The Editor's Page

Worldcentrism
globalization from the bottom up?

The mindset we call “modernity” with all of its interrelated values, models, assumptions, and predispositions has long been dominant; but in our own time we have begun to discern evidence of the weakening of its essential dynamics and to recognize the growing strength of a countervailing set of values. Take the example of patriarchy. There's certainly no more characteristic feature of modernity than the cultural assumption of the native superiority of the male and the concomitant notion that men should dominate every aspect of public and private life. To be sure, patriarchal assumptions have shaped the human social order for most of recorded history. Today, however, patriarchy's long dominance has been so powerfully challenged that it seems particularly unlikely to continue.

And that’s just the beginning. To the elements of the emerging set of values we can add: a new commitment to human rights, an unprecedented range of concern for social and economic justice, a profound awakening of the long dormant human sense of respect for the Earth, and a growing and vocal movement insisting that war has outlived its usefulness and legitimacy. Before you protest that the state of the world seems to reflect just the opposite, consider that we live not in the time of the ascendancy of newer values but in a time of value shift. The ideas, assumptions, and habits of thought that have nurtured patriarchy, harbored racism, tolerated injustice, presided over the rape of the planet, and refined the arts of war are being challenged as never before. Their influence is being significantly undermined, but many of their institutional and cultural infrastructures remain in place. However, a compelling array of countervailing values, understandings, hopes, and dreams is shaping a new cultural evolutionary moment.

There is no shortage of evidence that a transition may be underway. Consider the dramatic transformation of cultural attitudes and structures in the wake of the movement for the liberation of women or the hesitant but persistent "greening" of values that found expression at the Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002. The current global anti-war movement, to cite a more recent example, has given rise to protests and concern on a scale never before witnessed yet tempered by a range of thoughtful new analyses of violence and the human condition. The struggle for human rights, in the 55 years since Eleanor Roosevelt fought for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the floor of the new United Nations, has brought issues of racism, sexism, and social injustice to the fore in global politics. The growth of interreligious and intercultural movements around the world has shaped a powerful counterpoint to regressive and reactionary religious fundamentalism. Taken as a whole, the address to issues of peace, justice, and ecological sustainability now forms the core of a new world activism confronting the dangers of what one could term "globalization from the top down" – the creeping Americanization of the planet and the economic domination of the planetary South by the North.

In a sense, the new activism – by no means restricted to western cultures but growing on every continent – represents a form of "globalization from the bottom up" – an emerging worldwide consensus of values sharing a central focus or pulse that can be discerned in each of the developments we’ve noted: the long, slow, and painful shift from a range of what might be termed "mono-centrisms’ (ego-, ethno-, religio-, gender-, etc.) to worldcentrism (concern for the whole). Each failing cultural dynamic of the older era – sexism, racism, intolerance, religious exclusivism, injustice, imperialism, eco-abuse—manifests the essential blindness of ethnocentrism, the conviction that one’s own group, gender, race, class, nation, religion, or species is somehow inherently superior to every other.

Make no mistake. The values of the declining order still possess tremendous influence and command significant institutional infrastructures; but their radical disconnect with changing human and planetary realities becomes more and more apparent every day. The belief that the other is "alien" and always deficient in some critical regard requires at the very least a deep ignorance of that other, an ignorance that becomes more difficult to maintain with every new interhuman network link or interculturally shared "aha" experience. And that’s the undeniable advantage of the worldcentric movement.

Perhaps the clearest mark of the steady progress of cultural evolution shows itself in the reaction we begin to feel in the presence of stark ethnocentrism. The unapologetic hater – the racist, sexist, homophobe, eco-predator, warhawk, or cultural despoiler – every day becomes more of an anomaly and an embarrassment to those who realize that they live in age of transition. In an age that learns more every day about other ways of life and about the wonderful complexities of interdependent existence, worldcentrism has just the right resonance for interreligious commitment to dialogue and engagement.

Jim Kenney, Alan Race, Seshagiri Rao