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Sharing the norms and values that enable global coexistence, while respecting cultural differences Sean Cleary, Executive Vice-Chair, FutureWorld Foundation Contents I. The Global Agenda.............................................................................................................. 1 II. The fourth pillar of the Global Agenda: Sharing the norms and values that enable global coexistence, while respecting differences……………………………………………………………………....8 Values, norms, laws, political systems……………………………………………………………………………11 Conclusions……………….…………………………………………………………………………………………………..12 III. Summaries of the Research Papers………………………………………………………………………………..13 A. A Trans-civilizational Perspective……………………………………………………………………………..13 B. The Perspective of the Russian Federation……………………………………………………………….24 C. A Chinese Perspective………………………………………………………………………………………………30 D. An Islamic Perspective……………………………………………………………………………………………...46 1V. Insights and Conclusions…………………………………………………………………………………………………59 I. THE GLOBAL AGENDA AND THE NEED FOR DEEPER INSIGHT AND AGREED NORMS To manage systemic global risks, and to protect the global commons, we need to manage transnational challenges more effectively. The tension between the short-term pressures on national leaders from their citizens, and the trade-offs needed to balance costs and benefits in inter-national and inter-temporal transactions, makes collective action on transnational scales difficult under most circumstances. Current events, from the recent global financial crisis and recession, through geopolitical challenges of different scales, and the transformative effects of new technologies, to the risk of inflection points if we transgress planetary boundaries, make it clear that present arrangements are far from satisfactory. The complexity of the adaptive ecosystem in which humanity is embedded, and of the global economic and social systems that we have created, exceed our capacity to understand and plan their workings. Human society is a complex adaptive system, incapable of control on a collective scale; it is also a core component of the bio-geosphere, a still more complex adaptive system, within whose interactions the potential for unintended consequences – some greatly deleterious – is enormous. Adaptive change in the bio-geosphere impacting on human societies was a source of uncertainty for millennia. Today, in what some researchers style the Anthropocene, aggregate human behaviour using both old and new technologies, is the primary element destabilizing the bio-geosphere, destroying biodiversity, transforming the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, and negatively affecting the oceans and the atmosphere. Limiting this damage, and the risks attendant on it, is imperative. But academic, disciplinary and institutional specialization makes it difficult to address integrated global challenges comprehensively. The plethora of government ministries, departments of regional commissions, and UN specialised agencies, show our fractured approach. The potential impacts of any threat are, moreover, experienced and interpreted differently by different groups, preventing common perspectives, and inhibiting agreement on what to encourage or to proscribe.
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At the Trilogue Salzburg in 2011, we discussed the need for comprehensive Norms for Global Governance. It became clear that the absence of integrative, trans-disciplinary categories that allow us to understand global challenges properly, the divergence of interests, and the discrepancies in the way in which values are prioritized in different societies – and subsets within them – frustrate agreement on the collective action needed to address challenges across national boundaries. The fraught debate in Europe in and after 2010, over the best means to maintain the European Union and the Euro in conditions of economic and social stress, reflects these tensions on a more limited scale. Future Challenges The world faces many challenges that can only be resolved by effective collective action at national, regional or global levels. The need for enlightened collaboration will grow. Over the next thirty-seven years we shall see sharp increases in aging within most societies, not only in Japan, Western Europe and Russia, where this has been underway for some time, but also in China (due to the one-child policy), India (about a decade after China), and the United States (offset to a degree through migration from Latin America). Pension, health and other social security systems will come under increasing pressure. Indeed, by 2050, only the Middle East and Africa will not yet have experienced appreciable reductions of the populations of working age. Urbanization will continue to accelerate.i In 2014, 54 percent of the global population of 7.25 billion lived in urban areas, up from 30 percent in 1950, and 37.2 percent in 1970. Two-thirds of more than nine billion people will live in towns and cities by 2050, representing an increase of 2.5 billion urban dwellers. Nearly 90 per cent of the increase will occur in Asia and Africa. From 1970 to 2010, the percentage of persons living in towns and cities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania rose from 25.5 percent to 51.8 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa, only 40 percent urbanized (with just under 300 million residents, 200 million of whom live in slumsii) in 2014, will rise to 64 percent (1 billion residents) by 2050; China about 40 percent urbanized today, will reach 73 percent by 2050; India, with under 30 percent of its population in urban environments today, will see that rise to 55 percent by 2050. India, China and Nigeria are expected to account collectively for 37 per cent of the projected urban population growth to 2050. India is projected to add 404 million urban dwellers, China 292 million and Nigeria 212 million. Tokyo is the world’s largest city with 38 million inhabitants, followed by Delhi with 25 million, Shanghai with 23 million, and Mexico City, Mumbai and São Paulo, each with around 21 million inhabitants. By 2030, the world is likely to have 41 mega-cities with more than 10 million inhabitants. Tokyo is projected to remain the world’s largest city in 2030 with 37 million inhabitants, followed by Delhi where the population is expected to rise to 36 million. Unlike the past, a high percentage of large cities today are in the global South. The fastest growing urban agglomerations are medium-sized cities and cities with less than 1 million inhabitants in Asia and Africa.iii Sharply rising urban populations, associated with higher vehicle use, greater energy generation, and the concentration of industries in and around cities and towns, are key sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Although today’s cities occupy only about two percent of the earth’s landmass, disproportionately in coastal areas, they consume three-quarters of the world’s energy, and account
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for at least three-quarters of global pollution. Urbanization drives up energy consumption: a one percent increment in urban population is reported to increase energy consumption by 2.2 percent.iv Cities also tend to become 1 to 6 °C warmer than surrounding landscapes, depending on their size.v UN Habitat indicates that the growing demands of urban production and consumption are dangerously accelerating the pace of climate change. By 2050, they estimate, as many as 200 million people could be displaced by climate change “…unleashed by development and manipulation of the environment”.vi The high concentration of cities on coastlines, and near floodplains, accounts for this. Enabling more equitable and environmentally-sustainable urban development is thus essential. Rapid urban growth and efforts to curb city sprawl are leading to further densification. This reduces motor fuel usage per capita and limits the need for highway development, but confronts city planners, managers and residents with new challenges – enabling maintenance of infrastructures, refuse removal and delivery of supplies to businesses in congested neighbourhoods; and retaining, or improving, the quality of life in more populous boroughs. Congestion, refuse accumulation and traffic disruption due to road and pipe maintenance are all too common in large cities today. Making the cities efficient and habitable in the face of rising urbanization requires innovative urban design, coordinated planning, and effective engagement. The burgeoning slums on the urban peripheries pose the greatest challenge. Most of the largest urban agglomerations – Delhi, Mumbai, Mexico City, Shanghai, Calcutta, Karachi, Cairo, Manila, Lagos, and Jakarta -- are in low-income countries; many poor countries have several cities with more than 1 million residents: Pakistan has eight, Mexico twelve, China more than a hundred. Between 2010 and 2020, some 632 million economic migrants will swell the city surrounds of developing countries. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of slum dwellers in developing countries rose from 767 million to 828 million. This might reach 889 million by 2020.vii These particular built environments confront urban planners with apparently intractable demands. Incomes per capita in these exploding megalopolises are between a sixth and a third of those in the USA when it reached urban residency of 65 percent in 1950; municipal planning and implementation capacity is generally weak; and very high concentrations of people in fragile informal settlements inhibit large-scale provision of energy and sanitation infrastructures. In Africa, 175 million of the 200 million slum dwellers today, have no access to decent sanitation. In Lagos, two thirds of the people live in slums with sparse access to clean drinking water, electricity or formal roads.viii One can summarize the situation crisply: By 2050 we shall have some 2.2 billion more people on the planet; potentially three billion more in the middle class; but between a quarter and a third of the global population will be slum dwellers, with very limited access to services, unless we act constructively and decisively. Present Context A rising global population, living increasingly in urban environments, and with higher disposable incomes than today, will, of course, consume much more. The growing tension between a rising global
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population with expanding desires, and the falling stock of natural capital—groundwater, marine life, biodiversity, crop and grazing land, and a healthy atmosphere—is not sustainable. Demands for privileged lifestyles in the emerging economies may push us to an inflection point faster than we know. Climate change—and its impact on the other parts of the ecosystem—may create a systemic feedback loop that threatens survival. We must better align insights, policy, and action to avert this, and to mitigate its effects. We must de-link the economic growth needed to eradicate poverty, provide security and sustain welfare, from reliance on the incineration and emission of more carbon; and we must encourage humanity to distinguish human satisfaction from excessive production, accumulation, consumption and waste. The first is a significant technological and economic challenge; the second is more demanding. Fear and want enable the survival of species. Fear enables prudent behaviour to avoid threat; greed encourages accumulation to provide for scarcity, and sexual wants underpin procreation. Greed has become counter-productive, however, as we have destroyed the balance between our economic, technological and natural capital. We have grown the first two through urbanization, industrialization and financial sophistication, but depleted the available natural capital. Overconsumption, excessive acquisition, and the attendant waste and pollution, cannot continue to grow disproportionately. In parallel with these developments we have seen a continuing decline in state sovereignty, power and authority, and trust in governments and other institutions. The sense of personal and institutional responsibility, and the acceptance of accountability to citizens and stakeholders that flows from that, has been weakened. Social media have empowered the millennial generationix - 76 percent own a smartphone, and most are online for over six hours a day – but 52 percent do not believe that their country’s political system represents their value or beliefs. The percentage rises to over 60 percent in Europe and Latin America, hovers at 53 percent in the USA, and drops to 44 percent in Asia and 41 percent in the Middle East and Africa. While family (85 percent), school (61 percent) and friends (56 percent) (followed by technology – 30 percent) have shaped their outlooks on life, government has influenced only 8 percent. The millennials’ beliefs on “the most important way to make a difference in the world”, are interesting: 42 percent say “access to [quality] education”; 41 percent say “protecting the environment” (with another 24 percent saying “promoting sustainable energy”; while 39 percent say “eliminating poverty” (with a further 24 percent saying “providing basic food and shelter to people”). While 62 percent believe they can make a difference, as individuals, on local issues, only 45 percent believe that an individual can make a difference by working through the political system. Very high percentages believe that digital networking is an effective way of influencing outcomes, with 40 percent believing that they can individually have a global impact. The role of social media in organizing political protest in Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, Bangkok and Kiev, and in coordinating social and economic protests around the world through the Occupy movementx, supports this empirically, but none of these campaigns has defined remedial programs,
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or generated identifiable leaders or institutions. We risk further weakening the authority of our inherited political systems, without clarifying how to improve or replace them. Social media – and other information and communications technologies – provide access to information, often without context, and prompt the illusion of expertise, thus encouraging active engagement, often with less reflection than is needed to make a constructive contribution. Twitter and Facebook privilege emotion and expression, but discourage analysis and insight. The implications for democratic institutions deserve careful consideration. Present-day democratic constitutions provide for representative government through the election of persons to serve in executive and legislative posts for fixed terms, to implement the promises they made in their campaigns. There are exceptions: Several countries make provision for referenda and initiatives to prompt or prohibit reform; recall elections allow citizens to remove an official from office before the end of the elected term; and impeachment of a sitting President by the U.S. Senate is possible in defined circumstances. Parliamentary systems make provision for votes of no confidence in the Prime Minister, requiring office-bearer to tender his or her resignation. But social media campaigns of the sort that some activists promote, fired with enthusiasm after mass street protests led the military to displace two Egyptian Presidents – one of whom was duly elected – within two years, would transform democratic politics as we know it. Governments, and the broader political class, are likely to resist this.xi Few have thought through the tension between making information about their personal locations, views and actions digitally available to the Internet service providers whose products they use at no personal cost, while desiring to maintain privacy and prevent governments from having access to their personal data. In a world in which extremism and terrorism have proliferated and assumed protean forms, and radical groups of different ideological stripes employ digital communication instruments and financial systems, as well as explosive devices, with considerable skill, it is inconceivable that national intelligence services will not ‘mine’ the data made available through digital (and analogue) communications to search for patterns that may disclose planning of life-threatening attacks. Given the increasing business collaboration between terrorist groups and organized crime syndicates – whose operations now involve some $1000 billion in annual transactions, using the same digital and financial systems – similar data-mining for evidence of criminal activities is inevitably undertaken by law enforcement agencies outside the national security realm. These new technologies, the tensions they engender and the intimate connectivity that they and other elements of globalization effect, through transnational supply chains, integrated financial systems, and global broadcast networks, inherently weaken national governments’ ability to promote the immediate interests of their citizens, and to deliver on their campaign promises. Global economic expansion brings benefits to all if the government conducts prudent macro-economic and monetary governance; but these offer little protection in a global recession. Civic disaffection, political polarization and populism are thus natural, leading many to express cynicism and defect from voting.xii Governance suffers and trust declines.xiii
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These national tensions exacerbate the failure of effective transnational collective action, and weaken global governance. Meanwhile, geopolitical tensions in East Asia, the Middle East and at the interface between the Russian Federation and the European Community, are further debilitating effective collaboration, as the worldviews and perspectives on national interests articulated by elites, and by populist politicians, diverge sharply. In an effort to grapple with these challenges we identified five items on a tentative Global Agenda. The five components fall into two classes: the first three are partly overlapping challenges, whose management is essential for continued human progress; and the last two, essential enablers for success. • Delivering environmentally and socially sustainable economic growth – for without this, we shall not be able to achieve anything else • Reducing poverty and improving equity – because exceptional prosperity for the few at the expense of the many is neither morally justifiable nor politically sustainable • Addressing the sources of global and national vulnerability and promoting security – for security underpins both community and progress • Sharing the norms and values that enable global coexistence, and working to respect and reconcile cultural differences – because respect for core values and universal norms allows us to live in harmony, while appreciation of cultural diversity enriches our understanding; and • Improving the quality of global governance and our global institutions – for most of the important challenges we face in a highly-connected world cannot otherwise be resolved. Because of the need for integrated intellectual and disciplinary approaches, each challenge is defined comprehensively. Growth – normally the field of economists – serves no purpose if it is not socially and environmentally sustainable. Earth and climate scientists study planetary processes at different scales, but not economics or social sciences. Anthropologists and sociologists, and perhaps those who have mastered political science and law, understand social structures and systems, but not humanity’s relationship with the bio-geosphere. In search of mathematical precision, many economists have tended to reify the paradigm of rational choice and disregard both social context, and evidence of human behavior. Integrated dialogue, in which specialists effectively communicate their insights to one another, is needed to address these challenges. To progress beyond an elite understanding, however, we also need to define and secure acceptance of a comprehensive normative framework within which to address these challenges. If respect for planetary boundaries requires transformation of present models of growth, we need both (i) an ethos that legitimizes restraints on carbon emissions and excessive consumption; and (ii) new development models that enable poverty reduction despite an aggregate reduction in current levels of production, trade, transportation and wholesale and retail distribution around the world. If security is to be enhanced, and potentially catastrophic systemic risks managed and mitigated more effectively in an increasingly connected environment, we need both (i) better understanding of the workings of the social, economic and technological systems we have built, and
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the ecosystems in which we are embedded; and (ii) broader and deeper agreement on the norms we shall employ to mitigate risk and enhance security and sustainability. To achieve these, we need a deeper understanding of the worldviews of the different state actors, enabling us to understand their sense of their interests, and the values they employ in determining these. We need significant insights into the interests and values that lead each major societal cluster, and each influential polity, to adopt positions that must be accommodated by others in our collective efforts to agree on the provision and use of important public goods, and to manage the global commons. We have therefore commissioned, over five years, an independent research and seminar series on each of the pillars of the Global Agenda, employing teams from leading African, Asian, European, Latin American and U.S. think tanks. Each series comprises parallel programs of research on one of the challenges of the Global Agenda. An identical, open-ended mandate is given to each cluster, which is asked: To develop core, actionable proposals, and to make explicit the values and norms that underpin its recommendations; to allow us to identify the perspectives, values and norms which are held in common across each of these cultural clusters, and those that diverge. The common perspectives that emerge from the research frame the scope of action on what all agree has to be resolved; while the common values and norms identified can serve as the normative parameters of the solutions to be developed. The research hypothesis is that a triadic structure will emerge, that recognizes the need: To subordinate key global public goods, and certain areas that threaten a tragedy of the commons, to supranational systems; to cooperate more closely and harmonize rules on human rights, trade, financial flows and security (e.g. weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, pandemic control); and to commit to common objectives in other areas, without necessarily creating institutions to control or enforce compliance. The first pillar of the Global Agenda Against that backdrop, the Trilogue Salzburg 2012 addressed the first challenge on the Global Agenda – making economic growth socially inclusive, and environmentally sustainable. The title selected was: Tackling the Global Gordian Knot: Can economic growth be socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable? See - http://www.futureworldfoundation.org/Content/Article.aspx?ArticleID=5411 The second pillar of the Global Agenda At the Global Economic Symposium 2013, we addressed the second pillar of the Global Agenda under the rubric Poverty, inequality and equity – rethinking the paradigm See http://www.futureworldfoundation.org/Content/Article.aspx?ArticleID=6908 The third pillar of the Global Agenda
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At the Global Economic Symposium 2014, we addressed the third pillar of the Global Agenda Vulnerability and security: Integrating approaches across scales See - https://www.futureworldfoundation.org/Content/Article.aspx?ArticleID=8354 II. THE FOURTH PILLAR OF THE GLOBAL AGENDA This year, at the Global Economic Symposium 2015, we are addressing the fourth challenge on the Global Agenda: Sharing the norms and values that enable global coexistence, and working to respect and reconcile cultural differences. The research mandate is Defining the normative framework that can enable constructive global coexistence, in the light of our diverse cultural heritages. This topic builds on those addressed in the first three pillars, and is intended to enable an integrative understanding of how we can achieve security, equity and human welfare within our planetary biogeosphere. We are seeking new integrative concepts and insights, and an understanding of how may emerge from and across cultures and societies. Western norms are no longer paramount The global order of the second half of the 20th century was built on a normative and legal structure based on Western values, which were assumed to be, and represented by those seeking to enforce them, as being universal. They were, of course, the products of the Western cultural and intellectual tradition, originating in Judaeo-Christian ethics and Greco-Roman philosophy and law, informed by the progressive acceptance of rights from Magna Carta through the Western Enlightenment, and reinforced by economic principles born of the industrial revolution, and the superior firepower of Western armies and navies in and after the 19th century. In the aftermath of WW II, the pillars of global governance – the United Nations (and its proliferating Specialised Agencies), the Bretton Woods Institutions (the IMF and what later became the World Bank group) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – were crafted in accordance with the needs and the norms of the victorious powers. The norms that governed the system were not unchallenged: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, while participating in the United Nations, where it enjoyed a veto in the Security Council, was not represented in the IMF or World Bank, nor was it a party to the GATT, and it pursued a political, social and economic agenda distinct from that of the United States and its key Western allies. In politico-military terms, the states comprising the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and its associated bodies – CENTO xiv , SEATO xv and ANZUS – anchored by the Unites States – stood in clear opposition to the states clustered around the USSR in the Warsaw Pact. Furthermore, in the language of the time, the First World (comprising market democracies) opposed the Second World (of centrally-planned economies), leaving the remaining states and a growing number of new countries, lumped together uncomfortably as the Third World. Certain states of substancexvi sought to avoid becoming the captors of either dominant set of interests, and created the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961xvii, although the leaders of some of these benefited by playing Moscow and Washington off against one another, securing favours from both. This condition persisted until the end of the 1980s, with Washington and Moscow supporting opposite sides in the Middle East, and waging proxy wars in Africa, in Afghanistan, and in Central America.
