, recognizes that an embrace cannot
be a motion in one direction but must be reciprocated by the one
being embraced. The third movement, closing the arms, is the
goal of embrace indicated by reciprocity and a soft touch, which
preserves the otherness of the one being embraced by coming to
“the ability to not understand.” It also excludes those not held
within the arms; the view from somewhere is not a view from
everywhere. Last, in opening the arms in the fourth movement,
the other is allowed to remain other, as opposed being absorbed
into the subject, and difference may continue to be negotiated.75
The concept that makes embrace superior to inclusive or
exclusive identities is “the ability to not understand.” As posited
by Z.D. Gurevitch, this ability comes through a process of
dialogue that moves beyond the twofold movement from the
“inability to understand” to the “ability to understand.”
Gurevitch posits a fourfold movement that begins with the
previous two steps and then moves on to the “inability to not
75
Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of
Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996): 140-7.
78 theologies and cultures
understand” and finally, the “ability to not understand.” This
movement requires “a different type of ability and power – not
that of additive knowledge (more information and explanations),
but rather that of giving up information and explanation to make
the already familiarized strange again.”76
In other words, this
movement allows for the preservation of the otherness of the
other.
This leaves the third question that must be answered
anew after the inadequacy of the nation-state response exposed
in Turner: what is the object of the detached gaze? The situated
self. Such an answer requires some explication. First, it begs
the question, situated where? At this point in the process of
detachment, the self is situated in two places: in its source
context from which it detached and in its detached context to
which it detached. It is from the detached context that the self
considers itself as situated in the source context. However, the
condition is actually more complex due to the praxiological
approach Anderson takes with its double reflexivity to consider
the practice of detachment. This means that a second stage of
detachment to yet another somewhere is necessary in order to
have a context from which to consider the first detached context.
This process could seemingly go on ad infinitum! Indeed, such
a process seems to be the most gracious reading of what Turner
is trying to get at by advocating for thin communities and cool
solidarities. Of course, the secondary and following levels of
detachment are not directly relevant to the particular concern
that instigated the movement of detachment in the first place but
are indirectly relevant as they obliquely and transiently justify
and confirm the conclusions drawn from the vantage of the
primary detachment. Also, it would be entirely consistent with
the desire to justify and confirm, albeit obliquely and transiently,
76
Z.D. Gurevitch “The Power of Not Understanding: The Meeting of
Conflicting Identities.” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 25.2
(1989): 163. This paragraph and the previous are excerpted from my
“Ecclesiology and Identity.” unpublished manuscript. (Fall 2004): 4.
Overcoming Violence 79
for one of the subsequent levels of detachment to move back to
the source context.77
The second area of necessary explication comes up in
reference to the notion of self. Robert Cummings Neville
recognizes the imperialistic fallacy of essentializing human
nature.78
Furthermore, some social constructivists would like to
claim that the search for the self is like peeling an onion only to
discover, after peeling away all of the layers, that there is no
core, that the layers themselves constitute the onion. Both of
these are correct. Claiming an essence to human nature is an
inclusivistic move that then seeks to conform the natures of
every human being to it imperialistically. Also, the self is only a
self in relation to the other like God is only god in relation to
those others for whom God is god.79
Nevertheless, Neville
admits that there is “something very like” a self, namely that
which is in relationship. “The essence of a person is how that
person moves through intentionality structures uniquely his or
her own and in significant measure the person’s own responsible
creation.”80
Notice that essence here is not understood
universally but particularly and so every person has a particular
essence, is a self, who cannot be a priori prescribed.
77
This can perhaps be best understood in terms of “orientational pluralism”
as developed in S. Mark Heim. Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion.
pgs. 129-44. Heim is not quite willing to give up the normativity of the
source context, at least for the source self, whereas I am more willing to do so
while still privileging the source context in the sense of a “first among
equals.” 78
Robert Cummings Neville. “Is There an Essence of Human Nature?” in Is
There a Human Nature? ed. Leroy S. Rouner. (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1997): 92-109. 79
This notion of God as god in relation is in continuity with what I
understand Robert Cummings Neville to be doing in Symbols of Jesus: A
Christology of Symbolic Engagement. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2001): 32-44, esp. 36. For a more thorough explication, see
his God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God. (Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 1992). 80
Robert Cummings Neville. Symbols of Jesus: 219.
80 theologies and cultures
One of the primary things that a self does is to act
subjectively by taking others as objects. This is the notion of
“movement through” in Neville’s definition of the essence of a
person above: the implication is that a self applies the
intentionality structures, or at least peers through them as
through a lens, in order to grasp the world around. Furthermore,
one of the objects the self seeks to grasp subjectively is in fact
the self; hence the need for detachment or irony. Rudolf
Bultmann claims that this is impossible: “The relying self is my
existential self; the other self on which I rely, taking it as
something objective, is a phantom without existential reality.”81
To the contrary, if the self cannot take itself as object, then the
only possible means of orientation through intentionality
structures is by grasping and manipulating the external objects
of experience: imperialism.82
Instead, the self subjectively takes
itself as object in order to properly orient itself amidst all of the
other objects of experience. This act is the responsible and
ongoing creation and adaptation of intentionality structures
through which the self interacts with the rest of the world. Both
must be real or else the self is not really properly oriented
(although it still may not be) because there must be both
something oriented and something that orients. In this case, the
self is simultaneously both, albeit acting in different roles and so
differentiated. Turner ended up having the self become
differentiated or detach within itself and the types of detachment
subject to critique seek to differentiate or detach to nowhere.
Instead, the self detaches to the other objects to experience in
order to properly orient itself amongst them.
81
Rudolph Bultmann. “What Does it Mean to Speak of God?” in Faith and
Understanding. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969): 56. 82
Actually, Bultmann would probably claim that the self orienting itself is a
work. Instead, the orientation of the self comes about purely as a gift from
God. I am more willing to accept a bit of pelagianism and admit human
participation in the process of sanctification.
Overcoming Violence 81
After such abstract considerations, it is important to
return to the more practical question: so what? How is this
helpful as a response to globalizing violence? I want to suggest
two possibilities. First, Turner is right to direct his
cosmopolitan virtue to those responsible for globalizing violence,
even though he is insufficiently critical in understanding the role
of the nation-state in exercising that violence. The imperialism
that brings about globalizing violence cannot simply reorient the
objects of experience around it, (that would simply be more
imperialism), but must instead reorient itself in relation to those
it is violating. The detachment required for such a project
cannot be undertaken to a “view from nowhere” but must
simultaneously be self-critical of the imperialistic tendency to
overcome the other in detaching to a view from the perspective
of the other. Of course, actually getting imperialists to adopt
such a practice is another matter entirely!
Second, Z.D. Gurevitch concludes her analysis of
dialogue between conflicting identities by noting the power of
moving from “the inability to not understand” to “the ability to
not understand.” She notes that “an impasse brings about a
mutual realization of defeat – the defeat of the dialogue itself,”
but then “what seems like a defeat becomes a triumph – yet this
is not the triumph of the self, but of the other as other for the
self.”83
This analysis strikes a strongly christological chord.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus engaged conflicting identities:
intra Jewish and Jewish-gentile, as well as the conflicting
identities of the people of God and God-self. This engagement,
which sought to move beyond the inability to not understand,
resulted in the crucifixion. On Good Friday, those who
recognized Jesus as the messiah, the Christ, experienced the
defeat of the mission of God, the defeat of the dialogue between
conflicting identities. And yet, what seemed like a defeat
became a triumph on Easter Sunday. The resurrection was not
83
Z.D. Gurevitch “The Power of Not Understanding: The Meeting of
Conflicting Identities:” 172.
82 theologies and cultures
the triumph of God for God but was the triumph of God become
human as humanity for God.84
The “ability to not understand” can be a resurrectional
experience for those for whom understanding is a central part of
the human project. Letting go of the impulse toward
understanding creates space for valuation of otherness and an
aesthetic response. Often enough, it means taking reality more
seriously in its otherness than an obsessive grasping for
knowledge. For example, when learning about Minjung
theology, we were told not to try to understand the concept of
Han. It is too particular to the cultural ethos of Korea and
cannot be understood even by many Koreans who participate in
it, let alone outsiders for whom it is not part of the intentionality
structure. Furthermore, “the ability to not understand,” as a
resurrectional experience, resists the imperialist inclusivist
impulse to make the other like the self by applying humility to
self-righteousness and so exposing its roots in (often unfounded)
existential fear and angst. Similarly, it resists the exclusivist
urge to violence by making the otherness of “them” not only
acceptable but also valuable and so exposes the roots of
exclusivism in the same (often unfounded) existential fear and
angst as the inclusivists.
The constrained cosmopolitanism presented here
attempts to avoid many of the pitfalls of other cosmopolitanisms.
It would be irresponsible not to point out a particular definition
that the explication here not only seeks to avoid but seeks to
redress. Anderson cites Tim Brennan who claims, “that
cosmopolitanism, particularly in present-day America, is fully
compatible with a neocolonial nationalism. Indeed, he argues
that America ideologically forwards its own culture as the global
culture, using a mystified cosmopolitanism to advance its own
84
Much of this paragraph to this point is excerpted from my “Ecclesiology
and Identity:” 4-5.
Overcoming Violence 83
interests through global capitalism.”85
The cosmopolitanism
endorsed here seeks to counter this by insisting that the other is
not to be overcome or displaced in the process of embrace but is
to be valued as a willing partner in becoming a better self.
Transmodernity
Contrary to popular modernist opinion, most of the
violence occurring in the world today is not direct personal
violence as in the terrorism so central to media attention and
thus feared by the populace. In fact, most of the violence is
indirect structural violence being carried out especially through
economic means accompanying the processes of globalization
by modernist inclusivist imperialists against those who are other.
This is not a phenomenon that can best be explained
geographically or even ethnically because those same processes
of globalization have facilitated both a transmission of people to
non-native parts of the globe and facilitated the ideological
spread of modernist thinking virtually (again, pun intended) unto
all corners of the globe. As a result, some of the modernist
imperialists are from and continue to live in non-western
geographical societies, and in fact their imperialism is more
effective as a result. This is one of the ways cosmopolitanism
can be construed to favor imperialism. Furthermore, some of
those colonized and exploited by the imperialists live in western
and traditionally modern countries and societies.
Perhaps the best presentation of and relevant response to
this experience is the notion of transmodernity as articulated by
Enrique Dussel.86
Contrary to the opinion of most moderns,
85
Amanda Anderson. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the
Cultivation of Detachment: 65. paraphrasing Tim Brennan. At Home in the
World: Cosmopolitanism Now. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 86
I am primarily going to engage Dussel and his notion of transmodernity as
it is expressed in Enrique Dussel. “Transmodernidad e Interculturalidad:
Interpretación desde la Filosofía de la Liberación.” (México City, México:
UAM-Iz., 2005): [online]. available from http://www.afyl.org/articulos.html.
accessed 19 Feb 2007. All translations are my own.
84 theologies and cultures
Dussel argues that cultural identities that moderns assume were
destroyed by colonialism are in fact still extant by various
means and in various forms. “These cultures have been in part
colonized, … but in the majority structure of their values have
been more excluded, depreciated, negated, and ignored than
annihilated.”87
Because the cultures are not modern, and so can
neither be postmodern, they irrupt “as from nowhere” from the
perspective of modernity that is incapable of recognizing alterity,
and so are termed transmodern. The alternative perspective
offered by these seemingly invisible cultures are similarly
impossible to the modern mindset, being that they do not follow
modern methods and assumptions in developing solutions to the
problems modernity and postmodernity face.
The first step in the theory of transmodernity is affirming
the self-worth of the identities of the colonized cultures, and
“negating the negation”88
of those cultures, to begin the process
of decolonization. “This first step is a remembering of the past
from an identity which either had been before modernity or that
has evolved imperceptibly in inevitable and secret contact with
modernity.”89
This is followed by self-critique of the cultures
based on the assumptions of that culture. Furthermore, “the
intellectual critic should be someone located ‘between’ (in
betweeness) the two cultures (their own and modernity). This is
the idea of ‘border’ between two cultures as a place of ‘critical
thought.’”90
This is followed by a period of maturation, taking
time for “study, reflection, return to the texts or the constitutive
symbols and myths of the home culture, before or at least at the
same time as the dominion of the texts of the modern hegemonic
culture.”91
The necessity of this part of the process results from
the need to resist not only “the elites of other cultures” but also
“the eurocentrism of the very elites of the periferal, colonial,
87
ibid: 17. 88
ibid: 19. 89
ibid: 20. 90
ibid: 22. 91
ibid.
Overcoming Violence 85
fundamentalist culture itself.”92
Finally, there is a call for
“transmodern liberators” who come from the “exteriority” of
modernity and embody these principles.93
These liberators
“should not deny all of modernity from a substantive purist
identity of their own culture” but should instead seek to
establish a “pluriverse,” in contrast to an “undifferentiated or
empty globalized unity,” out of critical intercultural dialogue.94
There are three things to be profitably drawn out from
this theory. First, this is a cosmopolitan theory that is clearly
against imperialism but is cosmopolitan because it seeks to
cultivate a process of detachment as part of a response to
globalizing violence. Indeed, it is the very “biculturality”95
of
the transmodern liberators who straddle the border of their own
culture and modernity that makes this a critical as opposed to a
purely reactionary enterprise. It may at first seem odd that
transmodernity carries the category of critique (criticism, critical)
over into its enterprise, as it is one of the centerpieces of modern
philosophizing. However, this carry over makes more sense in
light of Dussel’s rescuing of philosophical practice by
redefining it. “If, on the other hand, by ‘love of wisdom’ you
mean the intent of organized, reflexive discourse that permits a
certain ethical-ontological comprehension of the totality of that
which one has experienced of reality, following
methodologically diverse organizational criteria according to a
rational order in the discourse, that can have its own
development in each culture, evidently the theories emanated
from Taoism, Buddhism, Brahmanic ontology or the ‘wisdom’
of the amautas or the tlamatinime are authentic “philo-
sophias.”96
In fact, this notion of philosophy and the carryover
of critique, especially in the form of the adapted cosmopolitan
virtue developed above, centering on a notion of critical
92
ibid: 23. 93
ibid: 24. 94
ibid: 25. 95
ibid: 24. 96
ibid: 25.
86 theologies and cultures
detachment critical detachment, would seem to be necessarily
central to the process of intercultural dialogue.
Second, the notion of “pluriversality” seems to
inherently adopt a necessarily “ability to not understand.” In
order for a true global plurality to emerge, there must be an
indelibly incorporated notion of otherness so that it does not
simply collapse into mere uniformity. This means that there
must be a limit to the pursuit of the intercultural dialogue
significantly before the risk of uniformity becomes apparent.
The limit is not so much temporally situated between plurality
and uniformity so that there is tipping point after which
uniformity is inevitable. Instead it is an inbreaking of the
transcendent made recognizable by the cultivation of value in
otherness that will insist that the process of embrace be repeated
continually and will resist the assumption of understanding and
thus either including or excluding the other. It is precisely such
a cultivation that the adapted theory of cosmopolitan virtue
above seeks to articulate.
Finally, there is an interesting analogy between the
explicit utopianism in the transmodernity theory and the
apocalyptic worldview of second temple Judaism. Horsley
pointed out three roles of the apocalyptic worldview in resisting
structural violence: remembrance of God’s promise of blessing
and liberation, creative envisioning of potential life without
these forms of violence, and critical demystifying of the
interpretations of the violence imposed by the established order.
These three roles find their analogies in transmodernity:
remembering cultures that are assumed to be extinct and so
appear ex nihilo, envisioning during the process of maturation
by reflection on the constituting texts, symbols, and myths of the
culture, and critical demystifying by using the both the
categories of the culture and of modernity itself against the
globalizing European-North American culture, “whose
Overcoming Violence 87
pretension of universality must be deconstructed from the
optical multifocality of each culture.”97
There is a further analogy between the project of
transmodernity and the means by which the earliest recorded
Christ believers sought to resist the Roman Empire by recourse
to constituting texts, symbols and myths of their culture.
William E. Arnal elucidates this in his discussion of these Christ
believers who created Q1 which was later redacted into a Q
document before being incorporated into the Gospels according
to Matthew and Luke along with the Gospel according to Mark.
“The critique is simultaneously progressive and reactionary: it
harks back to a past that was no more genuinely beatific than the
authors’ present, but simultaneously it uses that past as a lever to
offer serous class-based criticisms of the present order.”98
Similarly, transmodernity harks back to cultures thought to be
extinct while recognizing that these cultures carry their own sets
of baggage but still uses those cultures to critique the present
order. “What is at issue here is not a rejection of native
traditions but an effort to revive those traditions, to apply a
brand of nativistic revival against the encroachments of
imperialism.”99
Conclusion: Ecumenical Spirituality
Globalization is nothing new. What is new is that the
parasitic cancer of this planet, humanity in the view of The
Matrix, has sucked dry the planetary resources and so has now
turned on itself. There will, indeed, be a cure: either humanity
will consume itself, and probably the rest of the planet with it, or
it will find an alternative essence, an alternative way of orienting
itself in relation to God, to the rest of creation, and to itself. The
Christian hope is in the latter vision and the hope has already
97
ibid: 24. 98
William E. Arnal. Jesus and the Villiage Scribes. (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 2001): 202. 99
ibid: 203.
88 theologies and cultures
begun to be realized in the person of Jesus Christ. The question
is, will that realization come to fruition in us?
Spirituality is not merely the work of the Holy Spirit in
the bodies, hearts, minds, and spirits of people, although it is
surely that. Spirituality is also the intentional seeking after the
Holy Spirit in body, heart, mind, and spirit by people. Life in
the Spirit must be attentively cultivated with great care and
perseverance. What I have attempted to elucidate here is a
framework for living such a life, an intentionality structure
through which the Holy Spirit might be discerned from amongst
all of the other spirits blowing about in the world.
I claim that this spirituality is ecumenical. What I do not
intend by that is to have constructed a house (ecumenical is
derived from the Greek word οικος meaning “house”) in which
everyone on the planet should or must live. Instead, I seek to
provide a set of tools to use in building a house together. This
house should be hospitable to all of our human sisters and
brothers as well as the extensive extended family we have been
graced with in creation who will bring their own unique tools to
the process of construction and who should be warmly
welcomes as partners in the task. In God’s house there are many
rooms, each decorated according to the way(s) of being of its
inhabitant(s), each of immeasurable value in its otherness.
Life is short and we do not have too much time to
gladden the hearts of those who walk the way with us: so be
swift to love and make haste to be kind.100
Go with God, and
may the peace of Christ go with you.
100
attributed to Marcus Borg.
theologies and cultures,Vol.3, No.2
December 2006, pp. 89-126
Globalization and Communication
Preparedness: Risk Assessment of SARS
CChhoouu KKuueeii--TTiieenn11
his article reflects the emergency measures taken by
the Taiwanese government during the SARS outbreak,
particularly risk assessment and risk communication. Being
trapped in the traditional mode of medical emergency measures,
the government failed to consider the dialectical influences
among society, psychology, environment, and medicine. Due to
ignorance, risks spread throughout society. In addition, the
timing of information propaganda and communication was
unsatisfactory. Thus, fears arose among the public, particularly
those who were not clear about SARS infection routes. This
article specifically indicates that emergency measures models
1 Prof. Dr. Chou Kuei-Tien teaches at the Graduate Institute of National
Development, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
T
90 theologies and cultures
should cooperate with multi-dimensional risk assessment and
risk communication, as well as social and ethical concerns.
Therefore, a set of communicative mechanisms can be
constructively developed in response to globalizational risks.
Preface
The sustainable existence of modern countries and states
has been threatened by various risks. These risks, such as the
global financial crisis, the attack on the twin Tower on
September eleven, Taiwan’s earthquake in September 21, SARS,
floods, and nuclear accidents, result in serious uncertainties in
society, the economy, ecology, health, ethics and culture. Thus,
it is essential to face and recognize the essence of a modern
“risk society” (Beck, 1986; Chou, 1998) and to understand the
risks resulting from close interactions that occur in the
globalization process. Also, it is a great challenge for a modern
society to construct and combine local and national resources in
advance in order to form risk preventive mechanisms2.
For instance, globalizational risks caused by SARS are
categorized as the following: 1) unpredictable factors of disease
outbreak; 2) unmanageable strategies due to spreading viruses; 3)
transboundary spread of viruses. The SARS outbreak had
implication on the following aspects: medical care, sanitation,
tourism, air transportation, industry, investment, economy,
finance, unemployment, fears of social discrimination, social
trust, social ethics, politics, and national competitiveness. Hence,
a set of macroscopic preventive mechanisms should begin with
2 These characteristics of globalizational risks can be analyzed by the
‘globalization’ (Beck, 1999) and ‘dilemma of risk assessment’ theories
(Ravetz, 1999). Based on these two theories, the author argues that since risk
impacts come rapidly, globalization that is interpreted by knowledge theory
and high-tech development arguments has actually caused dilemmas due to
the uncertainties and uncontrollability of globalizational risks. In fact, such
contexts were mentioned in Bell’s 1995 book - the Coming of Post-Industrial
Society, which states that modern societies extensively apply knowledge
theory thus causing ‘indeterminacy’.
Globalizational Risk 91
overall risk assessment and then, a cautious process of
diversified and two-way risk communication should be carried
out. Based on this, the government needs to immediately focus
on constructing risk control mechanisms and integrating various
agents and resources in response to this globalizational risk.
Risk control and preventive mechanisms mainly focus on
how to rapidly and forethoughtfully reduce unlimitedly
expanding risk impacts by methods such as intervening in
harmful impacts caused by globalizational risks, establishing
risk emergency centers, carrying out cross-field political risk
decision-making, prompting risk communication and
propaganda, and utilizing diverse strategic instruments. By
enabling preventive actions, these mechanisms equip society
with the ability to confront the various impacts already
mentioned, hence, building bottom-up social risk preventive
networks.
Moreover, it is essential to construct dynamic, dialectical
and periodic risk indexes and to carry out preventive
mechanisms. State intervention is rather important at this point.
The role of the state is to integrate the resources of the central
authorities and the grassroots, then to establish information
delivery systems, emergency reaction systems, social mutual aid
systems, and resource deployment systems.
Based on the above suggestions, the author analyzes the
impacts brought about by SARS, which are deemed
globalizational risks. This article also examines the experiences,
systems, and preventive mechanisms of the state. Furthermore, it
points out the institutional deficiencies resulting from the
incomplete integration of social action resources.
Globalizational and glocalizational risks
The Characteristics of Globalizational risks
92 theologies and cultures
Globalization is both a trend of civilization and a challenge
of grand social transformation. The complexity of dissension
and integration constituted by globalization involves more value
disputes. This is because it makes society depart from traditional
paradigms and systems of resolving risks. As globalization
involves more and more variables and uncertainties, time limits
for making judgments and decisions become shorter (and some
may even need immediate resolution). Society shoulders also
more risks and challenges. Such that, people cannot be sheltered
by old models of operation and control.
From the 1990s, continuous breakthroughs in interactive
and high-tech industries (IT, genetic technology, and
nanotechnology) have gradually changed global society, the
economy, the media, labor, communication, and social
identification. They have also brought unpredictable risks and
challenges in terms of ecology, ethics, medical care, and social
injustice.
Due to the spread of globalization, these risks permeate the
world and become transnational, even surpassing the problem
resolution ability of states. Accordingly, world politics,
economies, cultures, ecology, and social order encounter stricter
challenges because of globalization (Giddens, 2001). In other
words, the coming of globalizational risks declares that modern
affairs and institutional forms have entered a state of high
uncertainty, and thus inevitably, the world becomes a global
modern risk society3.
In addition, the characteristics of globalizational risks have
become unpredictable, fast, diffusive, uncontrollable,
unrecoverable, and able to unlimitedly expand and impact more
than a single area due to trans-areas and diverse affairs in close
interactions.
3 Beck emphasizes that globalization is a myth of liberalism in global
markets. Under the ideology of development and advancement, a ‘world risk
society’ is formed in terms of politics, the economy, technology, environment
and culture (identity and ethics) in world countries (Beck, 1999).
Globalizational Risk 93
Globalizational risks are characterized by the following
(Chou, 2003):
1. Initially, globalizational risks emerge within the scope of
nation-states. Subsequently global effects expand from this one
single scope. In other words, the route through which risk
spreads expands from one single country or region to the global
stage.
2. Each risk problem is not only embedded in the framework of
political, economic, social and cultural contexts, but is rooted in
the power relationship, institutional contexts and political
culture of individual local societies. Relationships and contexts
embedded in global and local societies mutually influence each
other and this influence becomes a major factor resulting in risks.
For example, capital flow, industrial transformation, and
aggregation of local industries, which are brought about by the
competition of a global knowledge economy and high-tech
industry, all contribute to the difficulty of local financial control,
increasing unemployment, an enlargement of the poverty gap,
and the problem of emigration and immigration. These problems
impact on overall regional and global development. Global
tourism, commerce, and labor emigration and extensive
population flows make viruses spread even more rapidly. The
industrial era of tense global competition brings crises of
religious and ethical identification, and. this stimulates the rise
of local new religions, such as the Falun Gong. It even
challenges the stability of political control. With the
development of globalization, increasing risks in local societies
stimulate mutual dialectics between global and local arenas, thus
reproducing and duplicating globalizational risks in different
local societies.
3. In addition to globalizational and local dialectics, the spread
of risk should also value multilateral operations and network
nodes in different region4. Because of developments in different
4 The concept of ‘network nodes’ is from Castells’ 1996 book - The Rise of
the Network Society. The term is applied to explain that issues and activities
of globalization are fundamentally based on the foundation of global
94 theologies and cultures
local societies, mutual dynamic influences are generated. That is
to say, globalizational risks spread from a single nation or region
become global problems. In addition, through network nodes
around the globe, the dynamic spread effect is formed. That is,
globalizational and local risks are the result of mutual influences
within dense networks.