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Even during the Cold War, however, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) served as a norm governing the conduct of both military blocs. Over time, this led to new agreements: The AntiBallistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT I and II – the latter never ratified by the U.S. Senate) negotiated in the Nixon and Ford presidencies, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START), initiated under President Reagan. All were premised on the principle of MAD. Ronald Reagan and Mikael Gorbachev, for quite different reasons, brought the Cold War to an end. Reagan never doubted that American freedoms would triumph over Soviet communism, but he called for a world “which allows people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means”, and he sought to render “…nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete”.”xviii Gorbachev understood the fragility of the Soviet Union and the risks of confrontation with the United States. His efforts to revitalise the system by purging Communist Party hardliners and balancing central planning with market economics, led to the destruction of the Party, the fragmentation of the Russian empire, and his own loss of power. En route, he repudiated the imperative of class struggle and proclaimed peaceful coexistence as necessary for human well-being. Like Reagan, Gorbachev recognised that while distinctions would remain, “people are tired of tension and confrontation. They prefer a search for a more secure and reliable world…in which everyone would preserve their own philosophic, political and ideological views and their way of life.”xix This confluence of views allowed the two men to agree, at Reykjavik in 1986, to reduce strategic forces by 50 percent over five years and to eliminate all ballistic missiles in ten. Although the agreement fell apart, it illustrates the spirit of the time. Soviet and US diplomats were also able to work together to withdraw from, and help resolve, regional proxy conflicts. Gorbachev’s rationale encouraged the Poles, Hungarians and Czechs to press aggressively for independence. Accelerated liberalization hastened fragmentation, leading to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and NATO’s extension to Poland’s borders. When Yeltsin overthrew Gorbachev in 1991, the President of Russia dissolved the Soviet Union and dismembered the Russian Empire. The sense that Western (and particularly Anglo–Saxon) economic and political norms, defined by Francis Fukuyama xx as liberal markets and liberal democracy, had triumphed, and that the rest of human history would be defined by their progressive improvement, became the defining ethos of “globalisation”. Tom Friedman later eulogised the effects of this belief in The World is Flatxxi. Both Presidents GHW Bush and Bill Clinton hailed the “new world” – a world each said would comprise thriving democracies that recognised their shared responsibility for freedom and justice. xxii Commenting sagely at the time, Henry Kissinger noted: “For the third time in this centuryxxiii, America thus proclaimed its intention to build a new world order by applying its domestic values to the world at large. And for the third time, America seemed to tower over the international stage.”xxiv But almost as soon as this power was proclaimed, it ceased to be effective. As Asian states recovered capacityxxv in the last two decades of the 20th century, the presumed universality of the norms that “the West” had imposed was increasingly challenged and laid bare. Samuel Huntington xxvi was disturbed to discover that Asian states and scholars rejected the rights that he assumed were universal. Efforts by political Islamists to assert salafistxxvii principles, and restore shari’a as the law governing Muslim polities, and potentially the whole of the umma, dividing the world into the Dar al
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Harb and the Dar al Islam in the manner of Ibn Taymiyahxxviii at the time of the Mongol invasions, seemed to reinforce the thesis that a civilizational clash was looming. xxix The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by the Arab revolts in the wider MENA region, have led not only to power struggles between factions within within states; and contests for power between states; but a major conflict between ethnic and sectarian groups across state boundaries, and an assault by Islamists on the international state system. China, rising economically, and rediscovering its ability to pursue its interests in its neighborhood, is questioning arrangements that others hoped had been settled for decades. Russia, whose leader sees the Western liberal approach to societal tension as dangerous, in the context of “changes in the world order… [which] have usually been accompanied by, if not global war and conflict, then by chains of intensive local-level conflicts…[sees] …no certainty that the current system of global and regional security is able to protect us from upheavals.”xxx No power can today independently build a world order on its values and norms. In November 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, in Global Trends 2025xxxi, recognised this both as a reality, and as a trend towards 2025: “The whole international system - as constructed following WWII - will be revolutionized. Not only will new players - Brazil, Russia, India and China - have a seat at the international high table, they will bring new stakes and rules of the game.” This is inevitable: The rescendence of particularly the Asian powers, with deep reservoirs of historical experience, literate high cultures and philosophical reflection, makes challenges to the norms of international exchange established over almost two centuries of Western dominance, entirely understandable. The normative grip of the West on the world has slipped, and the characteristics of a successor regime are still unclear. The conduct of international relations involves each nation state pursuing its national interests – in accordance with its values – in an environment in which the interests and the values of other states often diverge from its own. This tension can only be mitigated by joint definition of a legitimate order that accommodates the interests of all powers. Periods of relative peace xxxii in history have been characterised by agreement on the norms that constituted the legitimate order, and creation of a balance of power that enabled each state to accept that its vital interests were adequately met. Hedley Bullxxxiii observed that a global society must comprise ’ . . . a group of states, conscious of . . . common interests and common values . . . conceiv[ing] themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations to one another.” The challenge is thus to clarify the interests and the values that nations have in common, and to negotiate and define the common set of rules that will shape inter-state behaviour, and our collective conduct in the context of the global commons. State interests will, of course, continue to differ. It is precisely this divergence that makes concluding international agreements so difficult. To reach agreement, and achieve the larger purpose of an international treaty, states must accept obligations they might prefer not to assume, and make concessions that have costs for their societies, at least in the short term. Sometimes it proves impossible to reach agreement, even as it does between individuals. Only well-defined norms – or rules of the game – recognised by all as transcendent, and justifying the sacrifice of immediate self-, or national, interests, can manage the tension between short-term national interests and the demands of a global order. Only by explicitly defining an inclusive normative
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framework appropriate to our time, can we create an anchor for a system of global governance that can address the needs of a highly connected world, and avert a tragedy of the commons. This does not require us to deny the diversity of cultures and value systems in our global society. It does demand an honest enquiry into what we hold in common. While group identities and cultural differences are a reality, and contribute to the richness of humanity, our ability to co-exist in a highly connected and interdependent world requires respect for, and adherence to, a certain quantum of universal norms. The challenge thus lies in defining the norms that are common to all of humanity, while accepting the diversity of cultures and group values that enrich our collective experience.xxxiv In this project, we have found it useful to distinguish between values, norms and laws, and to acknowledge them as the foundations of the political systems we employ to allow us to live together in large groups. Values Values, which may be ethical, ideological or aesthetic, serve to guide personal behavior. Individual values are embedded by nurture, schooling and experience, and form part of a more-or-less coherent system, learned and adapted over time. A value system is thus a set of [broadly] coherent values applied [relatively] consistently by an individual, to maintain personal equilibrium, and perhaps to comply with community standards for admission to and membership of a group. Certain values are physiologically determined and common to most humans: e.g. the desire to avoid physical pain, to seek pleasure, and to acquire and retain sufficient assets for survival. Others, including those we consider ethical, are aligned with individual beliefs and more extensive, communal belief systems, and thus vary across cultures and between individuals. The values of persons within groups xxxv , societies xxxvi and cultures xxxvii are largely common to their members, as they are transmitted through religious and secular schooling and reinforced by social norms. Values that are shared by the members of a group identify objects, conditions and circumstances that its members consider important for their identity and survival. Values thus both derive from, and inform, the norms of a society or group. Norms [Social] normsxxxviii are the explicit or implicit behaviors and cues applicable within a society or group, which are used to clarify and enforce appropriate, and discourage inappropriate, values, beliefs, attitudes and behavior. xxxix In discussions of the role of norms in shaping national identity and concepts of national interest, norms have been defined as collective expectations about proper behavior for a given identity.xl Deference to the social norms applied within a group enables one's acceptance by other members, while failure to apply them results in criticism, ostracism and sanctions, and may, if the violation is egregious or sustained, lead to expulsion. Within a group, norms promote coherent behavior, allowing each member to predict the responses of others. Not surprisingly, social norms vary between groupsxli, including social classes, and evolve over time, often differing from one age group to another. Most individuals today belong to many social groups, some of which are [sub-] cultures, at the same time. Some of the normative behaviors expected of members in one of these different groups may be different from those expected in anotherxlii, and some of the norms of any group may be at variance with the personal values, and private behaviors, of an individual member when [s]he is outside that group. As long as the contrast between the social norms of each group and the personal values of a
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member is not too great, however, an individual can reconcile the differences and extract and synthesize the benefits of membership. We are all capable of adopting a range of different personae, within certain limits. Laws Law is a system of rules (or codified social norms, violation of which attracts legal penalties), which is applicable to the whole of a particular society and is enforced through its institutions. The law seeks to facilitate relations between members of the society by clarifying their rights and responsibilities, balancing their interests, and regulating the behavior of individuals and groups in accordance with that balance. The society to which the law applies is usually that number of persons physically present within the national territory of the lawmaker, and thus subject to the jurisdiction of its courts. There are a limited number of exceptions to the principle of national jurisdiction, including diplomatic and consular immunity, public international law, including Human Rights law, and the extraterritorial reach of certain taxation regimes. The evolution of formal systems of law parallels the emergence and development of large societies, from shortly after 3000 BCxliii to the present. As a societal or civilizationalxliv artifact, its evolution has resulted both in numerous branches, and more importantly, distinct systems of law, the product of the codification of the social norms of different societies, or civilizations, at different times, in different places. Political Systems The purpose of political systems is to allow individuals, with different and potentially divergent interests, to live together in society. The political system adopted by a society reflects the values of its members and the norms they employ, to enforce appropriate, and discourage inappropriate, behavior. All political systems, no matter their normative content, have six functions: (i) they allow for the expression of diverse needs and interests; (ii) they aggregate similar needs and interests and facilitate reconciliation of those that diverge; (ii) they make explicit the normative context within which this expression, aggregation and reconciliation will occur; (iv) they elevate certain norms to the status of laws and attach penal sanction to their violation; (v) they provide institutions and means to implement the laws; and (vi) courts whose legitimacy is widely accepted, to adjudicate cases where rights are disputed between persons, or between one or more persons and the state. The social norms of each (national) society provide the bedrock of its political system. These norms define the means of political expression the society deems appropriate; they determine the standards that guide efforts at reconciliation of interests; they inform the laws enacted by the legislature and the behaviour of the executive in enforcing those laws; and they secure acceptance of the decisions of the courts, provided these are consistent with the society’s sense of equity and justice. When an executive, a legislature or a judiciary is seen to deviate from the norms of the society it purports to govern, social tensions erupt. In extreme cases, these may either displace the government, or force reform of the system. Conclusions This review makes apparent our dilemma on the global scale: There is no global community of citizens to which global institutions are accountable, and national governments are loath to devolve more power than necessary to supranational institutions. The weakness of global governance leaves us vulnerable, however, because most of the risks we face, from financial contagion and climate change to terrorism and pandemics, are global in scale and demand integrated policy responses.
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Building a sense of global community and establishing a polity to deliver effective global governance has proven impossible to date, because we have not invested in creating the coherent norms that bind communities together, allow divergent interests to be balanced, and disputes to be resolved. As these are the core functions of every political system, they can only be delivered if the society – in this case, a global society – is in agreement on the norms that will regulate these functions. Values and the norms that emerge from them, are, of course, both shaped by, and, in turn, influence the cultures in which they are embedded. Our aim in the project in 2015 is to progress to a better understanding of the perspectives, values and norms that are held in common across the most significant cultural clusters; and which diverge, in what manner. III.
SUMMARIES OF THE RESEARCH PAPERS
We asked each research institution to bring a broad, multidisciplinary approach to bear in addressing the topic. The four papers – a comprehensive overview by Dr Katherine Marshall of the Berkley
Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, and papers reflecting a Russian perspective by Dr Sergey Kulick of the Institute of Contemporary Development in Moscow, a Chinese perspective by Professor YANG Huilin and Dr ZHANG Jing of the Renmin University of China, and an Islamic perspective by Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburgh are summarised below.
Each has approached the brief from a different but complementary vantage point. The range of perspectives employed and the diversity of the insights offered by the authors, has, as in previous years, resulted in a rich tapestry, illustrating the breadth and depth of the topic, the difficulty of assembling an integrated perspective, and the importance of transcending these limitations.
A. A Trans-civilizational Perspective In her paper, Dr Katherine Marshall notes that the contending paradigms of an “end of history” or a “clash of civilizations” show remarkable tenacity xlv , because each offers a broad framework for insights on global affairs. She suggests that the dialectic that surrounds them beg important questions about the norms and values that underlie these visions and their implications. International affairs in 2015 invite similar reflections. The two articles were inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the USSR, and challenged core understandings of international affairs. They provoked debates that continue to this day. This fall, world leaders will meet to discuss the world’s future at the UN General Assembly in New York and the climate change summit in Paris. Conflagrations in the Middle East, economic troubles in Latin America, acute pressures from migration, and violent extremism give rise to uncertainty. There is every reason to reflect on ideas and values that might inspire the path ahead. Dr Marshall reflects on the contradictions in the Fukuyama/Huntington debates, focusing on approaches to identifying common global norms and areas of tension, seeking anchors for a system of global governance that respects common features that can bind together contemporary humanity, and important areas of difference that demand recognition and response. The question is how far the convergence in systems and approaches that Fukuyama cited, so visible in globalization, is challenged by disruptive forces and possibly increased clashes among civilizational forces. There are worrying indicators of deep rooted clashes, most obviously in forms of violent extremism in different world regions, but also in questioning of elements of human rights.
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A contemporary study xlvi illustrated in the following “map” of cultures and links, recalls Huntington’s assertion of major civilizational differences and continuing cultural divides:
This civilizational map resembles a spider’s web in the strength and complexity of interconnections, but unlike a web, has no clear center. From the center of a spider’s web, the spokes and links go outward in an orderly fashion. A United Nations with a headquarters and key organs at the center, and responsibilities allocated to specialized agencies - the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), World Meteorological Organization, Office of International Migration, and Peacekeeping forces, reflects such a web. Major national powers, notably the United States, likewise envisage a system where they are at the center although the nature of the spokes and relationships differ. But a civilizational map has no obvious center. Links that might reflect trade, cultural offerings, research, and ideas, go in all directions, with differing densities. In the face of the need to address the common challenges facing global leaders, this chart shows both the potential, and the difficulty, of finding common directions, given differing vantage points, ideals, ideas and interests, and an illusory center. Dr Marshall explores the challenges of identifying common values and ideals in the context of international relations and global governance, drawing on history, philosophy, psychology, political science, anthropology, religious studies, sciences, and art. Her focus is on the links between religion and international affairs, and the imperatives of development (addressing poverty and social justice). She offers a possible “ladder” of ethical principles to link different approaches and potential areas for action. Inspirational ethical scaffolds: A belief in and quest for common values The contemporary world does not lack for efforts to identify shared values. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the elaborate and dynamic body of international norms, covenants, and legal instruments that have followed, are the most complex and best elaborated. Others represent restatements of ancient wisdom (drawing on religious traditions), or are built on modern experience
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and ideals. They vary widely, from pithy articulations to elaborate formulations, with ideals accompanied by legal instruments and implementation modalities. She summarizes several “ethical scaffolds”, reflecting briefly on their strengths and critiques of their limitations, seeking to distill what is finest in human values drawing on millennia of experience, and to reinforce what humans (and in some instances all creation) share. They seek to articulate values and norms in order to unite and to capture attention in order to have impact. The Universal Declaration of Human Rightsxlvii “The General Assembly proclaims this universal declaration of human rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. “Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Wellesley College (and no doubt other academic institutions) gives to each graduate a copy of the UDHR as an inspiration. Staff of the United Nations organizations (and some critics) refer to it as the UN’s “religion”. The product of the era that followed World War II, the UDHR reflects both idealism and labour (led by Eleanor Roosevelt). The negotiators were dominated by the Allied victors, though there were non-westerners among them. And in an effort to draw on philosophical and religious wisdom, UNESCO consulted widely, also with Mahatma Gandhixlviii. Philosopher Jacques Maritain said that “human rights [themselves] are a social practice that aims to realize a particular vision of human dignity and potential by institutionalizing these basic rights”, but observed: “Yes, we agree about the rights, but on condition no one asks us why.” xlix The achievement of a common declaration was celebrated even as the enormity of the challenge and the reality of differences were recognized. These became starkly evident as the Cold War took form and the world seemed irretrievably divided between three or even four worlds: the “west”, the USSR-allies, the poor, often non-aligned nations, and, as the “fourth world”, the very poor and marginalized whose voice was scarcely heard. The UDHR remains the most wide ranging and fundamental effort to draw together and institutionalize core values, notably through covenants that followed. Signed by the world’s nations it is non-binding but a fundamental point of reference for any discussion of values. But there are plenty of critiques. Among the most telling are the concern, present from the creation, about the dominance of “western” values that clearly, historically, was part of the drafting and negotiation process. Another concern, reflected in a recent book by Mark Lagon and Anthony Arend, is that the notion of “rights” is legalistic and thus rigid. They argue that human dignity is a more positive and embracing concept.l Most worrying, however, are the constant reservations of various governments about specific rights, with women’s rights a prominent example.li The Millennium Declarationlii Also part of the United Nations framework (representing in practice the core of contemporary global governance), the Millennium Declaration reiterated the ideals of the UN Charter and echoed principles of human rights, amplified by ideals that had taken since 1948, focused on peace and the transformative effort to end global poverty: “We will spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected. We are committed to making the right to development a reality for everyone and to freeing the entire human race from want.”