From the above viewpoint, the meaning of each
globalizational risk problem derived from different social and
cultural contexts should be valued. Moreover, every society has
its own distinct structures and operation logics, which are
embedded in its cultural or historical tradition. These structures
and logics form models of political and cultural conflicts, and
customs of public criticism. Hence, the process of prevalent
risks entering into local societies will inevitably encounter
political, institutional and cultural conflicts in local societies,
and further develop their own interpretation based on the
perspective of local societies. Accordingly, the author will
discuss the structural risk problems of Taiwanese society
regarding the SARS outbreak.
In the process of globalization, all operations of social risks
are linked with activities of network nodes. Network nodes refer
to organizations, institutes, or individuals around the world.
They represent all kinds of agents. Through the network, they
connect national and international activities and exert their
influence. The difference is that different nodes (such as
political parties, the media, social movement groups and
religious organizations) pose different degrees of influence in
society. In addition, influences that one single node may exert
can spread rapidly via the network according to the influence
level of risk issues, which may cause global-affected risk
problems.
information structures. Through different network nodes, globalizational
risks develop and spread rapidly. The author argues that these network nodes
are wide and they exist simultaneously. The effects they exert cannot be
limited within one single region or geographical boundary.
Globalizational Risk 95
From the perspective of network nodes, the interactive
dialectics between local and globalizational risks can be more
clearly analyzed. That is, any risk outbreak in local societies can
be dynamically spread worldwide via network nodes, then
impact local societies and cause even more problems. Therefore,
under this principle, local risks cannot be concealed. Actually,
concealment and delayed reporting of local risks may cause
global impacts and local disasters5. At this time, major network
nodes should exert their influence by enhancing the
transparency of the media, information from the authorities and
administrative effectiveness in order to stimulate reformation.
We are so far unable to deal with globalizational risks
without open-minded insight and strategies. On the contrary,
problems under mutual dialectics within the open global
network should be foreseen. Issues of global finance, the
poverty gap, environmental and ecological damage, and
international human rights problems, to certain degree, are all
included in the structure of globalizational risk dialectics. More
importantly, we need to position ourselves with a more open
attitude in order to deal with the irreversible developments of
globalizational risks, including the high uncertainty, rapid
accumulation, and uncontrollability of transboundary risks, such
as those caused by SARS.
SARS as a globalizational risk
SARS can be viewed as a typical globalizational risk in line
with the European bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE]
crisis, the global greenhouse effect, and food safety uncertainty
5 Jänicke’s (1998) empirical studies point out that concealing and delaying
risk governance will stimulate the risk spread effect to other regions and may
cause more serious globalizational risks. One recent case in Asia occurred at
the end of 2002, when China concealed and delayed SARS risk governance
and emergency measures thus causing rapid risk spread through network
nodes, hence causing a global threat. In a very short time, impacts spread
from public health principles to other social and economic activities.
96 theologies and cultures
caused by biotech developments in GMOs, diminishing
biodiversity, and threat of elimination of the global by nuclear
weapons. In recent years, these risks have brought great
challenges to human health and our living environment.
The characteristics of SARS include: 1) Disease origins
unpredictable beforehand and inability to be traced after risk
outbreak (Lin, R-H, 2003); 2) Rapid virus spread after infection;
3) Difficult to control and immediately formulate corresponding
strategies in response to virus variation in different areas (Chang,
L-W, 2003; Chen, C-H, 2003). In addition, virus spread speed is
quick and rather transboundary. Besides causing great scientific
risks, related impacts rapidly spread across public health
principles through the agents of global network nodes6. They
continued to cause impacts in tourism, air transportation,
industry, investment, the economy, technology, finance and
unemployment. These impacts not only resulted in serious
economic loss and political tension, but also brought fear of
social discrimination. They shook social trust and ethics (Gu,
2003) and resulted in delays in national competitiveness.
The SARS outbreak caused immense cyclical influences.
Moreover, consequent effects were duplicated and reproduced
via the operation of global network nodes. From the perspective
of local society, as long as China and other Asian countries
failed to effectively control the disease, Taiwan would be
continuously affected by SARS, due to their close
interrelationship. Similar crises would then endlessly emerge,
thus causing great social and economic costs. Furthermore,
SARS mutated into local variants (e.g. in Taiwan and
6 Actions of network nodes refer to the following: a large number of media
reports, inappropriate handling due to government misconduct in public
health management mechanisms, large-scale intra-hospital infection due to
disease infection history concealment by patients and some hospitals, and
improper design of community quarantine. These facts caused social fears,
impact on the economy, and caused interpersonal relationship recession, and
isolation in trust. Different network nodes, including institutes, the media,
communities, or individual agents, were all able to develop cyclical
influences depending on the degree of seriousness of risk impact.
Globalizational Risk 97
Singapore), which posed new threats to daily life in these
countries, consequently causing new risks that were unable to be
resolved in a short time. Before a vaccine is invented, risk
threats will exist. The SARS risk is a time-effective threat. At
the beginning of risk outbreak, the Taiwanese government
rushed to respond to the SARS risk by carrying out only limited
assessment of related health and economic effects. Thus, we
should reconsider performing multi-dimensional risk
assessments of society and ethics in order to enhance the
capacity of risk governance.
Globalizational risk contexts of SARS
SARS outbreak is a link in the chain of globalizational risk.
However, it cannot be observed from only a local perspective. In
particular, as globalizational risks erupt into local disasters and
political contexts, they often transform into distinct localized
risk problems, thus, the structure of local societies will influence
the process of how globalizational risks develop into local
threats.
In the late 1990s, Taiwan encountered various types of
disasters and risks, such as the 1996 Typhoon Herb, Typhoon
Tao-Chi in 1997, the 1997 global financial crisis, the 1999 921
Earthquake, Typhoons Na-Li and Hsiang-Shen in 2001, the
2002 Taipei drought crisis, and the 2003 SARS outbreak. Some
of them were natural calamities, and others were man-made
disasters. From an historical perspective, they are proof that
Taiwanese society has encountered highly intense and
continuous risk threats. On the one hand, these risks are global
in nature while on the other hand, they bring challenges to
Taiwanese society and turn it into a ‘risk society’. The question
is whether a local society develops a set of preventive
mechanisms and institutional culture in response to risk or not?
Based on the risk society theory, natural disasters or man-
made threats are not only simple environmental and ecological
problems. In fact, what is involved is the process of policy
98 theologies and cultures
decision-making and its institutional settings in a modern
society. For instance, these policies and institutions affect many
facets of modern life such as cement construction, dam control,
urban electricity, transportation, food security systems, and
medical systems. However, when a ‘simple’ natural disaster
happens in existing social structures, it can cause a more serious
institutional crisis, thus generating greater risk threats (Beck,
1986), that become political, social and institutional problems.
What the author intends to emphasize is that the essence of
globalizational risks is to be found in their rapid spread,
unpredictability, uncontrollability, and unlimited transboundary
impacts. Although scientific preventive mechanisms are set up,
it is also important to modify the viewpoints and strategies of
risk assessment and uncertainty communication in order to
develop a new paradigm of globalizational risk management.
And yet, what the author has observed is that, after a series
outbreak of serious local risks in Taiwan, there seemed to be no
reform either in the state or society in terms of concepts,
institution, and actions7. Society only undertook partial, limited
and temporary resolutions based on old paradigms and
imagination of risk management.
What is often seen is that technocrats carry out partial
emergency rescues based on old paradigms of scientific
positivistic assessment. Also, interactive civil networks do not
form long-term preventive integration. . These social contexts,
which are in need of modification, result in the ignoring,
delaying and deterioration of globalizational risks.
The half-modernized country and localized risks
7 Actually, many researchers have pointed out that the SARS outbreak is a
warning about global risks. If preventive systems cannot be established
globally and locally in advance, greater and more serious risks will emerge in
this century.
Globalizational Risk 99
In addition to the above discussion of risk contexts in
local society, what also deserves discussion is the overall
structure of the risk society and what linkages exist between it
and the phenomena of globalization and modernization. Thus,
the author explores the institutional deficiencies of modern
Taiwanese society.
In May 2003, while Taiwan suffered because of the SARS
crisis and was reflecting on its emergency measures and crisis
management ability (Lin, S-L, 2003), the International Institute
for Management Development International declared that
Taiwan ranked sixth in the world in terms of national
competitiveness (Chen, Y-H, 2003). This situation was highly
ironic. On the one hand, Taiwan has high international
competitiveness; one the other hand, it is very institutionally
weak in risk problem resolution. Thus, what deserves
deliberation is: what kind of institutional deficiencies does
modern society have, and, does this result from different local
and global contexts?
Being trapped in the myth of national competitiveness,
Taiwan, as a modern country, is only a ‘half-modernized
society’ (Beck 1993), which worships economic drive,
technological competition, and the effectiveness of the free
market. The principle of these ideologies is basically modeled
on economic liberalism, which emphasizes market mechanisms
and effectiveness of private corporations. Also, the state trusts in
the effectiveness of technocrats and science experts. From the
1990s, with the dominion of international political and economic
powers, these principles developed into a globalizational
economy with close exchanges and interactions. On the contrary,
great political, economic, technological and ecological threats
emerged as well, such as political terrorism, global economic
financial crises, the Y2K computer virus, genetically modified
organisms, ozone holes, endangered species, and regional wars.
These systematic risks clearly imply that contemporary
globalizational societies have structural deficiencies, which in
turn jeopardize human beings themselves. According to Beck
100 theologies and cultures
(ibid.), such kinds of national and social contexts under global
competition can all be categorized as incomplete and self-
threatening to half-modernized countries.
Taiwan can possibly be considered a half-modernized
periphery state. This is because besides continuously imitating
the developmental logic of valuing economic development and
technological R&D, the state has systematically ignored
learning and reflecting on and constructing social, ecological
and cultural solutions to the problems. Thus, the state became a
production machine in the global system of labor division.
Under such contexts, institutional justice within a globalization
society has been seriously ignored and management has been
delayed 8
. With such a developmental background, examination
of the SARS outbreak exposes serious problems when we
examine national strategies. Taiwan comes out top in the world
ranking of national competitiveness (disregarding indexes of
public policy, Taiwan’s technological competitiveness ranks
third in the world, which is only behind Finland and the US).
However, the performance of the Taiwanese government was
inferior to that of Vietnam and Singapore, which made it seem
more like a Third World country trapped by disasters.
We are curious about what kinds of risk structures will be
developed under such developmental logic. Is the myth of the
free market truly embedded in local social systems? Or, does the
arbitrariness of technocracy dominate a state that values only
development (Yeh, 1997)? Do the above phenomena jointly
result in long-term unbalanced social development that
systematically ignores and therefore accumulates risks?
Consequently, on risk outbreak, technocrats still adopt unilateral
ideology and ignore overall risk assessments.
8 Structural problems of underdeveloped societies and institutional justice can
be demonstrated from various aspects. The author’s previous research
regarding gaps formed between technology and society can be referred to for
analyzing structural problems of the Taiwanese society, which is also a
‘double risk society’ (Chou, 2000 & 2002).
Globalizational Risk 101
When Taiwanese society encountered the SARS outbreak,
fundamental structures of local risk society were revealed
through the media such as:
1) Scarce public health resources inputs and medical
systems marketization. Based on Chen’s research, of the 500
billion NT (estimated 15 billion USD) input into the medical
health budget, only 3% was used for public health prevention
(Chen, M-H, 2003).
2) Indulgence in the medical market (Huang, 2003) resulted
in ineffectiveness of the national medical dispatch system (Wei
and Lin, 2003).
3) Unilateral national risk assessment (which only focused
on emergency mobilization in public health and medical care)
ignored the features of globalizational risks such as rapid spread
and transboundary impacts.
4) The government neglected the importance of risk
communication. At the initial stage, society lacked quickly
integrated and reliable risk information. The media arbitrarily
duplicated and exaggerated the seriousness of the SARS risk,
thus generating public fear and impacting economic and social
activities (Chou, 2003).
5) The administration was limited in its ability to deal with
globalizational risks. It was the first time that the government
encountered this kind of risk, thus local health departments held
limited resources. Thus, the central authorities had the
responsibility to mobilize resources (Gu, 2003; Ho, 2003).
6) Citizens violated quarantine regulations. Besides
educating the public to abide by laws, it is important for citizens
to have interactive risk communication and information to
enable them to gain more knowledge in terms of legal rights and
obligations, and for SARS prevention.
7) Social autonomous action systems were not efficiently
integrated for the carrying out of risk preventive actions. From
the time of the SARS outbreak, many autonomous actions were
undertaken and information was released, which to a certain
degree established information transparency and social learning.
102 theologies and cultures
However, the government still lacked integrated action
mechanisms.
8) The government failed to establish integrated
precautionary risk control concepts and systems and lacked the
ability to integrate effective networks for combining national
and local resources (Chien, L-C, 2003; Lin, 2003; Ho, 2003).
As a matter of fact, the basic risk structures of local society
demonstrate the weaknesses and unbalance of risk governance.
Meanwhile, official unilateral risk assessment that only governs
medical emergencies ignore the integrating of social networks
and resources. It is observed that while encountering the SARS
risk, the government could only undertake partial rescue and
risk control. The state, which was in a state of panic and half-
paralyzed, was busy dealing with a medical mobilization system.