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… We resolve therefore to create an environment – at the national and global levels alike – which is conducive to development and to the elimination of poverty. … Success in meeting these objectives depends, inter alia, on good governance within each country. It also depends on good governance at the international level and on transparency in the financial, monetary and trading systems. We are committed to an open, equitable, rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory multilateral trading and financial system.” The MDGs (Millennium Development Goals)liii The Millennium Summit in September 2000 (which adopted the Millennium Declaration) reflected idealistic reaffirmation of the values and norms of the UDHR, but brought some realism in framing goals, tied to deadlines, measures, and efforts at accountability: the MDGs. The MDGs drew on frustration with broken promises at countless summits, and a desire to draw on private sector principles of disciplined pursuit of specific targets. The MDG framework, sometimes dismissed as too narrow, has nonetheless helped to frame development discourse over fifteen years, and the efforts underway to expand them builds on the pragmatic values they reflect, including the importance of continuity and stocktaking. The Sustainable Development Goals It is probable that the 70th Session of the General Assembly will approve the 17 Sustainable Goals and 169 targets defined in consultations with over a million people around the world. The SDGs are to replace the MDGs, broadening their scope also to address climate change. Recognising the challenge of acting on this elaborate framework, the effort highlights People, Planet, Prosperity: Peace and Partnership over fifteen years from 2015: “People: We are determined to end poverty and hunger, in all their forms and dimensions, and to ensure that all human beings can fulfil their potential in dignity and equality and in a healthy environment. Planet: We are determined to protect the planet from degradation, including through sustainable consumption and production, sustainably managing its natural resources and taking urgent action on climate change, so that it can support the needs of the present and future generations. Prosperity: We are determined to ensure that all human beings can enjoy prosperous and fulfilling lives and that economic, social and technological progress occurs in harmony with nature. Peace: We are determined to foster peaceful, just and inclusive societies which are free from fear and violence. There can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development. Partnership: We are determined to mobilize the means required to implement this Agenda through a revitalised Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, based on a spirit of strengthened global solidarity, focussed in particular on the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable and with the participation of all countries, all stakeholders and all people.”liv The complexity of the international treaties is reflected in an affirmation lumps all the instruments together without reference to priority or evolution: “We reaffirm the outcomes of all major UN conferences and summits which have laid a solid foundation for sustainable development and have helped to shape the new Agenda. These include the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development; the World Summit on Sustainable Development; the World Summit for Social Development; the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Beijing Platform for Action; and the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (“Rio+ 20”). We also reaffirm the follow-up to these conferences, including the outcomes of the Fourth United
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Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries, the Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States; the Second United Nations Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries; and the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction.”lv The Charter for Compassionlvi The core notion of reviving a common sense of compassion as a unifying and inspirational idea is elaborated in the Charter for Compassion, led by writer Karen Armstrong. The outcome of a 2008 Ted Prize, this formulation of basic values and principles incorporates an overarching idea to inform a set of values. “We believe that a compassionate world is possible when every man, woman and child treats others as they wish to be treated--with dignity, equity and respect. “We believe that all human beings are born with the capacity for compassion, and that it must be cultivated for human beings to survive and thrive.” The Charter has garnered many signatures and inspired many events, but its impact is difficult to assess. The Global Ethic Another ambitious effort to frame core values and norms is represented by the global ethic, a conscious effort led by theologian Hans Kung to draw common values from world religious teachings, whose framework was articulated at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1993. lvii Kung subsequently elaborated and adapted it for a business, as well as religious and political contexts.lviii The core principles are: • Commitment to a Culture of Non-violence and Respect for Life • Commitment to a Culture of Solidarity and a Just Economic Order • Commitment to a Culture of Tolerance and a Life of Truthfulness • Commitment to a Culture of Equal Rights and Partnership Between Men and Women “Therefore we would be pleased if as many professions as possible, such as those of physicians, scientists, business people, journalists, and politicians, would develop up-to-date codes of ethics which would provide specific guidelines for the vexing questions of these particular professions.” Kung states that “If there are to be global solutions to them, they therefore also call for a globalization of ethic: no uniform ethical system ("ethics"), but a necessary minimum of shared ethical values, basic attitudes and criteria ("ethic") to which all regions, nations and interest groups can commit themselves. In other words there is a need for a common basic human ethic. There can be no new world order without a world ethic, a global ethic. • There will be no survival of our globe without a global ethic: • There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. • There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue and cooperation among the religions and civilizations.” The Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilitieslix Kung and colleagues have developed a statement of human responsibilities, conceived as a parallel to the declaration on human rights. The concept is that every right has a concomitant responsibility, asserted in part to counter the notion that rights entail entitlements. It has been promoted both by UNESCO and the Interaction Council but has met a lukewarm response, especially in Europe, because of concerns that it might undermine human rights. It harks back to a comment by Mahatma Gandhi in response to the UDHR draft: that the “Ganges of rights” arises from the “Himalayas of responsibilities”.
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The Earth Charterlx The Earth Charter, launched in 2000 is another effort to define global values and norms. Among its proponents are Stephen Rockefeller and a diverse group of religious leaders. Its tone is inspirational and it emphasises the interconnected state of the world, the intergenerational nature of the challenge, and the significance of cultural diversity: “We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.” Religious formulations The twenty-first century has seen rising attention to the roles of religious institutions and teachings, both as a “problem” (linked to extremism and to resistance to change on topics like gender equality) and a “solution”, providing a potentially binding force, and an inspiration for hope and meaning. Peacebuilding is a key focus recognising the power of religious institutions that engage some 85 percent of the world’s population.lxi Religious institutions have always focused on defining values and norms and communicating them to adherents, so it is natural that many efforts to define norms that bind communities start with religious teachings. Many interfaith efforts focus on common values, like the Parliament of Religions. Five illustrations are briefly highlighted: (a) Hillel’s wisdom: Looking beyond the UN framework to what might be termed “ancient wisdom”, a story is often recounted that highlights a far simpler ethical “scaffold”: the core notion of the idea, expressed in various ways, of the maxim “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. In the Talmudic story (Shabbat 31a), “Hillel, when asked by a prospective convert to Judaism to teach him the whole Torah while he stood on one leg, replied: ‘That which is hateful unto you do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole of the Torah, The rest is commentary. Go forth and study.’”lxii (b) Catholic social teaching: A vast body of teaching by the Catholic Church addresses virtually every facet of values and norms and, given the universal, global nature of the Church, they have application well beyond the Catholic community as for example, the Encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, on the environment. lxiii In the light of the attention given to this document, Dr Marshall several passages to reflect its thrust and tone: “All of this shows the urgent need for us to move forward in a bold cultural revolution.” (114) “We fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth.” (109) “Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise, even the best ecological initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic. To seek only a technical remedy to each environmental problem which comes up is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system.” (11) “Yet we can once more broaden our vision. We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is
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healthier, more human, more social, more integral. Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes …. An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door. Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance?” “Bartholomew has drawn attention to the ethical and spiritual roots of environmental problems, which require that we look for solutions not only in technology but in a change of humanity; otherwise we would be dealing merely with symptoms. He asks us to replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing, an asceticism which “entails learning to give, and not simply to give up.” (9) “I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all. The worldwide ecological movement has already made considerable progress and led to the establishment of numerous organizations committed to raising awareness of these challenges. Regrettably, many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions. We require a new and universal solidarity.” (14) “The continued acceleration of changes affecting humanity and the planet is coupled today with a more intensified pace of life and work which might be called “rapidification”.” “Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change. However, many of these symptoms indicate that such effects will continue to worsen if we continue with current models of production and consumption.” (26) “It needs to be said that, generally speaking, there is little in the way of clear awareness of problems which especially affect the excluded. Yet they are the majority of the planet’s population, billions of people. These days, they are mentioned in international political and economic discussions, but one often has the impression that their problems are brought up as an afterthought, a question which gets added almost out of duty or in a tangential way, if not treated merely as collateral damage. Indeed, when all is said and done, they frequently remain at the bottom of the pile.” (49) “Inequity affects not only individuals but entire countries; it compels us to consider an ethics of international relations. A true “ecological debt” exists, particularly between the global north and south, connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment, and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time.” (51) “The problem is that we still lack the culture needed to confront this crisis. We lack leadership capable of striking out on new paths and meeting the needs of the present with concern for all and without prejudice towards coming generations. The establishment of a legal framework which can set clear boundaries and ensure the protection of ecosystems has become indispensable, otherwise the new power structures based on the techno-economic paradigm may overwhelm not only our politics but also freedom and justice.” (53) “Politics must pay greater attention to foreseeing new conflicts and addressing the causes which can lead to them. But powerful financial interests prove most resistant to this effort, and political planning tends to lack breadth of vision. What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?” (57)
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“Each age tends to have only a meagre awareness of its own limitations. It is possible that we do not grasp the gravity of the challenges now before us. “The risk is growing day by day that man will not use his power as he should”; in effect, “power is never considered in terms of the responsibility of choice which is inherent in freedom” since its “only norms are taken from alleged necessity, from either utility or security”. (105) (c) Gandhi’s Social Sins: In 1926 Mahatma Gandhi articulated seven social sins, which have continuing resonance and applicability: • Wealth without work • Pleasure without conscience • Knowledge without character • Commerce without morality (business without ethics) • Science without humanity • Religion without sacrifice • Politics without principle (d) The Buddhist eightfold path: Buddhist teachings are recognized as speaking to core human values, as for example, the ‘eightfold path’: • Right understanding: Understanding that the Four Noble Truths are noble and true. • Right thought: Determining and resolving to practice Buddhist faith. • Right speech: Avoiding slander, gossip, lying, and all forms of untrue and abusive speech. • Right conduct: Adhering to the idea of nonviolence (ahimsa), as well as refraining from any form of stealing or sexual impropriety. • Right means of making a living: Not slaughtering animals or working at jobs that force you to violate others. • Right mental attitude or effort: Avoiding negative thoughts and emotions, such as anger and jealousy. • Right mindfulness: Having a clear sense of one’s mental state and bodily health and feelings. • Right concentration: Using meditation to reach the highest level of enlightenment. (e) Maimonides ladder: Ancient Jewish teachings speak to an order of priorities in relation to charitable giving: • The lowest: Giving begrudgingly and making the recipient feel disgraced or embarrassed. • Giving cheerfully but giving too little. • Giving cheerfully and adequately but only after being asked. • Giving before being asked. • Giving when you do not know who is the individual benefiting, but the recipient knows your identity. • Giving when you know who is the individual benefiting, but the recipient does not know your identity. • Giving when neither the donor nor the recipient is aware of the other's identity. • The Highest: Giving money, a loan, your time or whatever else it takes to enable an individual to be self-reliant.lxiv Where values clash With so many noble and inspirational efforts to build on core human values, what is missing? Why does the notion of a clash of civilizations persist? Why the violent extremism that defies every core principle? Why do human trafficking, bonded labour, discriminatory behaviour, corruption, and
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impunity persist, often with support from nation states that have affirmed and signed covenants prohibiting them? Is this the ancient struggle between good and evil at work, or does it reflect a deeper failure to recognize difference in the desire define shared norms that seem to speak to the common good? This question revives the Huntington hypotheses: that behind the mask of universal agreement on rights, norms, and goals there are in fact deep, often unrecognized divides along cultural, religious, or civilizational lines. This suggests a flaw in the UDHR, echoed in many other efforts to frame common norms, in that it places undue emphasis on western, Judeo-Christian values, to underpin the global governance superstructure. Dr Marshall believes that there is no inevitable clash, and that there is no need to discard the important areas of consensus that the ethical scaffolds represent. There is much that is universal in these principles and formulations, but that there is a need to listen more carefully, to understand different emphases, to address areas of divergence, and to learn from them. At the same time there is a need to work for stronger adherence to vital areas of common norms (including equality between men and women). Denis Goulet framed one dimension of the underlying dilemma in his often-cited reference to development experts as ‘one-eyed giants’, failing to appreciate elements of wisdom even when it lay before their eyes: “The white man. says Laurens Van Der Post, came into Africa (and Asia and America for that matter) like a one-eyed giant, bringing with him the characteristic split and blindness which were at once his strength, his torment, and his ruin. . . The one-eyed giant had science without wisdom, and he broke in upon ancient civilizations which (like the medieval West) had wisdom without science: wisdom which transcends and unites, wisdom which dwells in body and soul together and which, more by means of myth, or rite, of contemplation, than by scientific experiment, opens the door to a life in which the individual is not lost in the cosmos and in society but found in them. Wisdom which made all life sacred and meaningful - even that which later ages came to call secular and profane.’lxv Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argued for the need to open minds in The Dignity of Difference lxvi , pointing to the tension between strong beliefs, faith, and conviction, and willingness to listen to and respect other, very different perspectives. Sacks argues that respect for difference can reinforce one’s faith. He counsels hearing religious voices: “They are sustained reflections on humanity’s place in nature and what constitute the proper goals of society and an individual life… The great faiths have been the compasses of mankind.” Sacks addresses the deep divisions expressed in voices of religious extremism. “They are expressions of deep dismay at some of the side-effects of global capitalism: its inequities, its consumerism and exploitation, its failure to address widespread poverty and disease, its juggernaut insensitivity to local traditions and cultures, and the spiritual poverty that can go hand in hand with material wealth.” (p18). Healing, he argues, “must come, if anywhere, from the heart of the whirlwind itself”. (p. 19). He points out how globalization has immensely differentiated and destabilizing effects (p29). These factors complicate efforts to seek consensus on core norms and values. Many worry about the polarized discourse that characterizes many human relationships in the early twenty first century. This is not primarily, a debate among civilizations, but often within societies. This reflects the complexity of difference and highlights the importance of rediscovering the art of dialogue, distinct from discussion, debate, or argument, involving willingness and openness to transformation. Difference is acute in many areas, notably in efforts to identify the “root causes” of violent extremism and to understand the anger that fuels conflicts; in attempts to mediate in violent conflicts and in raw discussions about unresolved grievances and historical wounds. But they are also apparent in debates about priorities among worthy causes and in tepid responses to advocacy for certain human rights causes or for countering domestic violence.
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Consensus on basic norms is fragile in many areas, and thoughtful dialogue is needed. The “duelling ladders of inference lxvii that Professor Chris Argyris describes, point to the interplay of differing appreciations of facts and the core values that shape interpretations. These include: • The meaning and bounds of a secular versus a religious character of a state • Definitions of facets of democratic governance including arrangements for elections and changes of power. • Norms of governance including the roles and responsibilities of the state for the provision of basic social services, the control of corruption, addressing dissent, community, and solidarity, and regulating sexuality and family relations • Women’s rights and roles of men and women in society. Other issues with complex normative dimensions include ecological debt and interventions towards reconciliation. Towards solutions Efforts to define and frame core norms and values veer between two theories of change. The first focuses on the benefits of building on positive, common values to unlock human bonds and build means to address differences. The second is apparent scepticism, often evident in comments on interfaith dialogue as “the bland leading the bland”, and argue for direct efforts to engage differences. Both are relevant. In both cases human relationships are key, as is careful attention to process as well as outcome. In each of the areas highlighted, the problems are inter sectoral and interdisciplinary, so an ability to cross familiar lines of inquiry and learn new approaches is essential. An illustration is the challenge of secular/religious dialogue, where not only vocabulary but also frames of reference and rhythm and style of discourse can differ widely.lxviii Maimonides’ effort to define a hierarchy of values for charitable impulses illustrates a “ladder” approach to help frame discourse and give differing norms and values practical expression. Dr Marshall reports taking a similar approach in reflecting on international developmentlxix. She articulated different reasons, each reflecting a set of values, and ordered them based on her personal priorities. Her “ladder” has a rights based approach at the top, based on a normative belief that every child is entitled to quality education. Next comes charity and compassion, cognizant of possible patriarchal views but also of the virtues of compassion for giver and receiver. A business focused, “bottom of the pyramid” approach comes next, appreciating the wide reach and freedom of choice for poor communities, but with cautions linked to the commercial dimension and some pitfalls in microfinance approaches. Focusing on migration and labour movement seemed important when the piece was written, less amenable to action, but important in theory and reality. In the summer of 2015, those issues might merit a higher priority, but the ethics of action are still difficult to define. The final set of arguments relate to the violence reflected in unjustifiable inequalities, which underlie a case for development support as a way to temper violence. These are important but lack the positive values of development of human capabilities. Different people might well accept all or most of these arguments but rank them differently. Some, like Esther Duflo or Peter Singer, might add a measure of impact or effectiveness. Dambisa Moyo would perhaps reject the entire ladder. But the discussions of values and their ranking, forcing some specificity into the discussion, might result in changes to views and insight into the questions. She concludes her paper with a list of topics and “best practice” examples to promote a constructive dialogue, and action, on values and norms of global governance.
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1. Remember education: When approaches to development are prioritised, education must not be compromised if one is to build a community that draws the best from human capabilities. 2. Sharpen the focus on accountability: Measurement is not a panacea but accountability is impossible without disciplined reporting. The Social Progress Index (SPI)lxx seeks to measure the social dimensions (satisfaction of basic human needs, advancement of wellbeing, and promotion of opportunity) of national and sub-national governance. Robert Rotberg has identified 94 governance indiceslxxi. 3. Create, maintain, and nurture safe space. Public debate and dialogue are vital in advancing a compass of values and norms. While transparency is increasingly appreciated in the Internet age, private discussion are also needed in “safe space” where complex evolving ideas can be honed without public repercussions. 4. Respect and build the human side of engagement. Progress on difficult issues is linked to people and their relationships. Changes in attitude on topics like racism and religious prejudice often flow from personal contact. One needs creative ways to build such relationships. 5. Break large problems into bite size segments. Harvard Law School Professor Roger Fisher often counselled dividing problems into bite size pieces. A broad framework is necessary but vast problems cannot be addressed comprehensively. Framing is important. The UN Global Compact for example, frames its aim as creating “a sustainable and inclusive global economy that delivers lasting benefits to all people, communities and markets.”lxxii 6. Use naming and shaming measures well. Competition and ranking are important. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index lxxiii goads countries to act on corruption, and the World Bank’s Doing Business Indexlxxiv facilitates efficiencies. 7. Don’t neglect the arts and humanities. One can often best reach people and change hearts and minds through art. The Fes Festival of Global Sacred Music engages audiences through music and creative dialoguelxxv while storytelling frames people’s understandings of narratives and the meaning of experience. 8. Work with the media, old and new. Values and norms are not the exclusive province of philosophers or religious scholars. Both traditional media that report and editorialize, and the new social media that allow for rapid and wide communication of ideas, have central importance 9. Take religion seriously. Recognition that religious institutions have not retreated into private space, has grown appreciably. However, translating insight into wise action has yet to be realized. The question is which religious leaders will be engaged, and how vast numbers of institutions can be included in the discourse. Two focal areas are global health care (the Ebola crisis for examplelxxvi) and climate change. 10. Take gender issues seriously. Many contentious issues on human rights relate to women’s rights and gender roles. While there is a formal consensus on equality between men and women, there are many doubts, openly expressed in reservations to UN covenants despite the evidence on the economic, social, and political importance of women’s empowerment. Better ways are needed to engage the doubters in discussing the evidence. 11. Take inequality seriously. Large inequalities with highly negative consequences within and among nations are visible. Yet measures to address inequalities and inequity are not convincing, in theory or in practice. The mantra of sustainable growth must be tightly coupled with a realistic approach to lessening inequality. 12. Vigorous efforts need to be made to confront corruption. A leading grievance in protests and violent eruptions around the world is government corruption with business collusion. Corruption must be an integral, actionable part of the effort to counter violent extremism and to improve governance.