And, risk information was not spread to society. Society
suffered because of careless risk information and lacked
judgments and viewpoints about the overall economic and social
impacts. In other words, from the lessons of SARS risk handling,
we need to reflect on the various risk management experiences
in local society to build a set of preventive mechanisms.
Reconstructing risk preventive mechanisms:
Integrated risk assessment of globalizational risks: the
precautionary principle
A set of preventive paradigms should be established in
response to the uncertainty, uncontrollability, unpredictability
and ir-recoverability of globalizational risks. Actually, most
concepts of risk control in social science are still limitedly based
on the ideology of the nation-state, so they fail to provide
effective strategies in response to rapidly occurring risks. Hence,
a paradigm shift in theory and action is of great urgency.
Table 1: Comparisons between traditional risks and
globalizational risks
Globalizational Risk 103
Traditional risks Globalizational risks
Risk source Easy to
predict/assess
Difficult to
predict/assess
Controllability
and recoverability
To a certain
degree
Serious damage;
difficult to recover
Impact results Assessable High uncertainty;
difficult to recover
Ways of risk
spreading
Direct spreading
to surroundings
Spreading through
global network nodes
Speed of risk
spreading
Controllable Uncontrollable
Areas being
affected
Regional From regional to
global
Fields being
affected
Single relative
area
Cross principle
impacts
State capability All-powerful state Weak state capability;
required transnational
cooperation
Social resources State-controlled
social resources
State-integrated social
resources
A new paradigm should not be situated within one single
discipline or unilateral way of thinking. In dealing with
globalizational risks that are transboundary and rapidly
spreading, a macro risk assessment should be undertaken. Such
a macro risk assessment is one that is able to govern
globalizational problems and can quickly control the structures
of local risks resulting from globalizational risks
Risk refers to the uncertainty of issue development.
Traditional risk assessment deems risk occurrence a matter of
probability. Accidents that have a high probability of breaking
out are basically able to be prevented, amended and are also
manageable. However, as social affairs (including political,
economic and technological affairs) are becoming more
complicated, new risk assessment deems risks are highly
uncertain, and so are the problems they cause. Unstable
104 theologies and cultures
conditions and structures of complicated risk factors are difficult
to predict and can only be partially prevented. More, if risk does
occur, the resulting disasters and problems involved can be
controlled and recovered in a short time. Hence, social order is
in need of reconstruction.
In addition, a macro risk assessment should be based on the
precautionary principle (Hajer, 1995), which combines the
concepts of risk assessment and risk prevention. The newly-
developed precautionary principle is gradually becoming valued
by world countries and is being carried out in the dimensions of
science, ecology, and health, particularly concepts and
regulatory measures concerning threats to biodiversity, ecology
and food security resulting from genetic engineering
development. The theory of the precautionary principle has
become an important way of thinking and a practical strategy,
while the world confronts increasing scientific uncertainties and
threats to global sustainable development. Thus, as we
undertake practice drills in risk control, unpredictable
consequences in various dimensions can be decreased to a
manageable degree9. That is, the precautionary principle has
become a principle to manage the uncertainty of globalizational
risks. As a result, it can be a basis for risk assessment and risk
governance.
Macro risk assessment includes six main elements: health risk
(life safety), economic risk, social risk (fear), ethical risk
(discrimination), unemployment, social security, and future risk
of vaccine application. These risk factors are closely interrelated
and can be mutually affected. Thus, as we face risk challenges,
9 The Executive Yuan regulated that people from epidemic areas should be in
quarantine for ten days. This was a preventive measure. However, economic
costs should be taken into consideration as well. The government helped to
relax the economic burdens of related industries to avoid enormous impacts
on industry and social security. People who were suspected of being
potentially infected with SARS should have been in quarantine either in
hospitals or in their homes. This preventive measure was to do with
legitimacy.
Globalizational Risk 105
we should not only focus on one unilateral principle and ignore
the integrated effects caused by other risks.
Taking the SARS outbreak as an example of a newly-
developed globalizational risk, these health risks were the first
wave of threats that the Taiwanese people have encountered.
Second, social fears arose, which directly and indirectly
influenced the economy and industries such as tourism, airlines,
hotel businesses, transportation, education, and cultural
activities. These were considered the third wave risks. The
fourth wave risks were unemployment and social security
problems caused by economic risks. The fifth wave risks
involved ethical discrimination relating to social capital and
social trust (discrimination against medical faculties, infected
patients, their family members, colleagues and neighbors).
Finally, future SARS vaccines and new medicines will also
probably generate scientific uncertainty. These rapid,
transboundary and unlimited risk impacts should be controlled
and assessed with a macro vision risk assessment. More
importantly, these different types of risk may occur repeatedly.
That is, even though the SARS threat could be controlled, risk
impacts may still occur and cause great social costs10
.
Risk assessment and risk communication
Besides valuing macro risk assessment, risk communication
is often perceived as the essential process of how the public
accepts, perceives and responds to risk impacts. For example,
public dialectics on risk will consequently influence and
broaden social fears and be expanded to economic activities,
10
According to a newspaper report, from the perspective of risk assessment,
the epidemic prevention group led by Minister Lee should not come only
from medical and public health. Experts from various principles should be
recruited as well, such as those from legal, economic and social fields. Thus,
they can provide suggestions on risk features of the local society and carry
out more complicated and deliberate operations and risk control. For example,
the topics of human rights, patient rights, social customs of quarantine, social
discrimination and social safety should be re-examined.
106 theologies and cultures
ethical identity, human interaction, racial discrimination, and
political conflicts. SARS development in Taiwan is the best
example of this.
As risk communication becomes a basic procedure of risk
assessment, besides initial risk assessment concerning risk
source and primary impacts, risk communication turns into an
important and yet cautious constructive process. In addition, risk
is also a social construction process and result (Beck, 1996). In
the process of risk development, risk communication guides
public risk perception, understanding and action. Subsequently,
risk communication extensively derived into diverse degrees of
risk impacts. This is a cyclical process of dialectics (figure 1).
That is, risk communication and public risk perception are
viewed as having core roles in the active circle of risk
assessment, hazard identification, policy development, policy
implementation, and policy evaluation11
.
Risk communication itself is a rather complex process. In
the theory of risk communication, mechanisms include the
actions of the media, the public, policy decision-making, and
social and political institutions (social movement and political
groups) (Miller & Macintryre, 1999). Thus, risk communication
is not only a unilateral procedure of informing, listening, telling,
and influencing (Taig, 1999). Arkin (1989) also points out that
usually risk communication is limited by the nature of risk
science, and public risk perception. Scientific problems or
disasters with disputable and complicated risks such as the
SARS incident usually generate barriers to public understanding
of science. This is because, firstly, the uncertainty and
complexity of risk rarely brings definite answers to the public.
Secondly, knowledge and information gaps and the difficulty of
information access block the public’s social learning
opportunities. To explain further, risk information revealed by
the government, the media, and society influences subjective
perceptions and the public’s objective actions to some degree.
11
The cyclical process can also be viewed as a mechanism of risk governance
(Gerrard & Petts 1998: 6; Gerrard 1999:256).
Globalizational Risk 107
Figure 1: Risk perception and risk communication (Gerrard
& Petts, 1998)
Some researchers (Renn, 1991; Slovic, 2000a) indicate that
the effects of ‘social amplification of risk’ should be valued.
This refers to the phenomenon that different risk information
(from the state, the media, interest groups, and social network
agents) is disseminated to various groups (including the public,
influential players, and members of related groups) and they in
RISK
PERCEPTION
AND
COMMUNICATION
POLICY
IMPLEMENTATION
POLICY
DEVELOPMENT
RISK
ASSESSMENT
EVALUATION
HAZARD
IDENTIFICATION
108 theologies and cultures
turn influence others, further causing social disputes and social
fears12
.
From this perspective, Arkin (1989) emphasizes that when
performing risk assessment and risk communication, a state
should release information to certain groups of people with a
plan, select information release channels, test the effects of
information, and construct the connotation of risk information in
order to develop, educate, and guide public risk perception and
actions.
To speak neutrally, sources, channels, and credibility of
risk information are all significant. The public forms influential
decisions based on them. Frewer (1997) states that the public
distinguishes between received information from trusted sources
(such as consumer groups and doctors) and distrusted sources
(such as government and enterprises). Therefore, establishing
appropriate information release channels are imperative. This is
because trust in risk information source influences how the
public comprehends and forms judgments about complicated
technologies. It is important to establish a highly trusted
information release channel. For example, at the initial stage of
the SARS outbreak, professional medical personnel explained
the scientific factors of SARS. Socialists and psychologists
discussed social impacts, related social order, and mutual
support. Most importantly, public perception of risk is a
subjectively developed learning process. . Thus, a society should
value the establishment of a complete and trusted information
platform (release and conversation) for stimulating risk
communication. This is because once risk information is
released, public perception is hard to change (Miller and
Macintyre, 1999).
Trust in risk information source relates to public trust in
their original perception of complicated technologies. This kind
of trust establishment is essential and will continuously
influence the public’s value judgment and degree of acceptance
12
For example, the United Kingdom aroused public fears while dealing with
the mad cow disease.
Globalizational Risk 109
of new technologies. When distrustful opinions emerge, the
government and scientists are not willing to see this kind of
development (Frewer, 1997; Slovic, 2000b). Taig (1999)
proposes that the characteristics of trust problems include: 1)
The public sometimes overreacts to new risk information. 2) It is
difficult to refuse invalid and expensive risk resolution methods.
3) When debating risk control methods such as how to
effectively control and decrease risks, the focus usually changes
to other topics. 4) It is difficult to persuade the public that
technology brings more benefits than risks.
In terms of the technological dimension, Slovic (2000c:
320; 2000d: 409) proposes a similar argument. He points out
that it is easy to destroy public trust in technological risks.
Distrust develops faster than trust does. He called this process
‘the asymmetry principle’. This argument reminds us of the
importance of risk communication. In particular, for risk
communication practices, fragility of public risk perception
cannot be ignored13
.
The above two viewpoints are basically technologically
orientated. They neglect the fact that the uncertainty of public
judgment and risk disputes may evolve into problems such as
distrust in experts, unilateralization of power and discourses,
and the argument that technology brings more benefits than risks
(Beck, 1993). Taylor (1999) presents a clear and definite
blueprint to the opposing arguments above. In his analysis of
public risk perception and risk communication concerning
GMOs in the UK, he points out that risk assessment is not only
an ‘information problem’ and a ‘communication problem’, but
13
The research of Slovic (2000 a: 184-85) and Arkin (1989:128-129) points
out that public risk perception is seldom accurate. Some risk information may
frighten the public in the beginning. Also, the public prefers a simple and
absolute answer when facing a risk, which is unable to be substantiated and
this makes it easier for them to have feel in control. Priority has existed in the
public’s mind against some values. Hence, a new message delivered to the
public is individualized, whereas the public does not totally understand
science. The noticeable part is that the opinions of the public are easy to
control, and the beliefs formed are difficult to modify.
110 theologies and cultures
also a ‘structural and cultural problem’. These problems are
what we (people in different societies) have to confront and
recognize. Slovic (2000a) also proposes a structural question.
He points out that besides the fragility of public risk perception;
it is also interesting to discuss how the ‘system destroys trust’.
That is, how social, political, scientific, and communication
systems gradually destroy public trust in technological risks.
From the perspective of risk analysis, this is a problem of
institutional construction.
By observing this institutional system, we can see how they
continuously and constructively derive public risk perception
and public trust. To explain further, to systematically establish
public trust in technological risk, the state should first set up
appropriate and professional information platforms and enhance
information transparency. Most importantly, public participation
in risk communication and risk assessment procedures and an
interactive network are needed in order to integrate social
resources and preserve procedural justice, which then
strengthens public trust in information sources and enhances
information transparency and continuously establishes public
trust (Frewer, 1997; Miller and Macintyre, 1999; Taig, 1999;
Kasperson & Palmlund, 1989; Slovic, 2000a).
People should consider the social, political, scientific and
communication systems to be the key constructions of
institutions. By including public participation in the
technological policy-making process, the monopoly of
technocrats and science experts is broken. For individuals, the
public has opportunities to participate in and influence policy
and to learn about and comprehend complicated scientific risks.
For institutional development, risk communication mechanisms
which value conversation and equal rights are developed and
transformed into motives for public participation, which are
active not passive. In terms of trust establishment, risk
communication of complicated technological risks transforms
into a process of how the public learns to converse and make
Globalizational Risk 111
value judgments. This makes technological policy-making
become the process and result of public trust establishment14
.
Institutional construction and empirical criticisms of SARS, as a
localized risk
The spreading, impacts, and risk governance of SARS in
Taiwan can be divided into three phases. First, on 17 March
2003, Taiwanese business people, the Chins, who were infected
with SARS, came back to Taiwan from China. Next, on the 24th
of April, a potential intra-hospital case broke out in Ho-Ping
Hospital. The blockade of the hospital caused prevalent social
fears. Third, at the beginning of May 2003 after Ho-Ping
Hospital and Ren Ji Hospital were blockaded, there was the
possibility that large-scale community infection could have
broken out. This is what requires most prevention and may
cause great lethality.
Taiwan’s effective performance at the first stage of the
SARS outbreak was recognized. However, this only referred to
the intra-hospital quarantine measures, and did not include
resolving the problems of risk spread. In other words, such an
arrogant ‘Three Zero Record’ attitude (zero casualties, zero
community transmission, and zero departures of infected cases)
only considered problems from the viewpoint of unilateral
medical rationality, and disregarded the impact degree and
features of SARS as a globalizational risk.
On the one hand, the government undertook unilateral
SARS prevention by utilizing old risk governance paradigms.
Based on this, by valuing public health principles, the central
authority of the Department of Health (DOH) and the local
government (Taipei City) argued over whether they should
declare SARS a legal communicable disease15
. On the other hand,
14
The author suggests that not every technological policy-making decision
required public participation. In fact, such democratic principles are usually
applied to big and disputable technological affairs. 15
This is a typical problem of uncertainty about medical risks. The opinions
of medical experts of the DOH diverged from those of the Department of
112 theologies and cultures
due to disregarding the characteristics of SARS as a
globalizational risk (such as rapid spread, network development,
transboundary, and unlimited impacts), the government failed to
launch risk control and preventive principles, and construct an
overall risk assessment. Thus, the government attributed SARS
risk resolution to be a task of the government. This phenomenon
continued until the “SARS Coordination Center” was
established at the beginning of May 2003.
In fact, stagnating in the public health principle of risk
handling, the central authorities of the DOH and local
government revealed themselves to be rather incapable in terms
of preventive mechanisms and assessment of SARS as a
globalizational risk. They disregarded the difficulties of scarce
national public health resources, deployment of sickbeds, and
medical personnel mobilization. During the SARS outbreak, due
to problems with control of related medical resources (such as
respirators and respirator series), this chaos caused serious
infections. It seemed that the government wasted precious time
in launching preventive mechanisms at the initial stage.
What is also worthy of discussion is that due to a lack of
integrated risk assessment and preventive mechanisms, risk
communication and public risk perception are not considered
important elements in risk governance and policy
implementation. One blind spot lies in the ideologies of
advocating old risk control models (medical control) and
unilateral propaganda (from the government). One concrete
example is that on the 24th
of April, two days before the SARS
epidemic turned into a serious issue, the media reported that
President Chen Shui-Bian was confident in the medical handling
of the SARS risk).
Health of Taipei City Government. The former presumed this was a
controllable situation based on epidemiology. However, the latter emphasized
that SARS should be declared a legal communicable disease according to the
degree of its spread and related mechanisms should be mobilized. These two
statements were reasoned based on the single perspective of public health
principles and failed to include a macro risk assessment.
Globalizational Risk 113
Under these contexts, policy ideologies of diverse and two-
way risk communication and public risk perception were not
formed. In addition, the importance of public risk information
access, risk communication, and trust building were not taken
into consideration once risk outbreak occurred. These will cause
cyclical impacts on the next stage of medical treatment, public
health, economic and social activities, and then result in greater
losses. Actually, the lack of overall risk assessment is a
structural problem. Preventive risk policy is not included in risk
communication and public risk perception.
The second stage of risk outbreak started from the 24th
of
April with the high-speed blockade of Hoping Hospital and the
Hua-Chang community transmission and quarantine in the
beginning of May. This caused a great shock in public health
and medical circles, and society. Most discussions focused on
how to rapidly block the hospital, implement quarantine
measures, rescue SARS patients and medical personnel who
were in the dangerous situation of being infected, prevention
and settlement strategies and emergency measures against large-
scale community transmission16
. Only a few people analyzed
and assessed how the SARS epidemic would quickly spread
from public health and medical circles to psychological impacts
of public risk perception, which will result in high uncertainty
and influence social and economic activities. Thus,
precautionary measures should be undertaken. As the media
continued to exaggerate and advertise such phenomena as the
hospital blockade (which led to protests by Hoping Hospital
medical personnel in an internet petition), SARS spray infection,
and the probability of community transmission, and this resulted
in serious public fear.
In terms of reflection about SARS prevention experiences,
the government did not start a formal and institutional risk
coordination center in order to carry out preventive actions in
16
Undeniably, at this stage, all measures concerning public health were
critical and deserved approval. However, there was still a lack of integrated
epidemic prevention strategies (Tsai, 2003).
114 theologies and cultures
response to real emergencies and future impacts in various
dimensions. Also, risk coordination bodies were still limited
under the authority of medical and public health departments.
The central authorities of the DOH and the local government
argued over who had responsibility for emergency action and
disregarded the fact that globalizational risks spread rapidly and
may cause unlimited impacts.
High distrust17
is formed because of the cyclical
construction of public fears. Integrated risk assessment and
policy mobilization are not carried out completely. Carrying out
only medical emergency settlement makes public risk perception
a divided social reality. Free media broadcasts and exaggeration
of the SARS risk overthrew the weak essence of scientific
uncertainty and resulted in high social distrust. The public’s
psychological state was seriously impacted, and society was in
disorder. For example, the people of Yunlin County protested
that medical waste from Hoping Hospital should not be sent to
their local incinerator. The mayor of Hsin-Chu City led some
councilors in opposition to some SARS patients being sent to
local hospitals18
. People in Kaohsiung protested the
establishment of SARS examination hospitals. In Taipei, one
could see the unusual sight of every person on the street wearing
respirators. A shopping rush for N95 respirators continued
despite appeals from front line personnel, who were suffering
from medical resource shortages and they urged the public to
buy normal masks instead of respirators specifically intended for
medical use. Many government officers were also negative role
models by their wearing of masks on public occasions19
.
17
Take Singapore as an example Refer to Liang, (2003); Ting, Sun, Zou,
Peng and Chou (2003). Long-term environmental protest in Taiwan has
caused a culture of distrust, which also becomes a kind of risk culture.
Especially in the process of environmental impact assessment, the problem of
trust becomes serious. 18
Chen, Chu and Chiu (2003). 19
Due to immediate embarkation of risk communication, seldom citizens in
Singapore wore masks on streets. Besides the impacts posed by critical news,
the citizens of Singapore did not reduce social and economic activities. On
Globalizational Risk 115
At this stage, the SARS risk spread was supposed to be
under control. However, the government had still failed to
establish integrated risk assessment and risk communication
policies. The national administration mechanism was in chaos
due to the fact that they had ignored the implications of such a
globalizational risk. In terms of experience reflection,
technocrats underestimated SARS risk impacts. After SARS
caused large-scale impacts on the 24th
of April, the government
should have immediately initiated a risk coordination center.
Risk communication policies and information source should
have been established. Assessment professionals from various
related disciplines should have been recruited. In addition, a
transparent risk communication process to educate, inform, and
guide the public should have been built in order to integrate
rescue resources. Thus, public perception and risk governance
procedures of SARS prevention could have gradually been
constructed.
The learning processes of risk governance and contingency
management are new and difficult experiences. Restricted by
their lack of a model concept and actions to assess and govern
globalizational risks, technocrats failed to recognize the
importance of risk communication and information transmission.
The third phase started from the beginning of May 2003,
one week after the SARS outbreak, which was also too late to
initiate risk contingency management mechanisms. Generally
speaking, it was also too late to establish a risk coordination
center. Still, the authorities that dominated policy mobilization
were restricted to medical and public health principles. The
government not only failed to establish risk communication and
information transmission systems, but also failed to integrate
autonomous social information and communication networks.
One week after the SARS outbreak, the situation was out of
control and inclined to spread. In addition to mass misconduct in
the contrary, for Taiwan, the minister of the Executive Yuan and the major of
Taipei City demonstrated a negative model of wearing respirators in public
occasions. Particularly, they often wore the N95 respirators.
116 theologies and cultures
the medical prevention network, such as intra-hospital
transmission, even social and economic activities were being
seriously affected. With this background, SARS, as a
globalizational risk, escalated to a national crisis, which is
worthy of discussion. In terms of legal dimensions, the
Legislative Yuan passed the ‘Provisional Regulations Governing
the Prevention and Relief of SARS’ on 3rd
May. However, a
national and cross-field SARS risk coordination center had not
yet established at that time20
.
Due to a lack of experience in establishing integrated risk
assessment and risk governance mechanisms, the state and
technocrats hoped only to successfully control the transmission
of and infection speed of SARS, and to alleviate risk impacts.
Nevertheless, as intra-hospital transmission became even more
serious, their hopes were shattered. Even though such unilateral
risk control can fortunately reduce impacts in various
dimensions (particularly threats to public lives), time is still a
factor in problem resolution. In addition, it is still important to
value risk control, risk communication and risk information
transmission. These factors have a greater influence than the
SARS epidemic itself. That is, racing against time is the greatest
challenge to risk contingency management and public
perception formation. At this stage, a comprehensive assessment
of diverse risk sources and their spread effects should have been
assessed thoroughly in order to formulate contingency policies
and continue to modify risk control mechanisms. Mechanisms
that are limited to only medical and public health principles are
obviously insufficient. However, it is observed that consequent
developments are restricted in this unilateral ideology.
Since community transmission and intra-hospital infection
continued, on the 6th
of May, President Chen authorized former
DOH minister (Dr. Lee)21
to become the chief director of a
20
(United Daily, 2003). 21
The President designated the Premier Yu Shyi-Kun of the Executive Yuan
and the President Li Yuan-Tseh of Academia Sinica as the main conveners of
the “Everyone against SARS Committee” and the preceding minister of the
Globalizational Risk 117
SARS prevention action committee. On the 7th
of May, the
Executive Yuan set up the ‘Everyone against SARS Committee’.
Then, the next day (May 8), the presidents of various Taiwan
universities advocated the establishment of a ‘SARS Fighting
Center’, which later on became the ‘SARS Prevention and
Relief Committee’. At this time, the SARS risk coordination
center was not even built and it was already two weeks after the
Hoping Hospital blockade and one week after the launch of the
National Security Committee (on 1st May). All the above shows
that the government lacked macro risk assessment concepts,
policymaking mechanisms, risk governance mechanisms, and
action experiences, thus losing valuable time for risk
resolution22
. Also, at this time, members in the risk contingency
management center were still medical and public health
professionals. Although the National Security Bureau and the
Ministry of Economic Affairs had calculated the related impacts
on economic activities and economic growth rates for the next
season, there was still no clear explanation on risk assessment
and risk communication from experts of other disciplines (such
as legal, crisis management and media broadcasting experts,
sociologists, and psychologists). Thus, the government failed to
quickly form reactive strategies.
Effective risk governance is constructed based on the
following elements: 1) risk assessment including integrated risk
assessment and disaster emergency policies; 2) valuing
assessments of risk impact; 3) formulating definite risk
governance procedures; 4) establishing reliable risk control
mechanisms; 5) carrying out assessment and explanation of risk
communication and risk impacts on social and economic
activities. However, in actual fact, risk communication by the
government was quite delayed and did not occur until the first
national leaflet, ‘Special Issue of SARS Prevention’ was
Department of Health, Lee Ming-Liang, to be the vice convener and the chief
director, which was inappropriate in the aspects of system and policy (United
Daily, 2003) 22
(China Times, 2003; Lin, C-C, 2003; Lee, 2003).
118 theologies and cultures
published on the 6th
of May (Executive Yuan, 2003). The 8th
of
May was the first time that the former DOH minister (Mr. Lee),
the incumbent minister (Mr. Tu), and the vice minister of the
DOH propagandized risk communication procedures on TV.
Though their actions were late, they are still worthy of
recognition. Moreover, the three-times-a-day risk promulgation
of SARS was very constructive for the public to access to timely
risk information. From another perspective, the public
demanded this kind of reliable information source as a basis for
making judgments. As well, these actions from the government
balanced the exaggerated news reports form the media. At the
initial stage of risk outbreak, if these risk communication
mechanisms can be promptly carried out in order to explain
SARS scientific uncertainty and its infection probability,
uncertainty about risks can be decreased. Also, normal social
activities will not be affected and situations such as panic
buying of respirators and wearing masks on the streets need not
occur. Moreover, the public will have the chance to learn self-
governance and tolerance and thus, social exclusion and
discrimination can be avoided
In other words, immediate risk communication,
construction of reliable and definite public risk perception, and
lowering the impacts of risk uncertainty are essential procedures
and strategies to integrate risk assessment and reaction policies.
Risk communication and public risk perception are links in
the implementation of macro risk assessment policy. In addition
to government actions, the autonomous risk information
transmission system of the society should be examined as well.
From the above analysis, we can see that because the
government was limited to the paradigm of public health
principles they delayed launching macro risk governance
mechanisms. Furthermore, the government ignored the
construction of preventive procedures of risk communication
and public risk perception. It was not until the third stage of risk
outbreak that risk information promulgation started. The public
was exposed to a state of high information isolation and
Globalizational Risk 119
uncertainty, thus everyone was in a dangerous position after risk
outbreak. That is, the risk information vacuum and arbitrary
media broadcasts ensured that the public was in a natural state of
‘unawareness’, so they decoded, perceived, and delivered
wrong risk information. From the perspective of risk
communication, risk fears resulting from ‘unawareness’
intensified social capital of risk uncertainty, and easily destroyed
weak public trust (the asymmetric principle). A phenomenon of
high disorder hence appeared in society.