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13. Healing memories and addressing inherited grievance. Many conflicts look to long-standing memories and perceptions of injustice. Many of these issues can be addressed: There are examples of both success and failure. 14. Creative understandings of leadership. Leadership, intellectual and inspirational, has always been part of change towards new norms and ethical principles. The examples of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mother Teresa stand out. The Elderslxxvii are a current example of an effort to mobilise influence. 15. Use technology as an asset. New technology defines contemporary globalization, through what Pope Francis has called “rapidification”. Fast changing energy, medical and communications technologies must be employed for good in intelligent ways. B. The Perspective of the Russian Federation Dr Sergey Kulick observes that nation-states that prioritize national sovereignty and the protection of state interests still primarily define the global landscape. Tensions between the real or perceived interests of major states put strain on interstate relations and hamper the emergence of shared strategies to address regional and global challenges. The phenomenon of globalization plays out against the backdrop of divergent state interests and the need for the world to reinvent its institutions, leading to more acute tensions of both scale and content. By compressing space and time and accelerating changes in people’s lives, globalization triggers widely different responses from international actors, especially the more powerful ones. Major governments recognize that, for the first time, humankind must address a growing list of global threats whose scale brings risks endangering human existence: The proliferation of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, growth in international terrorist groups with access to nuclear and biological weapons, gradual depletion of vital natural resources and environmental collapse, and pandemics that cannot be contained. The yet-unknown challenges are still more disturbing: Uncertainty and anxiety in the context of geopolitical tensions weaken both national and international capacity. The world now faces proliferating system-wide risks on a planetary scale, requiring those who share one world to act collaboratively: This requires respect for different cultures and values in our efforts to develop shared rules of conduct that can accommodate separate identities and interests in our collective efforts to address common threats. Optimally, the global community would share common interests and values centered on the survival of humanity, but no such community of interest has yet emerged. Establishing it would require common interests transcending nation-states, requiring individuals to identify themselves as members of humanity, within an architecture of universal interests and values, rather than as members of an ethnic group or nation. Although a global community has not yet emerged, positive dynamics are in play. Increasing global integration, and widening and deepening capital, supply-chain, and labour networks link states and societies. These processes acknowledge poly-ethnicity and multiculturalism – although the latter has faced mounting criticism. Interpersonal bonds lead to a growing sense of communion, based on a shared heritage of art, literature, philosophy; an international lingua franca (English), mainstream scientific knowledge, internationalization of higher education, unprecedented cross-boundary tourism, international sports
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competitions and cultural events, and peer communication among scientists, artists, experts and nonprofit organizations. This facilitates alignment of rules of conduct with national and state identities. The elites of the scientific, literary, artistic, political, international institutional, financial and business communities are most engaged with their global counterparts, while publics are least so. Yet perhaps this minority can catalyze a global society through various forms of global governance. There is a growing consensus on core humanistic values, fusing those of Oriental and Occidental origins. Social research suggests that, despite cultural differences, nations from different countries and cultures share common moral principles. Russian studies reinforce this conclusion. So, the idea of a global regulatory synthesis is not quixotic. The Earth Charter initiative (2000 can be considered as a draft universal moral code. The UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression (2005) offers a platform for a single interpretation of universally accepted values, based on mutual respect between peoples and cultures. The absence of a commitment at the grass-roots to the idea of a united humankind still trails behind the level of global integration and the needs of the time, requiring promotion of better collective understanding. Society is a fabric of legal, political and economic relations bound by institutions. National communities exhibit similar characteristics. A global society can be based on a global market and a budding global civic society, but the political architecture is absent. In Russia, globalization – which is often seen as a euphemism for "global government" – prompts concerns among both elites and the general public, as it is seen to erode national sovereignty and foreign policy, dilute national identity, and displace traditional state functions with supranational polities. These concerns do not recognize that global governance involves control over processes, not territories, and this this is exercised with, not by excluding, nation-states. Strengthening the role of the state is necessary to establish a more stable world order. Likewise, global governance implies that self-regulatory state mechanisms based upon internationally recognized metrics that require each state to align global process with its national developmental needs. Moscow understands that globalization is a reality and that certain challenges to states and societies cannot be addressed either nationally or regionally. It also knows that media calls for restoration of a Russian “besieged fortress in confrontation with the West”, are wholly unrealistic. But this requires institutional changes, to allow Russia to reintegrate into the global socioeconomic order and to address conventional and non-conventional threats. This goes beyond epistemic values, although achieving crisp definitions of these is no trivial task. The paradox of Russia’s response to globalization is that its commitment to Russian identity coexists with values derived from European civilization which it holds as a moral compass. Current tensions with the West (notably Europe) have made it difficult to define its core values. Aware of a far wider "value gap" with the cultures to the East, Russia has embarked on a search for its own identity. Values shape individual and social behavior, underpin customs, traditions and cultures, and forge legal architectures. Russia is home to many nations and cultures, but most consider themselves part of Europe, bearers of a unique, yet essentially European, culture, expressed through EasternEuropean language and art, and founded upon the antique, Byzantine and Western European traditions. This is true of people in remote corners of Eastern Siberia and the Far East and even for a part of the Muslim population. That is why, while discussing Russian values we cannot exclude the European civilizational dimension, which affect perceptions of many external risks.
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Over the last two decades, however, the values of Russian citizens have changed. Soviet communism eroded Christian morality. In the 1990s, the secular ethics and ideology of the USSR were razed to the ground, but no new, comprehensible set of values, which could have helped Russia to redefine itself, emerged to fill the vacuum. During the Cold War, the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West was a visiondriven competition of values and ideologies. The world saw the USSR as a fully-fledged alternative to the West, with its own vision of how the world should be structured to build a new society and a better tomorrow. This concept collapsed together with the Soviet Union, but no integral image of "New Russia" has been formed, due largely to the lack of a positive agenda. The state leadership is unsure what national or global order it wishes to help create. The Russian Federation’s initial attempt to define this architecture was the 1993 Constitution, the first democratic constitution in Russia's history. It lists the so-called “supreme values” including territorial integrity and state sovereignty, responsibility for the destiny of the world and humankind, Russian/Russia's civilizational identity, the unity and solidarity of all nations in the Russian Federation, prohibition of any form of discrimination, a balance between traditionalism and progress, social justice, compassion and altruism, respect for the family, etc. Over the past two decades, however, attempts to define Russian "identity", "traditionalism" and "progress" (let alone the balance between them) have failed. The concept of "state sovereignty" was shaped, however, to express a high degree of autonomy in domestic and foreign-policy and freedom to act independently from the external pressures whenever possible. This was embodied in legislation: Security laws and regulations evidence great legal clarity, while those pertaining to individual rights and freedoms are more vaguely phrased, leaving a margin for uncertainty as to their reach. The higher status accorded to state sovereignty weakens the salience of other values, and especially freedoms, in the popular mind. This creates an asymmetry between professed values and institutional norms. Public demand for individual rights and freedoms can be dampened by invoking the need to strengthen national sovereignty and state security against internal and external threats, also covering the gap between institutional capacity and developmental needs. This distances Russia from the guiding values of Europe and promotes a drift closer to countries with oligarchic traits. Opinion polls indicate that Russian citizens list justice just behind sovereignty and independence in their catalogue of virtues. The demand for justice is key to the Russian character and it is placed above the law in the public mind. The reaction to injustice is thus asymmetrically negative. The sense that justice and the law are quite distinct leads to defiance of laws, poor legal awareness and little effort to develop jurisprudence. Strength has a special place in the Russian mentality, rooted in its need to protect itself against external enemies throughout its history. Yet true strength, as Russians see it, is not bullying, but calm superiority. This is the strength required today in the light of Russia’s weakness, bitterness and injured pride, a legacy of "besieged fortress" mentality of the Soviet era and the dire experience of the 1990s. The application of key values to the legal framework is also linked to Russia’s attitude to democracy. Many Russian statesmen and experts agree that Western ‘democracy’ is a successful example, but argue it should not be conflated with democracy, as it depends on specific societal traits. Russia’s geopolitical history has shaped its commitment to a strong state, independent foreign policy, and retention of a unique cultural and religious identity. Justice, patriotism and humane
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behavior, national sovereignty, state stability and security in a peaceful world order are higher values for Russia than democracy, human rights and personal freedom. The subordination of these liberal values is reinforced by state propaganda and institutions, whose deficiencies are attributed to the democratic reforms of the 1990s. It is widely believed that Russia followed Western prescriptions in this period, intended to engender "unchecked permissiveness", a condition anathema to Russian society. It serves no purpose to exaggerate the incompatibility of some Russian and Western values, however. This is as natural as divergent interests, which do not preclude cooperation, but require negotiation in search of compromise. Moreover, despite differences, there are values and interests that Russia shares with the West. The Russian value system is in the mainstream recognized and affirmed by international treaties; it is not an outlier that would frustrate the creation of a global community. The Russian Federation inherited all international treaties concluded in the Soviet era, and has acceded to others since 1991. It recognizes the values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which aims at the progressive harmonization of values across societies. Moscow is party to other international treaties that reaffirm the urgent need to protect the environment and tolerate political and cultural diversity. The Russian government also regards commitment to international law as a core value, even after its occupation of the Crimea. Despite Russia’s commitment to many European values, the current spike of anti-Western sentiment is due to "bitterness" at the reluctance of the West, especially Europe, to accept Russia into its "family". Moscow is very sensitive to criticism - not only by Western states - about contraction of the democratic space, constraints on freedom of speech, and an unjust legal system. Yet, neither the West nor Europe fully accepted Russia as one of their own even when relations were at their height. This is a function of norms, rather than values, as the regulatory frameworks of Russia and the European Union are substantially different. Moscow adopted European precedents in many of its regulations after 1991, notably with respect to international law and economy. Some of these regulations did not reflect the Russian reality, but Russia’s hope to become part of the "European family” – even an EU member-state –also proved vain. Despite uniquely Russian elements, Russia’s norms of conduct and self-identification are influenced strongly by the West. Despite the current anti-Western policy shift, these norms may prove stronger than before, and gain ground. Other than a limited part of the Muslim demographic in the Russian Federation, Russians do not identify with Oriental values, whether those of China or India, or of what is generally described as the Eastern world. Most research studies show no evidence of such identification. Comparative analysis of the values and norms necessary for peaceful coexistence shows that the strain in Russia’s ties to Europe are due to the current domestic political narrative. The strained relationship between Russia and the West does however threaten the joint commitment to common norms required to address environmental risks and address major transnational challenges. One bloc of Russians perceive the outside world as a threat, rather than a partner, and argue that sovereignty and autonomy from the West is necessary to marshal domestic resources for national development. This group aims to extricate Russia from the process of globalization. Another bloc recognizes the need to internalize new technologies and Western institutions, and embraces emerging supranational economic and social models. There is no cooperation between these blocs, just bitter
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rivalry, and the outcome, not least for Russia’s foreign policy and attitude to globalization, depends on which prevails. While Dmitry Medvedev was President of Russia from 2008-2012, he referred to three branches of European civilization – those in Russia, the European Union and North America – and discussed the conditions under which they could cooperate as partners. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, observed that adopting Western values was only one option for Russia, and that Moscow intended a different approach, encouraging a global competition of civilizations and development models. He coined the term "Greater Russian Civilization". Until recently Russia’s leadership saw these approaches as complementary, not contradictory. One was used when addressing the West; the other was employed for domestic consumption and when addressing neighboring states. Gradually though, the space allowing elites to define Russian civilization as a branch of that of the West was shrinking. The idea that Russia constitutes a large, separate civilization fits better with the neo-conservative approach and, in the view of its supporters, allows them to fend off accusations of undemocratic governance. Since the spring of 2014, during the crisis on Ukraine, the focus in the debate has shifted to national security, making Russia’s civilizational identity a matter of state and national survival. The events in the spring of 2014 have transformed the discussion of Russian national identity. The "West" came to be perceived as a force seeking to impose its values and lifestyle on the Russian world, to change the unique — and increasingly conservative — Russian national identity. This Western offensive was said to be waged not only through NATO’s expansion and U.S. policy, but also through the actions of the European Union. Even at the onset of Ukrainian crisis, a fusion of three narratives was underway: national identity (the “Russian world”, “divided nation”, and “Greater Russian Civilization), international security, and domestic stability. In all three frames, Western policy is identified as a major threat. The Russian government crafted a new foreign-police doctrine, stressing the unique character of Russian civilization, the identity of the Russian world, and the need to protect Russian-speakers abroad by any means necessary, including military intervention. This reflects a domestic vision of a Russian collective identity, rather than a concept of world order, and strains Russia’s relations not only with the West, but with almost all other post-Soviet states in the CIS. In 2014, a survey by the Levada Centre indicated that the percentage of Russians believing that Russia has a unique governance system and development path, rose from 33 percent to 38 percent. The percentage of those who saw the Russian Federation as a Western-style democratic state with a market economy, fell from 33 percent to 28 percent, with 24 percent wishing for restoration of Soviet socialism. The Russian government has formulated its view of the current situation to the international community, firstly, the West: • At the end of the Cold War, no clarity was established on when existing rules and standards would be applied, or in creating new rules. • As a result, since then, international law has been weakened, while impartiality and justice have been sacrificed for political gain. Legal norms have been replaced with arbitrary interpretations and biased appraisals.
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•
To solve this, the key international stakeholders need to align their core interests, agree on reasonable self-imposed restrictions, and lead by example through responsible governance, while improving the international legal framework. • Specifically, clear lines must be drawn between – o unilateral actions, and the resort to multilateral mechanisms, and o international efforts to protect human rights, and the principle of national sovereignty and non-interference into the internal affairs of states. The international security system is both the greatest concern and the object of criticism in this account. It resonates strongly with both elites and the general public, in part due to the salience of its components and the uncertainty about the values that order it. The outcome of negotiations around this will, as explained below, shape Russia’s international affairs agenda. The perception of global governance in Russia depends on a few factors. • First, whether Russian participation in the system provides it with leverage that can be used to advance its security and create a favorable development environment. • Second, whether global and regional alliances can enable its development in the prevailing external circumstances, especially along Russia’s borders. • Third, whether Russia will be recognized as a core stakeholder in leading international organizations and secure equal standing with other major partners. But the Russian government has disclosed neither an explicit agenda, nor a set of proposals that disclose a Russian vision of a new world order. The absence of overarching goals (like advancing communism in the Soviet era) and a domestic ideological vacuum weaken Russia’s aspirations to global power status. Neither the government, nor Russian policy experts, have presented a comprehensive and realistic global agenda. Many Russian initiatives find some favor, but their competitive edge is getting dull, and the ranks of Moscow’s friends are thinning. This does not exclude the possibility of Moscow re-engaging and collaborating in addressing common threats, although it is also possible that these efforts will be placed on the back burner. Some issues are privileged: Given security concerns and the priority of homeland protection, Russia’s leaders, elites and society agree on the need to fight international terrorism and curb nuclear proliferation. Cyber-security in its broadest sense — from protecting personal identity to ensuring the security of core infrastructure — is also an important challenge, while “Internet freedom” will continue to be addressed rather inflexibly, consistent with Russian values and its regulatory framework. Preventing and resolving internal and international conflicts tops the Russian agenda. This is also the area that has drawn most criticism from Russia, notably in respect of differing interpretations of international law, including the application of “responsibility to protect”. The events in Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 have triggered an exchange of counterclaims and fierce debates will precede the emergence of a global consensus on proper norms of global security. Mitigation of, and adaptation to climate change and management of global health security challenges are less important, but still relevant to Russia. Finally, despite the present sanctions regime, Russia still views regulation and management of the international financial system and global trade as important, requiring reconfiguration of the Bretton Woods and WTO arrangements, although Russia’s legal framework is based on prior Western standards.