The principles of preventive risk communication lie in
rapid, just, diverse, and constant propagation and
announcements of precise information, followed by the
construction of two-way, accurate, and controllable risk
perception (such as the successful risk communication model of
Singapore). Hence, besides state orientation, the key to
legitimate risk information sources and their interaction is to
integrate autonomous risk information and the action systems of
society. Thus, grassroots viewpoints can be added to make the
public trust more in the sources and contexts of risk information.
When the SARS crisis occurred, the government failed to
construct risk communication and information release channels
immediately. On the contrary, the public established numerous
information transmission channels and websites via the Internet
and by individual agents. Professor Pan Huai-Ming and Tseng
Hui-Chung set up the ‘SARS Information Network’ for SARS
analysis, and the website ‘SARS Q&A’ was established by
medical students in Taiwan. In contrast, the relevant authorities
were dominated by technocrats using unilateral professional
statements to deal with such situations as the Tau-Da
Community case (in Hong Kong), and forgot to conduct risk
communication. Without clear risk communication to the public,
public perception and prevention preparation could not be
established.
In this storm of uncertainty, both the central authorities and
local government ignored the importance of the outbreak failing
to activate a national risk promulgation system. To state in more
120 theologies and cultures
detail, as the SARS epidemic broke out, the best way would
have been for the state to grasp the moment and integrate all
related risk information and action systems and then create more
diversified and interactive risk communication mechanisms.
This would have made the public willing and able to carry out
autonomous risk handling actions and responsible social
learning, and subsequently enable them to form autonomous risk
governance. This is a mechanism that includes the spirit of
participatory democracy. While encountering the challenges of
globalizational risks, the government should rapidly establish
and integrate grassroots networks and resources. The public
should no longer be made frightened due to risk
individualization. Instead, they should be actors of risk
resolution23
.
Conclusion
The SARS crisis revealed a modern state’s problems in
terms of risk emergency reaction and risk governance
mechanisms. As a society that valued technology, effectiveness,
economic development, and national competitiveness, we
actually ignored the impacts of risk uncertainty and delayed in
carrying out crisis management while disaster broke out. These
phenomena evidence the unbalanced structure of Taiwanese
modem society.
The SARS incident is only one of the challenges that
Taiwanese society has faced in recent years. Increasing
globalizational risks rapidly spread out through networks and
become transboundary, then cause immeasurable impacts. In a
short time, they cause great losses in property and economic and
social activities. Hence, from a macro perspective of
23
At the time when the Hua-Chang community on Ta-Li Street was
blockaded, citizens living in the neighborhood seemed pretty relaxed. It was
because they were prepared for long-term SARS resistance and used such
measures as cooking herbal medicine every day. A close risk common body
was formed (Ku, 2003).
Globalizational Risk 121
globalizational risk evolution, it is imperative for a modern
country and society to recognize that a complicated era full of
globalizational risks has arrived. Thus, a set of preventive
actions and policy mechanisms should be established to prevent
risks from turning into greater crises.
In terms of the complexity of globalizational risks, risk
governance can be categorized into two parts: 1) preventive
macro risk assessment, predicting and formulating all kinds of
impacts and reaction measures of risk issues. 2) consideration of
threat development in terms of ecological, social, economic and
ethical orders that one single risk source may cause. In particular,
it is necessary to be always alert that there is a blind spot
regarding the incalculable measurement of the uncertainty of
globalizational risks. In addition, being restricted to unilateral
ideologies of risk control, preventive risk assessment should
include risk communication. Public risk perception is one link in
the chain of policy assessment.
Technocrats limited to the logic of medical and public
health were inclined to focus only on SARS risk control. In
addition, due to a lack of integration of local public health
preventive mechanisms, the government was unable to mobilize
and dispatch social resources immediately and effectively when
SARS initially broke out. Moreover, as the SARS epidemic
spread, the government lacked a rapid risk governance
mechanism and seriously neglected the fact that risk
communication and public risk perception are other important
factors of risk spread, which may also result in continuous
impacts.
In fact, the implementation of preventive risk assessment,
contingency management mechanisms, and risk communication
could be better implemented. For instance:
1) As the World Health Organization announced an alert
about SARS in March 2003, the government should have
recognized the risk features of SARS and quickly launched a
monitoring system preventing infected cases from entering
Taiwan.
122 theologies and cultures
2) Seeing other countries’ stories of intra-hospital
transmission, the state should have immediately carried out risk
control and standard operation procedures.
3) The state should have fully examined quarantine, rescue
and medical treatment mechanisms in response to possible
outbreak of community transmission.
4) Most importantly, besides unilateral preventive action,
the state should have carried out first-time settlements and
assessments of objects, activities and time points of risk impacts
in order to alleviate the degree of damage.
5) The state should have assessed and been prepared for
large-scale influences when risk broke out.
6) Last and most importantly, risk communication should
have begun from the first and then the construction of risk
concepts and information transparency should have occurred.
Also, the development of public risk perception was an essential
element influencing emergency reaction.
The second part of risk governance discussion focuses on
crisis management and prevention mechanisms. Traditionally, as
one risk breaks out, crisis management should be undertaken
with systematic construction, including establishing a cross-
department coordination center, establishing a national-wide
information communication system, setting detailed standard
procedures of operation, designing epidemic situation charts and
epidemic information networks, setting up on-the-spot directing
systems (such as operating groups, planning groups, back-up
support groups, and financial management groups), and quickly
reconstructing social order and the management of disaster
spots24
(Chao, 2003; Chiu, 2001). In fact, this set of crisis
management procedures has been proved effective in dealing
with disasters.
However, from a macro-scale point of view, the
settlements of risk incidents were still limited in the function of
emergency rescue. Although this set of crisis management
24
This is also a standard operation procedure of the Federal Emergency
Governance Agency of the United States (Chao, 2003; Chiu, 2001).
Globalizational Risk 123
mechanisms were recognized to certain degree, its sufficiency in
terms of macro risk assessment in dealing with globalizational
risks should be considered as well. For example, when the US
911 terrorist attack occurred, even though immediate on-the-
spot rescue was important, preventive mobilization in other
areas such as national defense, economy, society, or culture
were essential as well. Regarding the SARS epidemic, as intra-
hospital and community transmission broke out, in addition to
the basic mobilization of preventive mechanisms, what was also
important was to quickly undertake assessment on possible risk
impacts, including modifying preparation and mobilization
mechanisms of the first and the second stage.
Furthermore, clear risk information and communication of
impact assessment formed based on unilateral public health
principles cannot replace the essential procedures of resolving
public unawareness and public fear. This is because risk issues
cannot be concealed. Covered issues usually cause more serious
spreading effects, which are disadvantageous to integrated risk
prevention mechanisms.
Whether for on-the-spot crisis management, risk
assessment and mobilization of the first wave and second wave
of SARS issue development, and the construction of risk
information communication, if autonomous social actions and
information networks can be integrated these can be the key
drive for the state to confronting complicated globalizational
risks and to fight against all kinds of risk uncertainties.
Regarding lessons learned from the SARS incident, we
know that a set of standard and immediate risk governance
mechanisms should be established. Moreover, from a macro
perspective, concepts and policy tools of risk assessment and
risk communication not limited to technocrats’ ideologies
should be developed. Also, by integrating abundant social
resources and autonomous systems, society will be able to face
new globalizational risk challenges.
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theologies and cultures,Vol.3, No.2
December 2006, pp. 127-135
Impact of Globalization on Labour:
Migrant Workers in Taiwan
Sr. Wei Wei1
I. The Social Context of Migrant Workers
n the beginning of the 1990s, the Asian region
formed an interrelated economy that gradually
stratified under the influence of globalization. Within this
structure, Taiwan belongs to the economic level known as the
‘semi-core’, since it lacks human resources in traditional low
technology industries. Southeast Asian countries, conversely,
are at the economic ‘periphery’, since they are traditionally
agricultural and rely on low technology industries. This Asian
economic structure eventually collapsed and impelled their
workers to move to Taiwan. The globalization helps the capitals
and the labors to move freely and the markets are open to
competition. The Capitalists and factories earn the maximum
1 Sr. Stephana, Wei Wei, is Director of Rerum Novarum Center, Taiwan.
Rerum Novarum assists labour movements since 1971. We acknowledge the
assistance of Rev. Edmund Ryden, SJ for translating this article from Chinese.
I
128 theologies and cultures
profit and compete to reduce the cost that causes the move to the
countries or regions where have the cheep labors. The other
strategy is to reduce the working condition or to hire the cheep
migrant workers. Taiwan government officially permitted Thai
and Philippines workers since 1989 to fill the human resource in
the traditional industries. On the other hand, these migrant
workers provided financial support for their families outside of
Taiwan. The countries from which the migrant workers came,
received income from foreign exchange and taxes thanks to
these migrants. This helped to rebuild their collapsed economic
systems.
Taiwan's Migrant Workers are subject to the control by a
number of factors: numbers, country of origin and area of
occupation. The majority of the migrant workers are working in
manufactories (169,065). The number of caregivers is the
second place (150,326). At present the chief countries of origin
are Thailand (with the largest number), the Philippines (second
place), Indonesia, Vietnam, Mongolia. At the end of October
2006, there were 336,985 legal migrant workers in Taiwan. The
county with highest number of migrant workers is Taoyuan (70,
870 or around 21.03% of the total migrant workers) followed by
Taipei County (44,603 or 13.24%) and Taipei City 35, 425 or
10.51%). Among these workers, males account for 38.23%, and
females make up 61.77% (October, 2006). However, most
domestic helpers and caregivers are women. Of these there were
a total of 152,726: 70,809 Indonesians, 49,298 Vietnamese,
30,166 Filipinos, 2,436 Thais, and 17 Mongolians. It is obvious
that there is a feminized trend of the migrant workers in Taiwan
from the statistics.
The current poor economic climate in Taiwan, along
with the desire to protect local labor has led to a decline in the
number of migrant workers in construction and industry. On the
other hand, an increase in the elderly population has led to a
demand for more caregivers. (The number of the caregivers
were about 306, while domestic helpers numbered 363 in 1992.
These numbers increased to 26,233 caregivers and 12,879
Migrant Workers 129
domestic helpers in 1994. There were 113,755 caregivers, and
6,956 domestic helpers in 2002. At the end of October, there are
152,726 caregivers and domestic helpers in Taiwan).
Many caregivers are already married and bravely go
abroad to earn more money for their homes and the education of
their children. They know very little about Taiwan and whatever
information they can glean regarding their future work is often
very different from the reality of the situation. Many female
migrant workers hide the grief of their difficult adjustment and
separation from their children. Often they are only able to
express this grief by weeping alone at night. What keeps them
going is the dream of a brighter future for their children, a new
house or a small business they might run upon their return home.
Yet many workers, after several years away, are faced with an
unfaithful husband, profligate children or the sudden illness or
even death of their spouse. In a foreign land they can only cry
out to Allah, to God.
Many employers fear that if their workers are allowed to
meet other workers, they will start to compare pay and working
conditions and then demand higher wages or better conditions.
Thus, they deliberately arrange for them to work on holidays,
assigning extra duties in their homes. Some forbid their workers
from speaking to compatriots, prevent them from taking part in
activities for migrant workers, and even lock them in the house
during the day. The purpose of such behavior is to prevent
migrants from meeting people from their own land or practicing
their own religion. This turns migrant workers into virtual
prisoners, with no personal freedom, freedom of assembly, or
freedom of religion (eg. to attend services at a mosque, church
or temple). One Philippine domestic worker told me that during
her five years in Saudi Arabia she was always allowed a day off
on Sunday, even though the normal rest day there is on Friday.
In Taiwan, however, her rest day is Friday and so she is not able
to meet any Filipinos or go to Church.
II. Violation of the Human Rights
130 theologies and cultures
Despite the advocacy of NGOs and some modifications to
regulations, many migrant workers still fail to attain even
minimal protection of their rights, as we illustrate below:
(1) With regard to working conditions, many employers do not
permit their workers to take time off, forcing them to work 12
hours a day under threat of being sent home for failing to
comply. In addition, employers lay down many “No’s”; only
“work” is permitted.
(2) With regard to personal freedom of the workers, they are
often viewed by their employers as commodities or tools of
production. Even outside work hours they are subject to
surveillance, not allowed out of the house, not allowed to listen
to music, and especially not permitted to participate in religious
activities. This is a grave denial of their freedom of religion.
Employers also forcibly deduct a commission when their
employee is sent to work for someone else for a few hours of
extra pay. Sometimes employers offer to keep accumulated pay
in a safe place for the workers. However, some employers do
not return this sum of money before the worker returns to their
country of origin. Many employers lock up their workers'
passport and residence certificate.
(3) Work contracts are drawn up on unequal terms. If workers
do not obey the contract they are liable to be sent home.
However, workers are not permitted to change their employers
should they not get along with them.
(4) When female workers are subject to sexual abuse or violence,
they are often unable (for linguistic reasons and because they are
not able to leave the house) to seek redress and produce proof.
Moreover, since most of these offences occur in private there are
often no witnesses and they come to light only when the workers
are able to escape to a place of refuge. Such escapes only
happen about in about one out of every seven cases and even
then, the truth often only emerges during interviews.
Migrant Workers 131
(5) Migrant workers in the social service sector have no right to
form associations or unions to help them claim their rights.
(6) As for the infamous brokers' fee, the CLA does not permit
brokers to charge a brokerage fee in Taiwan but it does allow
brokers to charge a service fee of NT$1,800 per month in the
first year, NT$1,700 per month in the second year and
NT$1,500 in the third year. In total this amounts to NT$60,000
which is very similar to the brokerage fee that was allowed in
the past. Moreover, in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam
brokerage agents still charge an excessive fee so that that many
migrant workers have to pay over NT$150,000 just to come to
Taiwan. This sum is described as a loan so as to avoid the
censure of government regulations. Pressure engendered by this
fee means that the worker is caught in an ever-rushing current,
with the only prospect being to go ahead and not turn back. Thus
they accept whatever suffering comes and bury their troubles.
Indeed many female migrant workers suffer from stress-related
syndromes or mental disorders.
(7) Forbid the migrant workers to change the jobs and the
employers. The labor contract of the migrant worker is bonded
to the defined employer. Both parts are not allowed to change
the employer/ worker. However, the employers dominant the
situation that the migrant workers become the slaves by the
employers and the brokers’ companies. The migrant workers are
not allowed to choose the better employers either the better
brokers companies in a free market. This structure cannot screen
the incapable employers either the brokers’ companies.
III. Sketches of the Social Interaction of Migrant Workers
Come rain or shine, at around five in the morning
migrant workers are already out pushing elderly persons in
wheelchairs, slowly round the local park. These old persons are
not able to stretch their legs or exercise, but they are kept busy
looking at the various dances, acrobatics and other physical
exercises being undertaken and this in itself is enough to make
132 theologies and cultures
them feel full of energy, as if they were exercising themselves.
The foreign workers push the wheelchairs along the paths round
the park or turn left and right through the alleys of the area, and
thus consume several hours’ time. In some parks, of an
afternoon, the migrant workers take the old people to a
particular spot, while they then meet together and happily chat
about news of their homeland, or the foibles and quirks of their
charges or simply vent off about the pressures of worker and the
nagging of their masters.
Most days one is hard put to spot the migrant workers on
the street, but if you wait for the dustman’s cart to come, then at
each alley and street entrance you will see them in groups of
twos or threes clutching different kinds of plastic bags. This
moment is truly a special international moment on the streets of
Taipei. Many migrant workers long for this moment. It is a
chance to get out and have a change of air or even make a secret
phone call (many employers forbid their workers from using
mobile phones or the home phone). It is also a chance to meet
one’s fellow migrants and exchange a few words and let off the
tension brought on by the employer’s iron grip. Yet there are
also employers who forbid their workers to come out; no matter
how busy they are, they come out themselves with their rubbish
and stand in the front line. Furthermore, there are employers
who calculate the time required to the exact second and thus
check on whether the worker has made an unauthorized phone-
call or stopped to chat to someone and, if the time required for
dropping the rubbish is exceeded, the worker will be punished.
Dropping the rubbish is an important ‘social activity’ for the
migrant workers and so many neighbours take this chance to
enquire after them. Solicitous persons choose this short spell of
time to note the migrants’ needs, ask after their troubles and
difficulties and so seek to provide them help. It is largely during
rubbish dropping that the volunteers from our own Centre have
been able to get the local people to help in providing
information or making legal norms known.
Migrant Workers 133
Those who look after the elderly or long-term sick in
hospitals, both large and small, or in old people’s homes form
yet another ‘migrant worker community’. In this community the
migrants tend to form into ‘small clusters’ according to their
place of origin. Whilst such carers are usually kept busy all the
time clearing away phlegm, turning the person over every two
hours, giving massage every hour, helping nurses with their
work (many old people only trust their migrant worker), indeed
providing 24-hour a day care, yet in the hospital they have a
moment of freedom. There they can chat with their fellow
workers, or with other sick people, relatives of the sick, or share
ideas with the health personnel. In this special society there are
often moving and helpful tales to be told. Relatives of sick
people on the same ward, seeing the migrants’ devotion, often
seek to help them obtain the social services they need, or
medical personnel help workers whom they can see to have been
abused.
Some migrant workers look after the long-term
sick or elderly as if they were there own grandparents. The
elderly people in turn, whose children are busy elsewhere, even
far away, come more and more to rely on the migrants. Indeed
each depends on the other. There have been cases in which
elderly people were given up as vegetables where the migrants
have brought them back to almost normal and the carer finds a
sense of success and consolation in seeing the person thus revive.
In some cases the sick person sees the caregiver as if she were
their own child or grandchild. One old man on his deathbed
gave all the money he had to her Vietnamese caregiver. There
have also been old people who were bedridden and without any
energy, who when they realised that their own death would
mean the worker’s contract would be ended and she would have
to go back home, have redoubled their strength and
determination to live, such that miracles have happened.
IV. The Identity of the ethnicity and culture forms a
‘Filipino Migrant Worker Community’
134 theologies and cultures
Although migrant workers work behind the stage of city
life yet they are normally hidden in obscure corners. The
Filipinos are different. They actively congregate in the churches
and form an ‘Alternative Sunday Community’. Many churches
or church organisations provide religious services, legal advice,
social work service, psychological counseling, Bible sharing,
volunteer groups, and leadership training. It is only in these
places that the migrants leave the backstage and step forth,
developing their own interests and talents, showing their own
personality and needs. Among themselves, the migrants develop
bonding, leadership, cooperation, assistance and help other
migrants face the problems of work and life. Shared ethnicity
and culture help them overcome the barriers of space and the
opportunity to meet on Sundays enables them to form small
groups which are intimately bound together.
V. The Desire of the Migrant Workers
Before they come to Taiwan many migrant workers have
already undergone the lack of freedom involved in supposed
‘practice’ sessions where they do slave labor for their broker.
They are then forced to sign contracts for loans and if their luck
runs out they end up in a difficult situation in Taiwan as well.
What is it that makes them do this? For many, whether Catholic
or Protestant, Buddhist or Muslim, their faith gains in strength
once they come to Taiwan because religion becomes their one
and only support. They believe firmly that their devotion will
incline the Divine to have mercy on their predicament. Faced
with unjust employers whom they cannot resist, their sole hope
is that the God of justice will give them justice, reward good and
punish evil. They also need God’s care and blessing for their
family and to fill the gap they have left at home. Hence when
they are able to persuade their employers to give them half a day
off, they willingly spend all that time in church, mosque or
temple, freely pouring out their most personal desires, pains and
Migrant Workers 135
thoughts to God in fervent prayer. Yet there are still employers
who forbid them going out even to worship. How cruel a rule
that is!
Besides imploring supernatural help, migrant workers
have a further source of support that makes them keep going:
they remember their hopes and aspirations for their own children,
that they may study at a good school, enter university
successfully and find a good job in the future. Or they may hope
to save some money to open a small business with their husband.
Vietnamese workers mainly hope to rebuild their houses and
help their parents and family. In the case of an unmarried young
lady, she will hope to help her parents and provide enough to see
her siblings through school. It is with thoughts such as these that
they are able to struggle on, accept hardship and sacrifices, put
up with humiliation. Their desires make us realise that migrant
workers from south-east Asia have intimate links with their
families, even placing the happiness of their family before their
own. This kind of self sacrifice for the good of the family is very
different from the modern Western model of individualism.
Although migrant workers make a significant
contribution to Taiwan’s economy and social welfare, even so
much as to be the backstage hands of social life, yet state policy
and law are not adequate to protect their interests. Public social
life lacks a place or voice for them. Migrant workers long for
respect and appreciation, long for equal treatment. For this to
happen local people and NGOs need to make more effort to
work and improve the treatment of migrant workers.
theologies and cultures,Vol.3, No.2
December 2006, pp. 136-148
Depeasantization:
Impact of Globalization on Farmers
in India
Mammen Varkey
1
ndia, despite its impressive industrial growth and
remarkable expansion in the service-sector, still
remains to be an agricultural country. According to the
Economic Survey (2004 – 05) agriculture supports 57% of the
population of India. In such a country, one would be shocked to
hear that, between 2001 and 2006, as per even official statistics,
8,900 farmers committed suicide in the four states of Andhra
Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra alone.
Farmers’ Suicides
In Punjab, the state which led the green revolution in
India and which may be rightly called the granary of India, the
Department of Agriculture of the state government in a note
1 Prof. Mamen Varkey, former Principal of Bishop Moore College
Mavelikara, Kerala, India, is the founder Director of Vichara, a Research
Institute.
I
Depeasantization 137
published in 2004, says that there are 2116 cases of reported
suicides of farmers since mid 1980s and that “these figures were
only of reported acts and many more must have gone
unrecorded”. The note also states that more than seventy percent
of those who committed suicide were small marginal farmers
and landless labourers. For most of them their only source of
livelihood was agriculture. 65% of them were engaged in wheat
and paddy cultivation and 20% in cotton cultivation. They were
all men, most of them young persons. Revealingly the year after
liberalization saw alarming increase in suicides. The study
conducted by the Institute of Development and Communication
IDC states that in 1992-93 the suicides rate increased by
51.97% while the rate for the whole country was only 5.11%. In
1994-95 the rate of increase was 57%. The report points out that
there would have been many unreported cases of suicides.
In Maharashtra the number of farmers’ suicides
increased from 1,083 in 1995 to 4,147 in 2004. “In Maharashtra,
the age – adjusted SMR (SMR – Suicide Mortality Rate –
suicide deaths per 1,00,000 persons) for males increased from
17.4 in 1995 to 20.3 in 2004 and that for females decreased from
13.6 in 1995 to 10.8 in 2004.”
Andhra Pradesh is a state which, during the days of Chief
Ministership of Chandra Babu Naidu, vehemently pursued the
paths of liberalization. Between May and July 2004, more than
400 peasants committed suicides. It is true, earlier also peasants
have taken away their lives themselves. But the number is
staggering. And suicides were reported from every part, except
Hyderabad area, of the state.
The case of Kerala is different. The state of Kerala ranks
very high in human development and political mobilization. It
was thought that Kerala would only benefit from the
liberalization policies of the Central Government. Because,
“about 25% of the net states’ domestic products comes from the
remittances of her children abroad, agriculture-dependent
population comprising of both cultivators and agricultural
labourers constitutes only 23% of the total work force, (The
138 theologies and cultures
national average is 57%); contribution of the agricultural sector
to the state domestic product is just 15% (For India it is 22%)
and export oriented or exportable cash crops accounts for only
30% of the gross cropped area in the state. But the fact is that
Kerala had to witness an unprecedented tragic spate in the
farmers’ suicides. In Kerala, according to a reply in the State
Assembly on 20.2 ‘06 , between June 2001 and July 2006, 234
farmers committed suicides.
Alarmingly Increasing Distress
Obviously, these suicides are a tragic manifestation of
the alarmingly distressing state of the Indian farmers. Declining
comparable income of farmers and decelerating growth of
agriculture points to the aggravating conditions of the farming
community in India.
1. Farmer’s Income According to the National Sample Survey
Organization’s ‘Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers’,
conducted in 2003, half of the Indian farmers are deeply
indebted; the inequality in the income between the rural and
urban households has been increasing, the gap in the income
between the cultivators and non-cultivators has been widening.
Strikingly the monthly percapita consumer expenditure of farm
households was Rs.503/- (US$12,approximately). it is only
about Rs 75/- above the rural poverty line. Since it is only an
average, it is clear that vast segments of people will be below
poverty line. Isn’t it shocking? Interestingly, it was for the first
time that the NSSO conducted such a survey.
2. State of Agriculture ‘The growth rate of agriculture has been
decelerating for the last fifteen years. The contribution of
agriculture to GDP has been reducing. While there has been no
employment growth in the agriculture sector, the number of
marginal and small holding has been rising and the number of
people dependent on agriculture has been increasing’.
3. Abandoning Agriculture Most disturbingly, India has reached
a situation in which 48% of the farmers are indebted and 61% of
Depeasantization 139
them in the rural area are prepared to abandon their vocation, as
per the Situation Assessmnt Survey of the National Sample
Survey Organization (Ref: Deshpande and Prabhu 2005.)
4. Acuteness of Problem It may be argued that agrarian distress
has occurred in the past too. There have been droughts, floods,
pests and pestilence. In the past also, crops have failed and
prices have crashed but the problems faced by the farmers now
are drastically different. The severity and acuteness of the
problems are well-manifest by the unabated suicides committed
by farmers, and reported from different parts of India.
5. Worsening Situation The states from which most of the
farmers’ suicides have been reported are Punjab, Maharashtra,
Tamilnadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. A crucially
significant fact is that these are the states in which agriculture is
relatively developed. The irony is that even though agriculture is
well-developed not only that the farmers’ condition has not
comparatively improved but also that the farmers have been
pushed to the extent they could find solace and escape only by
committing suicide.
‘Development’ Causes Distress
The striking fact that more farmers’ suicide deaths were
reported from relatively agriculturally developed states points to
the nature of the present agrarian distress. In a way, the
‘development’ itself has caused the distress.One would naturally
expect that the condition of farmers would improve with the
development of agriculture in these states. And that the
development would facilitate their effective participation in the
competitive market in the globalized world. One would think
that benefits would, naturally, flow in from the global trade. But
what was witnessed in the post-liberalization period was the
farmers’ helpless fall into inextricable traps of debts and pits of
death.