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Agreeing on a common platform on which to harmonize positions is crucial. Russia sees the United Nations and its Security Council as the only legitimate fora available to maintain international stability, resolve conflicts and address common threats. Although the United Nations faces challenges in global governance, notably in shaping the post-crisis world, Russia will argue for its primacy. Securing the legitimacy of UN decisions, of course, requires that the entire international community, including Russia, should cede a degree of national sovereignty. Using international frameworks on security, trade, finance, information, energy and the environment as a step towards an overhaul of the international system may enable more flexibility on values and identity than the international institution-based world order has permitted to date. Such an approach would not impose norms on states, but facilitate reconciliation of state interests within normative structures. Use of an international framework instead of an international institution would have the further advantage of including not just states, but also non-state political actors: corporations, civil society movements, and political parties. These actors would become parties to multilateral interaction, gradually internalizing new rules, enablers and restrictions, in an international partnership. Developing such frameworks would require reinvention of the international legal toolbox but It is unlikely that principles of international law will change, shifting priority from state sovereignty to global responsibility, or submission to global governance institutions. It is more likely that elements of a “constitutional law of nations” (a unitary jus gentium) will emerge. Transnational legal guarantees of human rights and freedoms (and a legitimate basis for sanctions against violators) may be components of this future law of nations, as they are at present. Similar transnational legal norms could emerge to regulate management of the environment, access to information, and similar matters, although reaching consensus on the relevant legal provisions will be challenging. At present, the interests of political elites are rooted in a bygone reality while those of economic elites extend beyond national boundaries. The majority of those in national societies are suspicious and largely passive. These tensions damage states, nations and the international system. Societies and elites need a new rapprochement, clarifying and reconciling shared values, norms, and national interests. C. A Chinese Perspective In their paper, Shared Values for Constructive Global Coexistence: A Chinese position from the Perspectives of “écart” and “polarity”, Professor YANG Huilin and Dr ZHANG Jing argue that, in its ultimate sense, “value” has nothing to do with a relative balance between different interests, but must be based on absolute ideals. Ever since ancient Greece, the quest for “universality” has been a fundamental issue in Western philosophy. Today, as the subversion of traditional metaphysicslxxviii and the “colonization” of “systems” into “life-world”lxxix have challenged the legitimacy of value, some contemporary thinkers have been prompted to reflect anew on “the foundation of universalism.”lxxx For ancient Chinese sages, value lies in “ultimate goodness” (zhi yu zhi shan 止于至善). However, “ultimate goodness” is easy to name, but difficult to define. In this case, just as “beauty” is difficult to define in Socratic dialogues because nobody can experience perfection, Confucius does not define the meaning of “ultimate goodness”; but refers to “zhong yong 中庸”lxxxi (the course of the Mean), another important but elusive concept. He cites the difficulty of practicing this virtue and observes: “The
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kingdom, its states, and its families, may be perfectly ruled; dignities and emoluments may be declined; naked weapons may be trampled under the feet; but the course of the Mean cannot be attained.”lxxxii In discussing “shared values” we should not merely list the values that each tradition holds tolxxxiii or those that all share, but insist on seeking to understand the reasons behind the concepts. Otherwise, we cannot explain the paradoxes we face. For instance, all agree with the merits of world peace, so why are the tools with which we keep the peace never peaceful? All agree with the concept of forgiveness, so why can we not forgive or tolerate those who disagree with us? Why do similar or even identical values and ideals lead to irreconcilable conflicts? Why are crimes and holocausts too often carried out in the name of God, Heaven, or justice? In short, while “constructive global coexistence” should be based on shared values, egocentric assertion of our own values as those shared by all human beings, divorces us from the true meaning of “value.” The significance of value does not depend on endowing nouns arbitrarily with meaning, but on the process that generates the value. It is not a matter of sharing values as nouns, but one of participating in sharing, in making values “sharable.” The logic is one of “impossible possibility”: When the value is defined as an ideal, we are relativized and ‘become’ the impossible. Because value cannot be internalized by “us,” our impossibility unlocks the possibility of value, enabling it to transcend “centralized discourse” or “identity politics” and become the foundation of values supporting global coexistence. Many values in Chinese culture are shared by other traditions. In 2012, at the 18th National Congress of the CPC, twelve Core Socialist Valueslxxxiv were proposed as the epitome of shared values. Meanwhile, the Chinese traditional ethos – ren 仁 (kindness), yi 义 (righteousness), li 礼 (propriety), zhi 智 (wisdom), xin 信 (trustworthiness) – differs slightly from the Eight Honors and Eight Disgraceslxxxv proposed by President HU Jintao in 2006. The twelve Core Socialist Values are, in fact, shared by all cultures; none is exclusive to that of China. Furthermore, a foundation for constructive global coexistence can be found in the “clarification of four points”lxxxvi proposed by President XI Jinping in 2014, in the light of Chinese traditional culture. The four points President XI sought to clarify are: the historical evidence of the “Chinese mode,” the cultural foundation of “Chinese characteristics,” the syncretic and inclusive features of the Chinese nation, and the modern expression of Chinese tradition. The aim of articulating these four points was to encourage contributions to the global family, rather than a defensive posture, or one characterized by withdrawal. American theologian Jaroslav Pelikan cited an anonymous source: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”lxxxvii What President XI’s four points imply is that the living tradition can be reactivated and modernized, and the true Chinese culture can inform the world culture, and so be universalised. We must be able to transform our tradition so that it may be able to interpret, and be adapted to, the diversity of our world. This is the essence of constructive global coexistence. Reconciling Chinese concepts of global norms and values and the interests and priorities of the Chinese people is not a temporary expedient. When reflecting therefore, on how to promote the shared global norms in China, one should turn to Chinese texts for an answer. Professor YANG and Dr ZHANG begin by discussing two well-accepted values: the “zhong yong 中庸” and the Golden Rule, often employed whenever there is a geopolitical confrontation or a crisis in interfaith relations. To illustrate their utility, they explore the unique logic of the zhong yong and the
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Golden Rule by exploring the relationship between Chinese and Western ideas. They then discuss key terms - “ren 仁” and “shu 恕” – to help transcend barriers to understanding due to different languages and conceptual tools. The distinct linguistic constructs, however, elicit interesting questions, well-illustrated by two unique and representative translations, one by James Legge, a Scottish missionary, and the other by GU Hongming, a late Qing Chinese intellectual. They aim to display the effects of the inter-interpretation of Chinese and Western ideas in these men’s works, suggesting that this should be the foundation of constructive global coexistence. They also draw on contemporary thinkers – the French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien’s discussion of “écart” and German theologian Gerhard Ebeling’s construct of “polarity” provide apposite tools for better understanding of intercultural communication. Zhong Yong 中庸 A key concept in Confucian tradition, zhong yong was disseminated in the West in translations by missionaries in late 17th century. Some scholars have compared it with Plato’s concept of the “mean” (Republic 619a) or “intermediate condition” (Laws 792d) or the balanced course between excess and deficiency (Statesman 283d–284a), revealing many similarities between the ideas. lxxxviii Such similarities may help Chinese scholars “find a shortcut to the understanding of ‘Idea.’”lxxxix To conclude that these are common values, however, is not sound, as both in China and in the West, people have varied understandings of Confucius’s zhong yong and of Plato’s mean. The distinct conceptual systems behind zhong yong or mean cannot be bridged in so simple a way. Their similarities do not mean that they are ‘sharable’. This is also true of other core values. James Legge published his first translation of the Zhong Yong (The Doctrine of the Mean) in 1861, and GU Hongming published his in 1906. WANG Guowei, Master of Chinese Culture, made a comparison of their translations in 1925. WANG observed: the explanations of ancient teachings with modern philosophy might be regarded as supplementing gaps in the ancient sayings, but definitely not as faithfully rendering the ancient teachings …In making the ancient teachings consistent, one must use words with broader meanings, while the broader meanings obviously render the translation less precisely. Therefore, the distinctive features of the ancient sayings remain hidden. What is left is nothing but the superficial meaning. The difficulty of translating the ancient classics lies here.xc WANG chose GU’s translation as a specific example for his point: For instance, GU’s translation of “zhong 中” as “our true self” and “he 和” as “moral order,” can be a typical example of this case. If I translate “xing 性” as “law of our being” and “dao 道” as “moral law,” it is because I intend to simplify and unify the meanings of these terms. In my opinion, I prefer rendering “dao 道” as “moral order” to “moral law,” and “xing 性” as “essence of our being” or “our true nature” to “law of our being.” … James Legge uses “mean” for the Chinese word “zhong 中,” which cannot be understood in some paragraphs like “zhong ye zhe tian xia zhi da ben 中也者天下之大本.” GU now translates “zhong 中” as “our true self,” but how can he make sense of the “zhong 中” in other sentences like “jun zi er shi zhong 君子而时中”?xci WANG demonstrates the different meanings of “zhong yong” in different contexts. Its meaning varies in ancient and modern Chinese, in English and modern Chinese translation, and even in different
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parts of one sentence. It makes no sense to seek consistency in the meaning of the term. In fact, it is improper assert on meaning as the right one when the term is used in many contexts. If we try to find one word to cover its abundant and changing meanings, we do what WANG Guowei noted: “the broader meanings… render the translation less precisely.”xcii There is no single concept for zhong yong even in later Chinese interpretations. Some quote CHENG Yi (1032–1085), a famous Song Dynasty NeoConfucian scholar, in defining “zhong yong”: “Bu pian zhi wei zhong, bu yi zhi wei yong 不偏之谓中， 不易之谓庸” (Being not inclined [to anything] is what is meant by zhong 中, and not changing is what is meant by yong 庸). If this unswerving “zhong 中” is the same one that can be served as “the great root from which grow all the human actions in the world” (tian xia zhi da ben 天下之大本) as well as “the Nature that the Heaven has conferred”(tian ming zhi xing 天命之性), then can this unchanging “yong 庸” be equal to the “Path of duty in according with the Nature” (shuai xing zhi dao 率性之道) and the “Instructions and regulation for the Path” (xiu dao zhi jiao 修道之教)?xciii Perhaps this is why WANG Guowei thinks that no one can render the opening sentence of Zhong Yong precisely, just as “There is no term in other languages that serves as an accurate equivalent of the Chinese concept of tian 天. Likewise, in Chinese there is no equivalent word for God.”xciv WANG’s judgment on the translations of Legge and GU was stimulated by GU’s “revision” and critique of Legge’s translation. The controversy between GU and Legge is about the right to interpret: A Chinese Confucian scholar with high English proficiency wanted to regain the right of interpretation of Chinese classics from a foreign missionary with substantial proficiency in classical Chinese. The controversy raises a fundamental question in communicating Chinese and Western ideas: Does cultural identity prescribe the validity of the [interpretative] translation ? According to French scholar José Frèches, “[t]he history of sinology is essentially the history of Western observations on China … and their main concern is to reveal the mysteries of Chinese civilization rather than pronouncing judgment on it. This is the most significant difference between philosophers like Voltaire on the one hand and sinologists like James Legge on the other.”xcv However, compared with the rationale for contrasting a philosopher and a sinologist, James Legge’s dual identity as a missionary and a translator of Chinese classics may have more profound and far-reaching implications. It is interesting that a number of scholars have criticized James Legge for inserting Christian notions into the translations of Chinese classics, while others insist that he was not a Christian missionary at all but “was ... going to be a missionary to his own people and race first; … to translate and explain the learning of the East to the scholars and the missionaries of the West.”xcvi Among Legge’s critics, GU Hongming is Legge’s fiercest detractor, although he showed respect, with reservations, for Legge’s work in the “Preface” of his translation of Analects. But he then continues: Any one … even without any acquaintance with the Chinese language, who will take the trouble to turn over the pages of Dr. Legge’s translation, cannot help feeling how unsatisfactory the translation really is. For Dr. Legge, from his raw literary training when he began his work, and the utter want of critical insight and literary perception he showed to the end, was really nothing more than a great Sinologue, that is to say, a pundit with a very learned but dead knowledge of Chinese books … to the generality of the English reading people, we cannot but think, the intellectual and moral outfit of the Chinaman as presented by Dr. Legge in his translation of the Chinese books, must appear as strange and grotesque as to an ordinary Englishman’s eyes, unaccustomed to it, is the Chinaman’s costume and outward appearance.xcvii
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In short, “Dr. Legge’s judgment on the value of these works cannot by any means be accepted as final, and the translator of the Chinese Classics is yet to come.”xcviii According to GU’s own diary and researchers’ investigations, this paper was published in 1883 or 1884. Given that his translation of Analects was published in 1898, was GU referring to himself when he said “the translator of the Chinese Classics is yet to come”？ James Legge drew on sayings from Menzi 孟子 (specifically, 5A:4[2]) in his preface to The Chinese Classics: 不以文害辞，不以辞害志；以意逆志，是为得之 [Therefore, those who explain the odes in the Book of Poetry] may not insist on one term so as to do violence to a sentence, nor on a sentence so as to do violence to the general scope. They must try with their thoughts to meet the intention or the scope of the author with a sympathetic understanding, and then we shall apprehend it.xcix In a certain sense, “yi yi ni zhi 以意逆志” is a process of “generating values or meanings,” and the result of this is to make the values or meanings sharable. But in almost all translation and interpretation, the question is whose “yi 意” (will/thought), will meet the “zhi 志” (intention/scope) of an ancient author ‘with sympathetic understanding’. There have, all along, been different kinds of “yi yi ni zhi” not only between China and the West, but also within Chinese interpretation. For instance, since the Han Dynasty, Chinese scholars have stressed the need to “meet the intention or the scope of the author with a sympathetic understanding,” but the debate between the Old Texts School and the New Texts School, on the interpretations of the Book of Poetry, produced farfetched analogies and distorted interpretations, much misunderstanding, and inconsistent explanations that cannot be harmonized. DONG Zhongshu (179BCE–104BCE), a famous Han Confucian scholar, eventually proposed that “shi wu da gu 诗无达诂” (there is no final or definitive explanation of the Book of Poetry). All subsequent critics have agreed. Although “yi ni zhi” was intended to discourage “interpreting out of context arbitrarily,” it led to acceptance of the legitimacy of diverse interpretations. Similarly, “shi wu da gu 诗无达诂” originally focused on exegesis of the Book of Poetry specifically, but in the Song Dynasty it was changed to include any poetry. In the Qing Dynasty, scholars proposed, “The intention of the author might not be the same as the intention of the readers. Why should not this be possible or allowed?”c As a result, the original purpose of “yi yi ni zhi” has been transformed. We might also note debates over “the right/wrong understanding” in the commentaries of two Confucian masters, KONG Anguo (156BCE–74BCE) and ZHU Xi (1130–1200).ci Different people have viewed Confucius differently over timecii; orthodox commentaries and annotations may “use the terms of later ages to explain the ancient books.” ciii The translation of Western texts into Chinese and interpretation of the ancient sages from the perspective of a modern person, makes diverse interpretations inevitable; complaints about “misunderstanding” in the translation are not helpful. James Legge’s translation of the Chinese Classics was appreciated in some circles because his assistant WANG Tao, well educated in the Chinese classics, was a reliable partner in translation. But other Chinese contemporaries saw WANG Tao as “a man who had forfeited the self-respect of a scholar for the sake of regular wages.” WANG Tao himself complained in a letter to a friend that “relying on
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the barbarian pygmies for a living is … like being in prison”, and said that if the paper on which his work was written was not used for covering pickle jars or pasting up windows, one might as well throw it straight into the privy.civ How are we to evaluate this “yi yi ni zhi”? Do different ways of “yi yi ni zhi” inevitably result in such paradoxes? GU Hongming’s translation of The Analects also aims to “yi yi ni zhi,” but his concerns are described differently. GU says he wants “to make Confucius and his disciples speak in the same way as an educated Englishman would speak.” For GU, this is the only way that the educated and thinking Englishmen who will take the trouble to read this translation ... may be led to reconsider their hitherto foreign conceptions of the Chinese people, and in so doing be enabled not only to modify their preconceptions of the Chinese people, but also to change the attitude of their personal and national relations with the Chinese as individuals and as a nation.cv It seems that GU’s “yi yi ni zhi” is to achieve mutual understanding of two cultures, a wellintentioned purpose similar to others in the past and indeed today. But although we make such appeals and call for a sharing of common values, we adhere to the nominal value, and ignore the verbal process of sharing, which reduces sharing to a one-way transmission from the sender to the receiver. The word “common” means no more than “I” or “we.” By quoting Goethe and other Western writers and making Confucius and his disciples “speak in the same way as an educated Englishman would speak,” GU transmits his message to the receiver. He had no trust in the receiver’s ability to understand Chinese culture, having observed that “the foreigners who are looked upon as authorities on the subject, do not really understand the real Chinaman and the Chinese language.” cvi GU mocks the effort of Sinologists: “There is of course no harm in a name, and, with the exterritorial clause in the treaty, an Englishman in China might with impunity call himself Confucius if so it pleases him.”cvii Interestingly, at least in the translation of the Zhong Yong, WANG Guowei seems to have been more favourably disposed toward Legge than he was toward GU Hongming: “Comparatively, I prefer James Legge’s choice of ‘Mean,’ as it successfully conveys part of the genuine meaning of the book of Zhong Yong.”cviii This reminds us of the fact that for WANG Guowei, one’s mother tongue and cultural identity do not innately or necessarily carry cultural privilege in understanding one’s own culture. The difference between the translations of James Legge and GU Hongming, relates to another important question: When a value expressed by a philosopher is mediated in translation by other cultural concepts, does this enrich our understanding, degrade the original meaning, or render the value impossible to share? Why do GU’s quotations from Goethe and other European writers not succeed in making Confucius and his disciples able to “speak … as an educated Englishman would speak?” And, is it possible that James Legge, whose translation was affirmed by WANG Guowei, can help us grasp Confucian values through Legge’s interpretation informed by a Christian perspective? French thinker François Jullien’s understanding of Chinese culture may serve as an example. In k Un Sage Est Sans Idee, he translates “zhong yong” as “the possible equilibrium between any kind of extremes.” cix This translation may be due to Jullien’s understanding of the Chinese language, suggesting that he has integrated his philosophical thinking with his experience. Professor YANG and Dr ZHANG suggest that Jullien’s thinking not interprets the nouns but provides a logical tool allowing us to enter into the process by which meaning is generated. Jullien argues that we should replace the descriptive “différence” with the productive “écart,” stressing the “entre (between)” produced by “écart” so that we can find the other, and transform