140 theologies and cultures
Evolution of the Agricultural Sector in Post – Independent
India
Before we proceed to an analysis of the reasons for this
unprecedented agrarian distress, we will have a quick look at the
evolution of the agrarian scene in India. It will help us to
understand the present phase better. K.C. Suri writes that the
history of agriculture in India, since independence, can be
divided into three phases.
First phase - The 50s and 60s, the first two decades immediately
after the independence, constitute the first phase. What is seen
during this phase is a massive reconstruction of the agrarian
sector. The slogan raised and demands made during the
independence struggle provided the ideological inspiration for
this phase. Mahatma Gandhi’s famous statement ‘India lives in
her villages’ influenced the policy makers. Massive projects for
irrigation were launched; land ceiling acts were passed, land
revenues were reduced, agricultural extension services were
started. It was a time of ‘reform and consolidation’.
Significantly peasants were held in esteem. Farmers’ role in
nation building and their contribution in building up a strong,
self-reliant India were respectfully acknowledged. They ‘fed’
India and enabled India, in those critical days, to save scarce
foreign exchange for its industrial development and other needs.
The cultivator’s right to own the land was recognized. Providing
all facilitates for improving agricultural production was accepted
as government’s responsibility and policy. Most importantly the
farmers gained a certain share in the political power.
Second Phase - In spite of all these there was an acute shortage
of food in India during the 60’s. There was famine. The Govt.
felt compelled to boost the food production. And a massive plan
was initiated to influence the farmers to shift to high-yielding
variety of seeds and to intensive form of cultivation using large
amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Farm machinery
was widely employed. The farmers who needed money had to
hunt for credits as there was very high demand for credit.
Depeasantization 141
Thanks to those initiatives, food production leaped resulting in
the much talked about Green Revolution. This second phase of
the evolution of the agricultural sector in India, during the 70’s
and 80’s, is usually described as the ‘glorious’ period of green
revolution. But as a result of this, “agriculture became a cash
based, individual enterprise requiring high investment in modern
inputs and wage labour”.
The third is the post-reform phase. In 1991, the
economic reforms were brought in. The economy was opened
up. Liberalization was adopted as a policy in almost all sectors.
The implications of this for the agriculture sector were mainly
two:
The state support to agriculture was substantially curtailed.
Import restrictions were lifted and import tariffs were
either taken away or substantially reduced resulting in massive
imports of farm products. The seed and pesticide markets were
opened to the MNCs.
VI. Period of Liberalization
1. Post-Reform Declaration The reforms under the
policies of globalization and free trade based on the principle of
market competition wrought havoc to the farming community.
“The agricultural output in the post-reform period decelerated to
2.4 percent per annum during the 1990s against 3.5 percent
during the 1980s. It has slumped further during the last few
years, reaching an abysmal low level of 1.5 percent in 2004-’05.
The share of agriculture in GDP has been declining. Public
investment in agriculture has gone down. Imports have been
increasing as the tariffs are lowered. Between 1996-97 and
2003-04 imports have increased 270 percent by volume and 300
percent in value terms. Farmers of India are squeezed from both
sides - by the cost of seeds and pesticides of the foreign
campaigns and cheap imports from the heavily subsidized
western nations on the one hand and the indifference of the state
governments and the withdrawal of its support on the other. It is
142 theologies and cultures
an irony that the experts and social activists had to demand that
farmers, once regarded as food providers, should be given free
ration so that they would not be starved to death?” (K.C. Suri)
2. Asymmetrical Development The slowing down of
agricultural growth is not in itself a problem for a nation, if it is
matched by a buoyant growth of the manufacturing and service
sectors. It has happened in many a developed country. What
happened in India was that the agriculture sector declined
without a matching growth in the manufacturing or export sector.
India’s share in the global export is only 0.75% (Economic
Survey,2004-’05). Even now in India, about two-thirds of the
people depend on agriculture for their livelihood and live in
rural areas. But their share of the national income is only 25
percent. So the problem is with asymmetrical development. The
neo-liberal market policies resorted to since 1991 have
worsened the asymmetry in development.
3. Agricultural Product Market Opened With the
introduction of neo-liberal reforms, markets were opened up.
The agricultural product market was also ‘freed’ from Govt.
control. It was on the contention that the Indian agricultural
product market opened for global competition would fetch
higher dividends to Indian farmers. WTO led policy shifts also
paved way to this. To compete in the global market peasants
were coerced to switch over to cash crops. In many places,
massive shifts to cotton, pepper, rubber and such other cash
crops took place. But the opening up of the Indian agricultural
product to the global market resulted in dumping of vast
amounts of low-cost agricultural produce in India. The result
was that the prices of Indian agricultural produces crashed.
4. Govt. Withdraws Support Under the new policies, the
govt. effectively withdrew its support in making available seeds
and fertilizers at subsidized prices. The farmers were left to the
mercy of traders dealing with seeds and pesticides. Agriculture
became a high-investment necessary enterprise. The capital
starving peasants had to run for credits. In tune with the
globalization-regime, public financial institutions restricted their
Depeasantization 143
soft-term loans for agriculture. The poor farmers were left at the
mercy of private moneylenders. These moneylenders were, in
fact, also traders, traders in seeds and pesticides.
As the Government succumbed to the globalization
process, privatization became the catchword in every sphere.
And as part of this, government sponsored, public funded
agricultural extension services were abandoned. The farmers
were pressurized or lured into unwise highly detrimental
practices. For example, the farmer in Vidarbha and Andhra
Pradesh started cultivating high-investment, ecologically
hazardous cotton. For cotton and other crops the farmers were
urged to use indiscriminately chemical fertilizers. Seeds not fit
for a particular environment were made to be sowed there;
availability of water was not adequately taken into consideration.
All these happened because, Governmental agricultural
extension services were withdrawn from key areas and there was
no scientific advice free from vested interests available to the
farmers who became prey to the high voltage advertisement and
publicity campaign of seed and fertilizer corporations.
From the ‘80s public investment in agriculture declined
hugely. Let us take the case of irrigation. “The rate of expansion
of irrigated area in India today has fallen to half the levels of the
early 1970s. Even more worrisome, nearly 75 percent of the
increase in irrigation over the last 20 years has come from tube
wells. Which rather than resolving the water crisis, appear to be
only aggravating it.” [Mihir Shah]
5. Private Agencies Take Over “Public agricultural
extension services have all but disappeared, leaving farmers to
the mercy of private dealers of seed and other inputs such as
fertilizes and pesticides, who function without adequate
regulations, creating problems of wrong crop choices,
excessively high input prices, spurious inputs and extortion.
Public crop marketing services have also declined in spread and
scope, and marketing margins imposed by private traders have
therefore increased.” [Ref. Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2004]
144 theologies and cultures
Vagaries of monsoon, many a time, led to failure of
crops in consecutive seasons. Even if there was a good crop, it
was not enough. There should be good prices also. Good crops
and good prices together seldom happened. The market is now
global. Earlier, if the local production were not good, price
would have gone up. Some balancing would have taken place.
Now, agricultural produces at lower prices were available in the
world market. And vast quantities of agricultural produces were
imported. Eg. Pepper in Kerala. Along with these the non-
availability of sufficient amounts on credit from public
institutions, and insurance support for the crops, sent the
helpless farmers to the usurious private moneylenders.
6. Health and Educational Service Commercialized
Simultaneously another thing also happened. As part of the
globalization process more and more areas and activities were
opened for private capital and the state began to exit from the
fields of health and education. The hard-pressed peasants were
also forced to find more money for the education and health of
their children and other dependents.
7. Summary of the Reasons for Suicide In short,
consecutive crop failures and price-crashes, switching over to
cash crops as a consequence of which agriculture became a very
high-investment activity that necessitated them to go in for loans
from usurious private lenders, withdrawal by the state of its
extension and support services, helplessness of the bankrupt
peasants and agricultural labourers in meeting the soaring health
and educational bills and total loss of hope that the multiplying
debts could ever be paid back, forced the farmers to take to the
last recourse, committing suicide. And they did it, in thousands.
‘Depeasantization’
1. Under globalization, what is happening in India, is
transfer or ‘extraction’ of surplus from the agricultural sector to
the urban, commercial sector. In this process the rural areas are
stunningly deprived and impoverished. The rural society, as it is
Depeasantization 145
strikingly described, faded from the ‘popular imagination’, and
the national priorities were directed to the urban, manufacturing
and service sectors.
2. Social scientists have attributed different reasons for
the grave agricultural crisis in India. i. With the introduction of
the economic reforms in the early ‘90s, what has happened is
total neglect of agriculture. The globalization motivated policies
led to, what is described, as ‘depeasantization’. Consequently
the rural, agrarian sector was totally marginalized.
ii. Under globalization, social relationships gave way to
market relationships and to a commercial culture with the result
that only those who are ‘market-competitive’ will be able to
survive or rather need to survive. iii. It was the failure of the
farmers and agriculturists to ‘acquire weberian rationality’
characteristic of modern capitalism that caused the crisis. iv.
Social scientists and ecologists like Vandana Shiva trace the
crisis to the ecological catastrophe set in by globalization
inspired crass commercial considerations. “Shiva along with
some others attributed the suicides by farmers growing cash
crops directly to the ecological crisis generated by the
introduction of new economic policies associated with the
globalization process. ‘The tragedy of farmers committing
suicides highlights some of these high social and ecological
costs which are linked to globalization of non-sustainable
agriculture and which are not restricted to the cotton growing
areas of various states but have been experienced in all
commercially – grown and chemically farmed crops in all
regions…” – Shiva et al 1999. [Ref. Surinder S. Jodhka.
‘Beyond Crisis’.]
3. An important point is to be noted in the discussion on
the impact of globalization on the farming community in India
and the agrarian crisis in India. It is the dramatic change that has
taken place in the political theatre in India. As the agricultural
sector evolved in India, peasants became politically powerful.
Farmers’ representatives were enthroned in seats of power but
with globalization sweeping across the country and agriculture
146 theologies and cultures
declining these peasant politicians were ‘de-peasantized’. What
was lost was not only a class of ‘peasant-politicians’ but a vital
dimension from the political agenda, political articulation and
policy-making.
Conclusion
1. Issues Graver than those met by the eyes: A detailed
study on the impact of globalization on the farming community
in India and a systematic analysis of the crisis engulfing the
agriculturists and agricultural labourers in India would lead us to
some graver issues than those met by the eyes. The farmers’
suicides, that too in thousands, with all the tragedy it entails may
force us to stay at the visible level of reality. Failure of crops,
crash of prices, soaring cost of inputs, non-availability of credit
at reasonable rates and on negotiable terms, absolute
incapability in escaping from the clutches of usurious money
lending ‘Shylocks’ and the last resort to suicide to save ‘self-
dignity’ and the trauma of the surviving members of the family
and relatives are the visible aspects of the crisis. Behind these
one should notice the deep changes taking place- at the
economic, political and even ethical dimensions.
2. Economic: At the economic level, agriculture is
converted, under globalization, into a market-controlled activity.
The production for food, that is production for human
sustenance, and the agricultural sustainability are, in the process,
ignored. The implications are grave. In this process, engineered
by global finance and global services, what takes place is the
extraction of surplus from agriculture and transfer of the rural
surplus. “Businessman, traders, industrialists, professionals etc
are all interested only in the extraction of surplus from
agriculture, as their profits or earnings are inversely related to
the net retainable incomes of those engaged in agriculture”.
(K.C. Suri) It results in impoverization of the rural areas and
pauperization of vast sections of people in a primarily
Depeasantization 147
agricultural country like India. In this agricultural country,
agriculture is ‘downgraded’, with all the serious implications.
3. Political: At the political plane what we are witnessing
is the emergence of a new politics. The political process in
which peasants had a decisive sway gives in to a politics
dancing to the tune of metropolitan, global capital. Indian
politics, at one level, is being ‘depeasantized’. The agriculturists
and landless agricultural labourers are disempowered. At
another level, the Government surrenders its right to self-
determination and independent policy initiatives, and subjects
itself to the global financial and political structures like the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World
Trade Organization. The national government begins to act
within the framework determined by global, corporate players
and absolves itself of the responsibility to intervene in the
interests of the farmers and rural people.
4. Ethical: The spate of farmers’ suicides raises some
fundamental ethical questions also. These suicides are the
outcome of profound social transformations taking place in the
rural areas in India. The absence of the extending hands of the
state to save the farmer from the ‘loop’ is obvious but it also
reveals that the agriculturists have become ‘atomized and
fragmented’. Earlier, a few suicides would have shaken the
society. Now, it has become so common. The public conscience
doesn’t seem to be gravely disturbed. A new perception
regarding Government’s public responsibility is taking over.
Market values are forcefully replacing the age-old values of
concern and care.
The farmers’ suicides are a grim manifestation of the
grave situation prevailing in the Indian rural areas. And nothing
less than a new politics and a new economics based on a new set
of value-perceptions and human and eco-relationships would be
able to bring in a new life to the Indian villages and villagers.
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