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dialogue into “dia-logue” and between into “in-between.” Jullien notices that Chinese thought has a special innate feature, demonstrated in the first Chinese phrase that he learned: “Zhe shi shenme dongxi 这是什么东西” (What is this)? He was fascinated to learn that “dongxi 东西” (this/something) combines two opposite directions: “east” (dong 东) and “west” (xi 西) and asserts that this “contains a great possibility of ideas – so great that I even cannot dream of! … I still remember my shock and do not know how to explain the kind of ‘aberration’ I felt at that moment. It is an extraordinary aberration from a ‘category of the object’ to a ‘category of relationship.’” For Jullien, the concept of “dongxi” can produce “completely different understandings if seen through a relationship of two extremes. … The contrast between ‘dong (east)’ and ‘xi (west)’ … tells us what has separated the Chinese ideas from the whole [Western] history of ideas and science.”cx Compound structures like “dong–xi” are common in the Chinese language: “shijie 世界,” the world, is composed of “shi” (moving and shifting of time) and “jie” (position, direction, or boundary of space)cxi; “tian xia 天下”(the world) refers to the governance of “tian” (heaven) and “xia” (earth); “guoji 国际” (international) points to the relations between “guo” (nation) and “ji” (inter-); “guojia 国 家” (country or state) integrates the communal “guo” (state) and one’s own “jia” (family). This parallels the “yin 阴” (inactive) and “yang 阳” (active) in the Book of Changes, which claims that “tai ji sheng liang yi 太极生两仪” (the Grand Terminus produces the two elementary Forms). As ZHOU Dunyi (1017–1073) explains in the Taiji tu shuo, “The Supreme Polarity in activity generates yang; yet at the limit of activity it is still. In stillness it generates Yin; yet at the limit/extreme/end of stillness it is also active. Activity and stillness alternate: each is the basis of the other. In distinguishing yin and yang, the Two Modes are thereby established.”cxii The two forms of “yin” and “yang” interact and are mutually generative in the interaction. They are complementary, and serve as the origin of the other. Therefore, each activity has a consequence, and the logic of “Wuji er Taiji 无极而太极” (Non-polar is yet the Supreme Polarity) pertains. The Qianlong Emperor (1711–1799) bequeathed his calligraphy of the sayings “wu qu lai chu 无 去来处” (there is no definite origin or destination) and “dong jing deng guan 动静等观” (there is no sharp distinction between the dynamic and the static) to the Buddhist Temple Da Jue Si in the western suburb of Beijing. The two idioms might tell us how Chinese thought is separated from the history of Western ideas and science: in Chinese, there is no difference between coming and going, active and inactive, within and without. The ancient Western philosophical questions “Where am I from and where am I going?” become the Buddhist chant: “I am from where I was, and I go where I go” (“wo cong lai chu lai, wo dao qu chu qu 我从来处来，我到去处去”). The English translation may confuse Westerners; however, seeing the proposition from a Westerner’s perspective may help distinguish the two philosophical approaches. Friedrich Nietzsche once categorized ancient Greek philosophy as “metaphysical intuition,” which means that no matter whether we trace the origin of the world to water or fire, the process itself expresses the metaphysical proposition that “Everything is one,” and all else proves a false hypothesis. cxiii A Chinese idea such as “wu qu lai chu” does not abolish the Western philosophical question but dissolves the “metaphysical grammar.” Similarly, there is no need for Buddhist wisdom to negate or abolish the Western pursuit of the origin of the world, but the question is transformed: “originating from a place of no origination” (“zi wu shi yi lai 自无始以来”). Following this approach, one can say that modern Western thought likewise dissolves the metaphysical grammar. Jean-Luc Marion and John Zizioulas’s discussions on “person,” “gift,” “Holy
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Communion,” and “erotic love”cxiv are what Alain Badiou has called the “eventful” form in discussing mathematics, poetry, political revolution, and gender position. cxv In Badiou’s analysis, the breakthrough and paradox in mathematics, the challenge of poetic language, the conflict in political revolution, and the differences and relations between the sexes can be restated as a relational existence, which challenges the institutionalized discourse. Jullien’s amazement at the structure of Chinese language may have arisen from his recognition of a discursive form completely different from the metaphysical grammar with which he was familiar. Jullien’s association of his concept of “écart” with the Chinese “liangji 两极” (two opposite extremes), prompts discovery of another reference in the Western tradition. In respect of a “Noun,” Gerhard Ebeling’s “polarity” seems relevant. Ebeling claims that “Life itself is determined in a polar way” and “what binds New Testament into a unity … is presented in polarities”; for instance, the “canonicity” of the New Testament requires unity and coherence but is “not yet finished” scripture: “Jesus Christ can be expressed as the center of the New Testament only in such polarities as the one who proclaims and what is to be proclaimed, humiliated and exalted, crucified and resurrected, true God and true man.” In short, only in light of the “structure of polarity” can one understand the confessional texts.cxvi For Christian theology, such polarity may focus on “how to make revelation meaningful in today’s world,”cxvii or how to update Christian theology for the present, or “Proclamation that has taken place is to become proclamation that now takes place.” ”cxviii Therefore, the gap between the historical and current situations, between reality and tradition, addresses the reality that “secularization ... has reached a certain completeness in every sphere of human life.”cxix However, in the Chinese context, dialectical ideas such as “the one who proclaims is also what is to be proclaimed, the humiliated also the exalted, the crucified also the resurrected” are extended into a broader vista, encapsulated in the concepts of “dong/jing 动-静” (active/inactive) or “yin/yang 阴-阳” (positive/negative). Similarly, in the spirit of “yi yi ni zhi,” the Chinese can naturally resonate with Karl Barth’s interpretation of Romans 4:17: “the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.” As Barth said, There is nothing but the final and – because there is no escape from it – the unique contradiction between life and death, between the things that are, and the things that are not. …The dilemma of this double-sided negation is resolved only by the apparent impossibility that “minus times minus equals plus.” The relation between the two negations by which both are dissolved is their true meaning and power. The living must die in order that the dead may be made alive. The things which are must be seen as though they were not in order that the things which are not may be called as though they were. Here is the impossibility of knowing, the impossibility of resurrection, the impossibility of God, Creator and Redeemer, in whom “here” and “there” are both one. …God is pure negation. He is both “here” and “there.” He is the negation of the negation in which the other world contradicts this world and this world the other world. He is the death of our death and the non-existence of our non-existence. … This is God, and the transformation of all things in Him … and the LOGOS of all history.cxx Dietrich Bonhoeffer produced similar prophetic sentences, which render the polarity of Christian theology into a Chinese dialectical proverb: “The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who makes us live in this world without using God as a working hypothesis is the God before
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whom we are standing. Before God and with God we live without God.”cxxi For Chinese speakers, “dongxi,” “shijie,” “tianxia” are commonly used words. Few people would realize the implied polarities, and the modern Chinese mindset has lost its sensitivity to the notion that “yin yang xiang ji 阴阳相济” (yin and yang are complementary). The ideas of Western thinkers like Jullien, Ebeling, Barth, and Bonhoeffer offer Chinese a means of thinking of China from outside, through the West, just as Jullien thinks of the West from the outside, through China. Through this, the “yi yi ni zhi,” has become a “verbal process,” participating in the text that is being interpreted. It matters greatly in determining the meaning of zhong yong whether we have this outside insight. Compared with the “écart” or “structure of polarity,” the philosophical sense of zhong yong cannot be covered by the traditional interpretation of “bu pian 不偏” (unswerving) or “bu yi 不易” (unchanging). If the essence of the shared values lies in the verbal nature of sharing rather than the nominal value, we cannot return to the original meaning of the concept. What deserves attention is the hidden common logic behind the seemingly dissimilar concepts. It is not only that zhong yong may be an archetype, but that its meaning structure, activated by translation and interpretation, should be applied to other values, allowing the construction of global coexistence to be understood more deeply. There is no need to erase differences in the dialogue of ideas. Nor do we need to achieve superficial agreement on shared values. It is important to find the logic behind the values, whether through the theological structure of polarity or the philosophical construct of “écart.” Legge’s translation of Chinese classics may help us find the interface allowing for mutual generation of insight from Chinese and Western ideas, as alternative translations of the “zhong yong” have shown. Golden Rule, Ren, and Shu Another shared value, the Golden Rule, and related Chinese concepts such as “ren 仁” and “shu 恕”also allow us to explore the logic and verbal process in these values. Generally, no one disagrees with the Golden Rule, found in both the Analects and the Bible. But like other ‘shared’ values, the Golden Rule also engenders controversy, not least whether it should be expressed positively or negatively. This makes clear that what is shared must have a shared logic. In the Bible, the Golden Rule appears in positive form in Matthew 7:12 (“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”) and Luke 6:31 (“Do to others as you would have them do to you.”). A similar positive form can be found in the Analects, such as in the “Yong ye 雍也” section: “Now the man of perfect virtue, wishing to be established himself, seeks also to establish others; wishing to be enlarged himself, he seeks also to enlarge others.” However, the negative form is more frequent in the Analects. For instance, in “Yan yuan 颜渊” and “Wei ling gong 卫灵公,” twice Confucius says, “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” In other places, one can find different wording with similar meaning: “What I do not wish men to do to me, I also wish not to do to men” (“gong ye chang 公冶长”).cxxii Some Western scholars seem to believe that the positive form is superior to the negative one, and that Christian mores are superior to Confucian ethics; some Chinese scholars think that only the negative expression is a universal ethic, while the positive expression is logically chaotic and reflects Eurocentric hegemony. This shows why many similar values are not shared, but may lead to confrontation if all hold fast to the definition of the values we claim to share. In fact, just as there are both positive and negative forms in the Analects, so both forms are
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present in early Christian literature. In early biblical texts (Leviticus, Acts, and Romans) both occur. George Brockwell King observes: It is time, then, that the dispute as to the superiority of positive over negative came to an end. There is no basis for extravagant praise of the positive any more than there is ground for … the assertion that the negative is the more fundamental of the two. … Basically they are the same, in idea as in origin.cxxiii When Hans Küng was drafting the Declaration toward A Global Ethic for the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1993, he joined the two expressions from the Bible and Analects: “We especially call to mind that Golden Rule which is found and has been maintained in many religions and ethical traditions for thousands of years: What you do not wish done to yourself, do not do to others. Or positively: What you wish done to yourself, do to others!”cxxiv Olivier du Roy, moreover, remarks: “The British and the Germans’ understanding and knowledge of Golden Rule came from Christianity. For the French, however, the wide interest and attention on Golden Rule happened after the Confucian ideas were brought into France.” Roy points out that in the Declaration of Rights of Men and Citizen, in the French Constitution of 1793, Article Six cites the maxim “What you do not want to be done to you do not do to others.” In 1795, in the Declaration of Rights and Duties of Men and Citizen in the Constitution, the positive and negative expressions were put side by side: “The two principles engraved upon everyone’s mind are: ‘What you do not want to be done to you do not do to others’; and ‘All that you want people to do for you do for them.’”cxxv In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “This is that Law of the Gospel: Whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them. And that Law of all men: Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris.”cxxvi Hobbes praised the Latin maxim in its negative form as the “easy sum, intelligible even to the meanest capacity” and translated it into English as, “Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thyself.”cxxvii For Hobbes, this negative form of the maxim is no different from the positive form in the Bible, except that he attributes to “the laws of nature.” the teachings “of Law and Prophets” in Matthew’s Gospel. Voltaire’s understanding of the two forms is still more interesting. In his Essay on the Manners of Nations, he argues that the ethics of Confucius are as pure, strict, and humane as those of Epictetus: “He [Confucius] did not say ‘Do not do to others what you do not want them do to you.’ (in the negative) Instead, he said ‘What you want others to do onto you, do it to the others.’ (in positive).”cxxviii This is, frankly, a misreading of Confucius; however, if we treat the two forms of the Golden Rule as the “liang ji 两极” (two opposite extremes), a process that generates meaning, Voltaire’s “yi yi ni zhi” should also be regarded as a shared participation, in which the misreading of certain knowledge does not harm the Golden Rule. Although Voltaire was impressed China, the materials he drew on are less than reliable. He defended Chinese “ancestor worship” in the “Rites Controversy,” the “purest morality” and the “simplest religion” of Confucianism, and the Qing government’s prohibition of Christianity in China.cxxix In support of his arguments, he alluded to the stone tablet at the border between China and Russia in 1689 in the Treaty of Nerchinsk: “…the following memorable words were engraved in the Chinese and Latin languages: ‘Should any ever determine to rekindle the flames of war, we pray the sovereign reign of all things, who knows the heart, will punish their perfidy.’”cxxx He concluded that the Chinese were a people who worshipped a supreme God, as Westerners did. But the Treaty of Nerchinsk included no
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such words. Voltaire seems to have relied on the Latin diary of the missionary Thomás Pereira (徐日 升).cxxxi Voltaire’s belief that Confucius did not use the negative form of the Golden Rule but only the positive form like the Greek philosophers, might be his commitment to communication between China and the West. His conclusions (e.g. on the purity of Confucius’s ethics) participated in the generation of meaning.cxxxii When discussing the Golden Rule and the interpretation of similar values in Confucianism and Christianity, James Legge serves as a critical resource. He is not concerned by the positive or negative form and does not discuss this, but is interested in how he to draw “ren 仁” and “shu 恕” from the Golden Rule and participate in the generation of meaning from a Christian perspective. The Golden Rule in “Yan Yuan” offers an explanation of “ren 仁,” while the Golden Rule in “Wei Ling Gong” explains “shu 恕.” According to the earliest Chinese dictionary “Shuo wen jie zi 说文解字”, “shu” is used to explain the meaning of “ren,” but Legge distinguishes between them by using “perfect virtue” and “reciprocity,” respectively, which implies a subtle link. Legge did not translate “ren” as “benevolence”, as he did in other places, nor did he translate “shu,” as “pardon, forgiveness, or mutual tolerance” as in other verses. He opened a greater interpretive space by rendering “ren” as “perfect virtue” and “shu” as “reciprocity, having discovered is the logical structure behind the concept, and sacrificing superficial coherence. Are Legge’s commentaries on the Golden Rule based strictly on his understanding of the Chinese texts, or are his Christian inclinations implicit in his translations? GU Hongming, a Chinese Confucian scholar, chose to “speak in the same way as the educated Englishmen” and imputed a Christian God in his translation. Comparing the translations of James Legge and GU Hongming in detail, we find, first, the “Yan Yuan”: 仲弓问仁，子曰：出门如见大宾，使民如承大祭；己所不欲，勿施于人；在邦无怨，在 家无怨。 James Legge: Chung-kung asked about perfect virtue. The Master said, “It is, when you go abroad, to behave to everyone as if you were receiving a great guest; to employ the people as if you were assisting at a great sacrifice; not to do to others as you would not wish done to yourself; to have no murmuring against you in the country, and none in the family.”cxxxiii GU Hongming: Another disciple of Confucius on another occasion asked what constituted a moral life. Confucius answered: “When going out into the world, behave always as if you were at an audience before the Emperor; in dealing with the people, act as if you were at worship before God. Whatsoever things you do not wish that others should do unto you, do not do unto them. In your public life in the State as well as in your private life in your family, give no one a just cause of complaint against you.”cxxxiv GU translates “da bin 大宾” as “the Emperor” and “da ji 大祭” as “worship before God,” while Legge renders these as “a great guest” and “a great sacrifice.” For “ren,” Legge uses “perfect virtue,” while GU simply uses “a moral life.” In “Chinese Scholarship (Part II),” GU clarified the meaning of “ren” as follows: Take … those Chinese words of constant recurrence in the Classics and generally translated into
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English as “benevolence”（仁）, “justice”（义） and “propriety”（礼）. Now when we come to take these English words together with the context, we feel that they are not adequate: they do not connote all the ideas the Chinese words contain. Again, the word “humanity” is perhaps the most exact equivalent for the Chinese word translated “benevolence”; but then, “humanity” must be understood in a sense different from its idiomatic use in the English language. A venturesome translator would use the “love” and “righteousness” of the Bible, which are perhaps as exact as any other, having regard both for the sense of the words and the idiom of the language. Now, however, if we disintegrate and refer the primary notions which these words convey, to the universal nature of man, we get, at once, at their full significance: namely, “the good,” “the true” and “the beautiful.”cxxxv Although GU employs biblical words such as “love” and “righteousness” or the contemporary phrase “the good,” “ren” is indeed the “moral life” in a secular sense. Therefore, he used “renounce yourself and confirm to the ideal of decency and good sense” to interprete the important idiom “ke ji fu li 克己复礼.”cxxxvi in the first paragraph of “Yan Yuan” and regarded it as the equivalent of “decency,” a quality exemplified by the Greek philosopher Diogenes. GU believed that “the first part（ke ji, 克己） is the self-renunciation (Entsagen) of Goethe.”cxxxvii GU explained “fu li 复礼” as “the imperious ideal of Art (礼) of the Greeks and Italians” on the one hand, and “it is religion, as Goethe says” on the other hand.cxxxviii This is problematic. No matter how hard he tries, by rendering “ren” as “a moral life,” GU has to connect “Wei ren you ji, er you ren hu zai 为仁由己而由人乎哉?” (Is the practice of perfect virtue from a man himself, or is it from others?)cxxxix with “Wo yu ren sir en zhi ye 我欲仁斯仁至也” (If a man will only wish to live a moral life, there and then his life becomes moral).cxl The question “Is the practice of perfect virtue from a man himself, or is it from others?” (为仁由己而由人乎哉) thus has to be changed to an affirmative statement: “To be moral, a man depends entirely upon himself, and not upon others.”cxli Legge’s understanding appears to differ. He renders “ren” as “perfect virtue”. In a Christian theology, “the perfect” implies something beyond human limitations, as in 1 Corinthians 13:10, “But when that which is perfect has come,” (NKJV), “perfect” refers to the second coming of Christ. In Legge’s translation of Chapter 38 of the Dao De Jing, “shi de er hou ren 失德而后仁” (When the attributes of Dao were lost, the benevolence appeared), he uses “benevolence” for “ren” instead of “perfect virtue.”cxlii In the earlier quotation “wo yu ren si ren zhi ye” (I wish to be virtuous, and … virtue is at hand), Legge uses the root “virtue” instead of “perfect virtue.”cxliii We can see that his choice of “perfect virtue” for “ren” in “Chung-kung wen ren 仲弓问仁,” where the Golden Rule is uttered, is an indication to his readers that the meaning of “ren” in Confucius’s Golden Rule in “Yan Yuan,” is very similar to Christ’s Golden Rule. Legge is focused on communicating this in a footnote to the “Yan Yuan” chapter: When two disciples, Yan Yuan and Chung-kung, asked Confucius separately about the meaning of “ren,” Confucius gave different answers: “Yan Yuan asked about the perfect virtue. The Master said, ‘To subdue one’s self and return to propriety, is perfect virtue.’” When Chung-kung asks the same question, Confucius responded with the Golden Rule, and the metaphor of good behavior before “a great guest” and “assisting at a big sacrifice.” Legge explains, “The different answers, given about the same subject to different questioners, show well how the sage suited his instructions to the characters and capacities of the parties with whom he had to do.” Legge also extended the meaning of “ke ji 克己” (to subdue
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one’s self) to “subdue and put away the selfish desires in the self,”cxliv and followed the commentary of the Qing Dynasty scholar ZHANG Zhen Taocxlv in discussing the transformation from “ren xin 人心” (the mind of man) to “dao xin 道心” (the mind of reason): “The mind of man is in opposition to the mind of reason. … This refractory ‘mind of man,’ it is said, ‘is innate,’ or, perhaps, ‘connate.’ In all these statements there is an acknowledgment of the morally inappropriate condition of human nature – reflecting the Christian doctrine of original sin.”cxlvi Legge not only removes a sense of “original sin” from “ke ji” but also rendered “gui 归” (to return) as “yu 与”（to allow), following Zhu Xi’s commentary on the text. So the saying of Confucius “yi ri ke ji fu li, tian xia gui ren yan 一日克己复礼，天下归仁焉” is translated as “If a man can for one day subdue himself and return to (or ‘allow’) propriety, all under heaven will ascribe perfect virtue to him.” (GU’s translation is: “the world would become moral.”) Legge subsequently follows a Ming Dynasty commentarycxlvii and interprets “gui ren 归仁” (ascribe perfect virtue to him) as “cheng qi ren 称其仁” (praise his perfect virtue), so the question of the subjectivity of the action of “being ren or virtuous” (为仁由己而由人乎哉) is not affirmative “I wish to be virtuous, and … virtue is at hand” (我欲仁斯仁 至也),cxlviii but a choice between “from oneself” and “from others.” It thus remains a controversial question: “Is the practice of perfect virtue from a man himself, or is it from others?”cxlix As Legge saw perfect virtue as beyond human capacity, he tried to define “ren” with a more limited virtue than perfect virtue in “si ren zhi ye 斯仁至也” (virtue is at hand), using “yu 与”(allow) and “chen 称” (praise) to confine the meaning of “gui ren 归仁” (ascribe perfect virtue to someone). In this way, the use of “perfect virtue” in this chapter could make sense, and the Christian logic of “to be accounted as righteousness” (Romans 4:5) and “to be justified” (Romans 2:13; 3:20–28; 5:1–9) could be implied in the meaning of “ren” interpreted as the perfect virtue. Readers of Legge might understand that in Confucius’s answer to Yan Yuan, “ren,” in its positive form, affirms a behavior that fights against “original sin”; while in the answer to Chung-kung, “Do not do to others what you do not want them do to you 己所不欲、勿施于人,” “ren,” in a negative form, implies the limitations of human beings. As for the practice of “ren,” Confucius gave an answer that combines the positive and negative forms: “behave to everyone as if you were receiving a great guest; to employ the people as if you were assisting at a great sacrifice; and to have no murmuring against you in the country, and none in the family.”cl When another disciple Sima Niu asks again about the meaning of “ren” (in the third paragraph), Confucius answers, in Legge’s translation: “The man of perfect virtue is cautious and slow in his speech…. When a man feels the difficulty of doing, can he be other than cautious and slow in speaking?” Here again, Legge allows the reader to sense the difficulty of explaining clearly the meaning of “ren,” and why Confucius employed the negative form to explain it. By contrast, GU uses “worship before God” to translate “da ji 大祭.” However, if “ren” is simply “a moral life,” it cannot be “the imperious ideal of Art,” which Goethe asserts “is” religion. GU message in his translation (by using Christian terms like “God”) does not reach as deeply as Legge’s exploration of original sin in his “the perfect virtue is praised or ascribed.” His intent can be seen more clearly in “Wei Zheng 为政,” when Confucius talks about his disciple Yan Hui. Legge translates this paragraph literally: “I have talked with Hui for a whole day, and he has not made any objection to anything I said, as if he were stupid. He has retired, and I have examined his conduct when away from me, and found him able to illustrate my teachings. Hui! He is not stupid”（吾与回言终日，不违如愚，退而省其私， 亦足以发，回也不愚。 ）. In a footnote, Legge explains that Yan Hui was Confucius’s favorite disciple.
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GU’s translation is similar to Legge’s but in his footnote, he adds the annotation that Yan Hui was “the St. John of Confucian gospel” so that the Western readers might connect Yan Hui with “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23). Similar cases can be found elsewhere. To argue that “Confucius also believed in God, although he seldom spoke of it,” GU translates “wu shi er zhi tian ming 五十而知天命” as “At fifty I knew the Ordinance of God”; “bu zhi ming wu yi wei jun zi ye 不知命无以为君子也” as “A man without a knowledge of the Ordinance of God, i.e., the Divine Order of the Universe, will not be able to be a gentleman or moral man.”cli In his English translation of the Analects, GU changed the translation to “At fifty I understood the truth in religion”clii and “Without religion, a man cannot be a good and wise man.”cliii To translate “tian ming 天命” as “the Ordinance of God” is too great a stretch, and yet to render it “the truth in religion” does not adequately convey the meaning. How can we communicate Confucianism and Christianity between the excessive and the insufficient? For Legge, the Christian, the communication between Confucianism and Christianity is not so simple. In his understanding, “wu shi er zhi tian ming 五十而知天命” is simply “At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven.”cliv By the same token, “bu zhi ming wu yi wei jun zi ye 不知命无以为君子也” is “Without recognizing the ordinance of Heaven, it is impossible to be a superior man.”clv What is the exact meaning or implication of “Heaven”? This is the key to Legge’s translation and commentaries. In comparison, although GU made Confucianism and Christianity alike at a superficial level, he failed to “make Confucius and his disciples speak in the same way as an educated Englishman would speak.” This contrast also appears from their translations of the Golden Rule in “Wei Ling Gong,” where Legge uses “reciprocity” to translate the Confucian term, “Shu 恕.” This example might help us reflect more deeply on such fundamental issues as “What does global coexistence mean?” or “Where are shared values from?” 子贡问曰：有一言可以终身行之者乎？子曰：其恕乎。己所不欲，勿施于人。 James Legge: Tsze-kung asked, saying, “Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?” The Master said, “Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”clvi GU Hongming: A disciple of Confucius enquired: “Is there one word which may guide one in practice throughout the whole life?” Confucius answered, “The word ‘charity’ is perhaps the word. What you do not wish others do unto you, do not do unto them.” clvii GU uses “charity” to explain “Shu 恕” and notes that “altruism” might be a modern alternative. Here he might have referred to Legge’s notes, “Altruism may be substituted for reciprocity.”clviii In the Western tradition, the word “charity” not only connects with the “graces of charity,” the goddess representing virtue and gentility but points to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment where Kant asserts that in the triadic pleasures of “happiness, beauty, and goodness” and the corresponding triad “hobbies, charity, and respect,” only aesthetic pleasure is “disinterested” and free, and that is charity.clix As such, is “charity” the equivalent of “shu”? Legge’s use of “reciprocity” is more meaningful. If “Altruism may be substituted for reciprocity,” altruism first of all is the reciprocal relationship between “I” and the “other,” whereas charity does not carry this connotation.
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“Reciprocity” comes from Latin reciprocus, which means the mutuality of two parties. In the Biblical tradition, “reciprocity” might remind people of human-God and human-neighbor relations. John 14:23, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them.” Or John 15:12– 14: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. … If you obey my commandment, you are my friend.” According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, these verses stress the function of reciprocity, so that love can be the genuine friendship between human beings and God. The Christian Theological Lexicon explains “reciprocity” as establishing a “correlative principle” on the basis of “commutative justice.”clx Legge’s choice of “reciprocity” for “Shu” might aim to stress this “correlation” in the theological sense.clxi It matches the commentary of ZHU Xi, “jin ji zhi wei zhong, tui ji zhi wei shu 尽己之谓忠，推 己之谓恕.” Doing one’s utmost is “zhong” (faithfulness or royalty); putting oneself in the other’s place is “shu” (pardon, forgiveness, or reciprocity).” According to the compositional rule of Chinese character, “Shu 恕” is composed of two parts, the upper part “ru 如” tells the pronunciation of the character, and the lower part “xin 心” tells of its meaning – related to “heart or mind.” Probably based on Legge’s “reciprocity”, some missionaries have interpreted “shu” as “如心, empathy, an interpretation gradually accepted by many native Chinese speakers. The same thing has probably happened to the English word “reciprocity.” Now it is almost impossible to get rid of the traces of “Shu” in “reciprocity,” and vice versa. In September 2010, the European Union (EU) held a summit on foreign policy addressing “strategic partnership.” For the first time, the EU affirmed the importance of strategic partnership in EU foreign policy: “To establish strategic partnership with the major countries in the world provides an efficient tool for the EU’s purpose and benefit.” clxii The president of the EU Council, Herman van Rompuy, said that “in the framework of strategic partnership, the most important notion is reciprocity.”clxiii As we have discussed, it is fine to interpret “reciprocity” as “mutually beneficial” in the Chinese text; however, in the Western context, it is much more. This also reminds us of Gerhard Ebeling’s “polarity structures”clxiv and François Jullien’s reading of “equilibrium between the extremes” from the Zhong Yong or his understanding of “category of relationship” between “dong 东” (east) and “xi 西” (west). clxv The meaning of “reciprocity” is not significantly related to “mutual benefit” or “mutual forgiveness,” nor “mutual respect”. It is first a “reciprocal relationship of mutuality.” Thus, the meaning of “shu” is also freed from the unidimensional understanding of “forgive” or “being forgiven.” In Legge’s translation, “reciprocity” is linked with “shu,” a key term in Confucius’s “doctrine of an all-pervading unity.” If we trace the line from the Analects to the commentaries of the Song NeoConfucian scholar ZHU Xi, to Legge’s translation, to the “strategic partnership” in the 21st century European Union, to the common understanding of “shu” as “ru xin 如心”(empathy), it might be hard to differentiate who is constitutive, and who is being constituted. Meaning becomes the product of some “structure of polarity” or “relational category.” Legge was not aiming to pursue conceptual “coherence”. Through his efforts, however, he built a more effective channel of exchange between Chinese and Western ideas. In the case of “reciprocity” and “shu,” the choice of the words elicits mutual conceptual inspiration, enabling sharing instead of one-way communication from sender to receiver. The key is not the difference or similarity of the concepts in China and the West but the innate logic that makes them sharable. Thus can we discover the channel connecting Chinese and Western ideas, and find a foundation for values for constructive global coexistence.
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Conclusion Our intention in comparing the translations of Legge and GU was not to judge which is superior. Legge’s translation and interpretation was not perfect, as he well understood. For instance, in “Xian Wen 宪问,” there is a debate over “yi de bao yuan 以德报怨” and “yi zhi bao yuan 以直报怨” (whether to recompense injury with kindness or justice). Legge asserted that if Confucius intended to “recompense injury with justice” then “how far the ethics of Confucius fall below our Christian standard is evident from this chapter, and even below Lao-tsze”; on the other hand, Legge replaced “de 德”（kindness）and “yuan 怨” (injury) with the Christian concept “good” and “evil.” Thus, “yi de bao yuan 以德报怨” (Recompense injury with kindness) is now “yi shan bao e 以善报恶” (Good is returned for evil); “yi zhi bao yuan 以直报怨” (Recompense injury with justice) is changed to “yi zheng yi bao e 以 正 义 报 恶” (Evil is returned with justice). Thus, the differences in the Analects are comparable to the difference between the “measure for measure” of the Old Testament (see Exodus 21:24; Leviticus 24:20; Deuteronomy 19:21) and “Love your enemy” of the New Testament (Matthew 5:44). Although Legge’s translations contain many misreadings, his effort at “yi yi ni zhi” is more valuable, in the hermeneutical sense, than that of GU Hongming. Legge’s strategy is obvious. He delved below the surface of the text to explore deeper meanings, helping us trace the dialogue between Chinese and Western ideas. We find a similar attempt in Jullien’s reading of Chinese culture and thought, notably in his interesting observations on Buddhist practice and meditation, which he explores deeply in a way similar to Legge. Jullien believes that this is a relationship “established in an incommunicative dialogue, sustained through mutual teaching or mutual reflections,” which enables the practitioner “to stay in a temple meditating and chanting all day long without necessarily having any outcomes.” And yet Jullien also discovers what Chinese thought and Chan Buddhism (禅, Zen) have taught us: how to devote one’s soul and mind to something, and abandon oneself fully, so that one can understand that “to gain enlightenment is to be enlightened to gain nothing.”clxvi Paul F. Knitter discussed the differences between Buddhism and Christianity: Buddhists claim that “You cannot change the world unless you sit,” whereas Christians assert that “You cannot sit unless you change the world.”clxvii If this comparison is hard to comprehend, then Jullien’s observation may be helpful. He took a story in Mengzi, “Ba miao zhu zhang 拔苗助长” (help the shoots grow by pulling them upward and consequently spoiling them) and related it to the Buddhist meditation and practice. Jullien thought this story “touched upon the most delicate feature of Chinese ideas, namely how to combine the artificial with the natural. … The maturity of the grain happens inside … so is the growth of a monk in the temples. … All efforts are made to stimulate or accelerate the coming of a natural and spontaneous event.”clxviii In discussing shared values, Jullien’s observation may serve as a metaphor: if we only hope that others will share our values, or we stick to seemingly perfect nominal concepts, we shall have an incommunicative dialogue. Besides, Buddhist chanting and meditation, which have no specific purpose or goal in mind, might be like the “wisdom-seeking engagement with the diverse others,”clxix seeking for a way of communicating in understanding that can never be uniform or identical. Only through being “devoted and also self-abandoned at the same time”clxx can we go beyond the narrow politics of identity and discover the innate nature of shared values. We believe that this is the inspiration that
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Chinese philosophical thinking can bring; this is the root the Chinese values should hold fast to; and so enable the construction of global coexistence. D.
An Islamic Perspective
In her paper on Islamic Perspectives on Developing Shared Norms and Values to Enable Constructive Global Coexistence, Mona Siddiqui argues that justice, equality, empathy, and human rights resonate across different religious populations and political aspirations, and are fundamental to our understanding of human desire, agency, and aspiration. She notes that Muslims constitute nearly one-fifth of the world’s population and points to the need to understand the religious values deriving from the Qur’an and Islamic thought, while also assessing the religious thinking that informs the policies of Muslim states. This may help explain why the laws of many such countries may be seen as antithetical to the liberal democracies of the West. She discusses norms and values from an Islamic perspective by focusing first on select scriptural verses with respect to human freedom, charity and justice, and gender issues, and discussing them alongside contemporary scholars seeking religious reform in Islam. She explores key theoretical frameworks arising from the Qur’an and post-Qur’anic literature supporting coexistence, inclusivity, and pluralism as opposed to verses suggesting the singularity of Islam and hostility to nonbelievers. Islam has come to Western consciousness as a religion that is essentialized and archaic, its European presence largely absent from a modern understanding of European history. Many do not know the complex histories of Muslim empires, civilizations, and intellectual life. Its presence has been felt in the West through socio-ethical concepts that modernity finds baffling – shari’a, jihad, forced marriage, honour killing and extremist violence. Divergent socio-ethical issues are thus conflated by the terms “Islam/Muslim”. She suggests that while “modernization” and “Westernization” are not synonymous, they are conceptually intertwined. The Western experiment of capitalism led to exploitation of other countries and cultures, while the hegemonic discourse of modernity is shaped by the institutions and intellectuals of the powerful modern West. Christopher Dawson argued that there is no other history but that of Euro-America, not even pre-Enlightenment European history.clxxi When discussing Islam, cultural, civilizational, and political comparisons are usually addressed with the phrases “Islam and the West” or “Islam in the West.” While many regard the Islam/West dichotomy as simplistic and highly others see it as a conceptual paradigm that has been restructured by a global framework. Mohammad Samiei argues that the West needs to give “transculturally compelling” reasons why its values are correct and that while liberalism is a valid form of a good society, it is not the only form of a good society. He argues that the premise of the Occident versus the Orient – critiqued by Edward Said – is hopelessly out of date: Although many preconditions which were responsible for crystallisation of the Orientalist discourse are no longer in place, it would be naive to think that the old patterns of human history and destiny which had shaped the West-and-Islam dualism have simply been removed. Far from it: they have been reconstituted, redeployed, redistributed in a globalised framework and have shaped a new paradigm which can be called “neo-Orientalism.”clxxii
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Despite these deconstructions, differences remain between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’. A commitment to democratic liberalism – equality under the law embodying cultural and social pluralism – is intrinsic to the modern West. Liberalism speaks a language of rights, celebrating the primacy of the individual over the collective, giving society a new model of freedom, and a new social order wherein forfeits its former elevated position. Democratic rule, civil society, and human rights comprise this new political and moral consciousness. Concepts of human dignity and democracy, while contested in meaning and scope, are seen as integral to human flourishing, but human rights are a struggle in parts of the world afflicted with poverty, inequality, violence, and degradation. Thus, if religion cannot dismiss human rights: Religious ethics must complement the rights-based discourse in language that is meaningful, not just authoritative. Only then will religion be a public good rather than a private passion. The human rights language, including its expression in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other conventions, has immersed itself in global political and legal discourse. If the language of human rights language appears culturally modern that of religion, often pointing to a world beyond the struggle for rights on earth, does not. Thus religion does not find a meaningful constitutional and political place, even if it does so socially. We live in a world of growing diaspora religious communities, often governed by secular regimes. The emergence of the nationstate, mass migration, and globalization has not seen the demise of religious faith even if clerical hierarchies have eroded gradually. Religious traditions have perhaps experienced the most radical transformation in recent times, giving rise to multiple voices. Many argue that principles of egalitarianism and justice are present in their scriptures and that it was politics and patriarchy that denied people full dignity and moral agency. Others claim, however, that their prime duty is to the eternal laws of God, while ‘human rights’ are culturally relative albeit that they claim universally validity. This rights-based language is either muted or contested in many Muslim countries. Modern Muslim states and societies lag far behind international standards of equality, democracy, and human rights. Many Muslim countries, which historically allowed people of different faiths to worship in accordance with their conscience, now extend this right only to non-Muslims. They may extol religious freedom as a precept, but struggle to accommodate it in their polities. Reformers in the Muslim world recognize that pluralism is built on free expression. As Abdulaziz Sachedina has said, The term pluralism is one of the catchwords of a new world order whose diversity of cultures, belief systems, and values inspires both exhilaration at the endless shadings of human expression and dread of irreconcilable conflict. The invocation of pluralism has become as much a summons as a celebration, an urgent exhortation to the citizens of the world to come to terms with their dizzying diversity.clxxiii The “modern West” means largely Euro-America; is impossible to imagine the West outside this paradigm. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama’s thesis was that the liberal idea rather than liberal practice had become universal. He argued that no ideology could challenge liberal democracy and that although Islam was a coherent ideology with its own code of morality and political rule, “this religion has virtually no appeal outside those areas that were culturally Islamic to begin with.” clxxiv The ‘software’ of liberal democracies demands an engaged citizenship based on justice and equality, and a commitment to civil pluralism, irrespective of culture, background, or religious affiliation. A global
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civil society requires acceptance of diversity because today different mores can only coexist in relative harmony within civil society. Diversity is not inherently good, but cultural diversity requires us to compare value systems and lifestyles in discussing how to build universal values and beliefs. We need to free ourselves from dogmatism and prejudice and empathize with others at the local, national, and global levels. In Islam, this requires restoring the principle of coexistence and promoting inclusivism as a theological imperative, and a civic duty. Despite recent tensions between ‘Islam’ as a religion and ‘the West’ as a civilization, in an age of increased migration and globalization Islam is, more than ever, part of the West and the West is part of Muslim life. Notwithstanding the variety of Muslim societies and attitudes, certain values in Islamic thought resonate with liberal humanism, while others can be reconciled with a pluralistic age. This is not promoting an ideal of Islam or reclaiming a culture whose brilliance once dazzled the world. It is to recognize that the theological language of compassion (rahma) and justice (adl), and the spirit of intellectual inquiry (‘ilm) have been part of Muslim consciousness for centuries and can be reclaimed to transform many parts of the Muslim world. Transforming attitudes demands changing ethical norms around gender, rights, and free expression. This is challenging as the human rights debate is contested. But the reality of diversity requires us to use of judgment based on equity and public interest to negotiate a shared space and language with ethical and political weight. For many Muslim states, it means making Islamic values appealing as a force for moral and material prosperity for their citizens and across national boundaries. For some, this had led to problems of citizenship and loyalty in the construct of the nationstate. Many verses of the Qur’an have different theological and historical interpretations, and both are used in religious and political rhetoric to unite and divide people. They have the potential to transform thinking and perspectives. Verses of empathy such as “Had God willed, he could have made you one community” (Q5:48), “We have appointed you races and tribes so that you may know one another” (Q49:13), and “There is no compulsion in religion” (Q2:256) cannot be mere theological abstractions but must be transformed to normative statements with political and social resonance. Islam: State and Modernity Jose Casanova wrote on the paradox of religion in the contemporary world, “I am not claiming that people today everywhere are either more or less religious than they may have been in the past. I am only claiming that ‘religion’ as a discursive reality, indeed as an abstract category and as a system of classification of reality, used by modern individuals as well as by modern societies around the world, has become an undisputable global social fact.”clxxv Casanova expresses a very modern reality about religion. Emile Durkheim and Max Weber posited that in the modern age religions would struggle to provide universal world views and that forces of modernity would inevitably affect religious institutions and the vitality of religious practices and convictions. But the decades after World War II have seen a steady rise of religiosity in the public arena, despite the reduced role of religious institutions. For many people today, the individualization of religion has occurred, not as a transcendental experience but as a value-laden normative ethic. With advances in science and medicine, greater awareness of poverty and socioeconomic justice, a shift in gender roles and expectations, and the demise of structured expressions of religious allegiance, whole areas of personal, ethical, and political life are being rethought against a background of scripture and tradition.
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While religion is accused of creating deadly conflicts and systematic oppression, individuals from all faiths promote religiously inspired ideals of justice and peace. “Tolerance” is a contested word, with many advocating going “beyond tolerance” to enable meaningful coexistence. But tolerance does not mean blind acceptance; it means understanding that diversity must be negotiated by people who believe that they have a stake in the moral and emotional well-being of all human beings. Nations can divide citizenship and encourage partisan loyalties, but the state cannot divide our common humanity. Religion expresses itself through the intellectual, spiritual, and political history of peoples. Political context makes clear that some contemporary struggles that Muslim countries face are the consequence of history. The history of Muslim and then European expansion shows how Muslim countries were influenced by European powers. Islam expanded from what is now Saudi Arabia across North Africa, through the Middle East, and into Asia and Europe. In different forms, Islam was the religious ideology of all Muslim states, including the great empires: Umayyad (661–750), Abbasid (750–1258), Ottoman (1281–1924), Safavid (1501–1722), and Mughal (1526–1857). In the 11th century the Islamic world came under attack by Turks and Mongols. These invaders were not conquered by Islam; they entered the Islamic world as conquerors and converted to Islam over the centuries. However, the Europeans who colonized the Muslim world in the 19th and 20th centuries did not convert; Muslims were politically subjugated by European empires. The 20th century was marked by European colonialism and the Muslim struggle for independence. The legacy of colonialism is reflected today in the boundaries of Muslim countries. After World War II, moreover, the French were in West and North Africa, Lebanon, and Syria; the British in Palestine, Iraq, the Arabian Gulf, the Indian Subcontinent, Malaya, and Brunei; and the Dutch in Indonesia. European colonialism and its aftermath drastically changed the nature of the political and social organizations in the territorial states inhabited by Muslims today. The migration of Muslims from parts of the Islamic world to European countries in the 1950s was the first time that large groups, with their cultural norms, had voluntarily left Muslim countries to live in the West. Some generations later, this and later waves of migration have assumed different cultural patterns, and led to ethnic communities that live culturally and religiously diverse lives. Globalization is a key concept of modernity, reflecting the fact that global capitalism has incorporated all economies into a single system. While it is debatable if this has had a homogenizing cultural effect, it has led to a global flow of ideas. It allows religious groupings to reflect on themselves vis-a-vis others, encouraging pluralism. Religions are less geographically rooted, and are more hybrid in expression because of diaspora lifestyles, networks, and other links. In most Muslim societies, this has led to the erosion of traditional means of knowledge production and dissemination. Mass communication and literacy have led to different ways of democratizing knowledge although widespread access to knowledge has always been part of the Muslim world. Now discussion forums involve imams, muftis, and trained lay scholars who are all part of Islam’s public voice. Where does religious authority lie if not solely in charismatic religious leaders? Who speaks for Islam on matters of politics and ethics, and what does it mean to be speaking for Islam? In a globalized world, what happens in London reverberates in Yemen; what matters in Cairo provokes debate about nation and state in the West. Language travels in seconds, and words change meaning across cultures. As Mohammad Samiei says, modern technologies have “annihilated” and “compressed” distance, “so that distant events and decisions affect local life, and any crisis anywhere
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can affect human beings everywhere. What happens to ‘others’ now matters to us to an unprecedented extent.”clxxvi The process of globalization has immediate local impact in multicultural societies, so that how we understand the world influences how we understand our neighbour. French political scientist Jocelyne Cesari argues that the discussion of religion in the age of globalization is highly reductive with the primary focus on fundamentalism. She stays in relation to Islam: Islam is often cited as the example par excellence of such religious fundamentalism: in terms of its conservative or reactionary interpretation of the Islamic religious message, or in extreme cases, its sectarian usage and recourse to violence. The Islamic quest for authenticity is thus said to signal the definitive decline of the western Enlightenment.clxxvii Cesari says that in the past two decades, two globalized forms of Islam have attracted more followers around the world. The first is the theological and political movements emphasizing the umma, the brotherhood of believers; these include the Muslim Brotherhood, the Tablighi Jamaat, and the Wahhabi doctrine, which emphasize a more fundamentalist approach to the Qur’an and the Prophetic teachings. The second is the solidarity of diaspora communities beyond the boundaries of nations, in the form of “transnational networks.” The mobile dynamics of “electronic religiosity has meant that Islam has expanded in all kinds of ways from audio/video to satellite shows and chat rooms; the monopoly of traditional religious authorities has therefore been broken.”clxxviii It is largely within these structures that Muslims living in the West are connected to traditional forms of learning about Islam and to ethnic Islamic practices. Yet, they live in the more secularized societies of Europe and America where their faith has increasingly assumed a higher visibility and a more public dimension. However, to view the Muslim presence in the diaspora as either an ethnic identity or a religious force separate from society perpetuates a narrow debate about civil society in the context of globalism. The emergence of civil society in European civilization was associated with a liberal philosophy pitting religious faith against the rational and placing the individual at the center, a condition seen to be impossible if the sacred encroaches on the public arena. This perspective, however, caricatures the sacred as standing in contrast to civil society rather than being one of its many parts. Contemporary scholars are divided about the meaning of the term “Islamic state,” with some claiming that by any standard definition of the modern state, an Islamic state is an impossibility and a contradiction in terms. In her paper, Dr Siddiqui use the term “Islamic state” to refer to countries that try to apply the shari’a, in their constitution or governance. Strictly speaking, shari’a refers to God’s law ‘as it is with God and his Prophet’, in which is to be found an ideal of Islamic society. In its simplest definition, however, shari’a is not law as we understand law today, a set of rules imposed to give order to society. Shari’a is contained in the corpus of revelation, in scripture and the legal reasoning of jurists. Thus, Islamic law developed neither as an unequivocal nor monolithic expression of God’s will. It derived from a discourse in which religious scholars interpreted the sources in different ways and debated essential legal and moral matters. Their aim was to explore moral behaviour with respect to all aspects of social relations, from dress, marriage, and business transactions to penal law. In this way, all juristic reflection became shari’a.
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In recent decades, many scholars have found the definition of shari’a too narrow and inconsistent with the ethical and moral imperatives of the Qur’an.clxxix Some claim that by treating the classical heritage as an immutable body of law, Muslims have ignored the essence of Islamic law in society - its mutability in social and political contexts. They state that even when changes were made or religious laws were subsumed into Western legal codes, human relations were too often conceptualized in a largely medieval framework. And yet, as Wael Hallaq has argued in relation to Islamic legal systems and the Islamic state, the shari’a is now “institutionally defunct.” He states that while “[its] hermeneutics, courts, discursive practices, educational systems, and the entire range of its sociology of knowledge” are no longer functioning, what matters is that the shari’a is preserved as a moral source. For Hallaq, Western laws have replaced much of Islamic law in Muslim countries, but the pillars of Islam continue to define what it means to be Muslim.clxxx Classical Islam had few systematic treatises on ethics and norms, as these subjects were subsumed under law and worship. The juridical literature gives insight into the conditions in which Muslims could participate in non-Islamic societies, but these pre-modern texts are not conclusive. They do not contain appropriate equivalents of “liberalism,” “human rights,” or “democratic pluralism,” the global vocabulary of the modern age. With new contexts, new language is needed and one of the biggest challenges for many thoughtful Muslims is haw to align text with context. Tradition and orthodoxy are unelaborated concepts in Islamic classical thought. Muhammad Arkoun argued that Muslim scholars need to “initiate a process of new thinking on Islam with tools such as history of thought rather than political events or fixed parameters; to make unthinkable notions – a historical rather than a religious postulate – thinkable; and to relate secularism, religion, and culture to contemporary challenges rather than substituting one for the other.” Thinkers, writers, artists, scholars, and economic producers need to inject new dynamism; no dominating ideology can encapsulate the richness of Islam. What is needed is the freedom to think the unthought. For Arkoun, Islam as revelation is only one attempt to emancipate human beings from the natural limitations of their biological, historical, and linguistic condition. In his critique of the polemics against Orientalism, Arkoun argued that Islam needs a new epistemological perspective for the study of cultures. This must be the project of thinkers, writers, artists, scholars, and economic producers, committed to the idea that “thoughts have their own force and life. Some, at least, could survive and break through the wall of uncontrolled beliefs and dominating ideologies.”clxxxi The project of thinking Islam is a response to two needs: (1) the need of Muslim societies to think about their own problems, which had been made unthinkable by the triumph of orthodox scholastic thought; and (2) the need of contemporary thought to open new fields and discover new horizons of knowledge, through a systematic cross-cultural approach to the fundamental problems of human existence. Muslim thinking on so many issues has historically been confined to interpretations, albeit varying, of classical sources. Yet, modern social and political realities require new ways of thinking employing new language and sensibilities about coexistence. This does not advocate disregarding the traditional sources, but it does entail reviving them in ways that keep them meaningful to contemporary concerns. The discursive nature of religious piety must be kept alive to prevent religious faith becoming a fundamentalist ideology. “Fundamentalism” whose original roots lie in American Christianity, has gone through several reincarnations. It has re-emerged in the lexicon as the global (dis)order has contributed to an excessive
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concern with identity, authenticity, and ultimate values – the fundamentals of existence – which precipitate a quest for guiding principles and ideological certainty. Even though secular models exist in Muslim countries like Turkey, Bosnia, and Algeria, these have been eclipsed by internal concerns about stability and authenticity. The term “fundamentalism” has become indispensable for journalists and pundits, and by adding “extremism,” these actors have initiated a new cycle – from textual exegesis to political activism. For those with a low tolerance for ambiguity, the attraction of a prescriptive solution is clear and explains the appeal of puritanical approaches like Wahhabi or Salafi Islam. But fundamentalism goes against the spirit of intellectual inquiry, ‘ilm, the divine command to search, explore, and discover for a more just world. Professor Siddiqui draws on three Qur’anic themes to explore the values intrinsic to the Qur’anic world view, and to human dignity: Human freedom, charity and hospitality, and gender and justice. She argues that without understanding human freedom, we cannot understand our relationship to God. It is human freedom that makes us all equal in creation, accountable for our moral conduct, and responsible for, and to, one another and to nature. Charity and hospitality are themes concerned with rethinking the stranger in our globalized world, and the imperative to care for those on the margins of society. Charity and hospitality go beyond giving money and aid or providing shelter; they are profoundly transformative of the self and society. Running through all these themes is justice. Justice (adl) is a divine attribute and is present throughout the Qur’an as a framework for human relations and political contracts. Justice is not about legal rulings or moral rightness alone but should be permeate all ethics as we strive for a more authentic self. As John Stuart Mill stated, “justice is the chief part, and incomparably the most binding part of all morality.”clxxxii Thus, when we think of gender relations, what is important to appreciate is just how many women in the world feel dehumanized by the society around them. How we imagine and render equitable just male-female relations is a universal issue, but of particular concern in many Muslim societies, in which many women feel silenced, denied autonomy, or caught in oppressive social and religious structures. These three themes are the most widely discussed issues in contemporary reformulations of Islam by scholars and activists. Human Freedom The Qur’anic account of man’s creation is simultaneously an account of man’s vocation. When the Qur’an says “We created man in the best of forms” (Q95:4), it is not simply referring to man’s physical form but his ultimate purpose. Humankind is free, restless for knowledge, and morally accountable to fellow beings. Human creation, alienation, and destiny depend on man’s unique relationship to God. Man, who is weak, is asked by God to be his representative on earth; man, who is free to choose, must live the moral life; and, finally, man who is mortal, must prepare for his destiny with God. The essence of this relationship is the concept of free will and personal freedom, which allows man to make choices using his intellect. Human freedom is God’s greatest gift to man, not because other life forms are not free but because human freedom is tied to human accountability. At a philosophical level, morality is possible without belief in God. But to believe that God does not exist
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and that one has no moral accountability is literally de-moralizing, as our moral choices would then be insignificant, as our fate and that of the universe would be independent of those choices. “De-moralization” means deterioration of moral motivation. It is hard to do the right thing by sacrificing one’s self-interest and resisting temptation when the desire is strong. The belief that it does not matter what one chooses will sap one’s moral strength and undermine one’s moral life. By contrast, the belief that one will be held accountable for one’s actions and that one’s choices help cause the good, strengthen moral life. In Islamic thought, moral accountability is rooted in ihsan. The Qur’an says, “Bear witness to the truth in all equity and never let hatred of others lead you to deviate from justice. Be just for this is closest to righteousness. Remember God is well aware of all that you do” (Q5:8). Freedom comes with responsibilities, and our humanity is reduced if we are not free. Thus, the freedom of the individual citizen to choose his or her own moral life lies at the core of humane governance. This is succinctly stated: “If God had so willed, he would have made you all one community, but [He has not done so] that He may test you in what He has given you; so compete in goodness” (Q5:48). This is not a matter of private morality. It demands acceptance of religious pluralism and freedom of conscience. As Sachedina states, “religious pluralism can function as a working paradigm for a democratic, social pluralism in which people of diverse religious backgrounds are willing to form a community of global citizens.”clxxxiii The exercise of this freedom is intrinsic in the obligation of stewardship. Verses such as “God loves those who are good to others” (Q2:195) and “God loves those who put their trust in Him” (Q3:159) have been interpreted to mean that God’s love is conditional. Professor Siddiqui suggests that they mean that God will draw nearer to man when man places trust in God’s infinite mercy, and when human beings behave with justice (adl) and mercy (rahma) toward one another. Such compassion makes us human. The Prophet said, “None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”clxxxiv She cites a number of related sayings: God will not be merciful to him who is not merciful to [other] people.clxxxv O son of Adam, so long as you call upon me and ask of me, I shall forgive you for what you have done, and I shall not mind. O son of Adam, were your sins to reach the clouds of the sky and were you then to ask forgiveness of me, I would forgive you. O son of Adam, were you to come to me with sins nearly as great as the earth and were you then to face me, ascribing no partner to me, I would bring you forgiveness nearly as great as it [i.e., the earth].clxxxvi God’s compassion has no limits, and mercy and compassion lie at the core of Islamic values however these terms have been interpreted throughout history. It could be argued that there is no Islam without compassion. Stewardship involves our moral accountability for the planet and places demands on our material needs. Muslims do not act ethically if they do not see their relationship with the planet as a reflection of their relationship with God. The sanctity of nature is core to God’s dealings with human beings. When the Qur’an says that man was foolish in accepting God’s trust to look after nature, it highlights the challenge we face when nature is at stake. Do we choose to act as stewards of the earth so that we do not stand accused by future generations, and do we see contaminated seas, pollution, the destruction of forests, and high levels of industrial waste as reflecting the subordination of nature
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to human exploitation and the measurement of progress by the material rather than the spiritual? The Qur’an says that “the earth will tell its stories” (Q99:4) and relate these to human actions. Our presence on earth is about our relationship to nature and our search for meaning. Ecological concerns may a modern insight, but nature has always witnessed our actions. Human freedom involves choices and everything is affected by our choices. Humans may be raised above nature, but their voluntary stewardship means that they are of nature, and responsible for it. These principles should unite governments in efforts to combat degradation of the world’s resources. Justice is about our relationship with all humankind and all nature. Justice (adl) is the fundamental premise of human relations including citizenship and the social contract. The Qur’an commands that oaths and contracts be observed: “Fulfill the contracts which you make” is repeated several times in the Qur’an. Does this then not relate to nationals of a country who have applied for residence and live under its laws? Muslims living in all countries are morally bound to observe the rules and be compliant with the laws of the state from which they receive protection. Not to do so is treachery, which is abhorred in the classical texts, where cheating and treachery are equated and legal and ethical reciprocity is recognized between citizen and the state. For many contemporary scholars, the obligation to the state is one of contractual obligation, satisfied by abiding by the laws of a country. State security demands a tacit recognition of this reciprocity; for many Muslim scholars, this has become the dominant position on issues of citizenship and social obligations. In the Qur’anic world, the foundation for a good society is an honest society, one where business contracts are not based on malpractice, whether towards individuals or institutions, and one where concern for the other’s well-being is intrinsic to human relations. Charity and Hospitality Moral integrity underpins the civilizations in which we have prospered by being concerned with the wellbeing of others. When we ignore the prosperity and dignity of others our own civilizations are doomed. The Qur’an and other texts make many references to the need to show mercy and respect to those who have little; to those who are oppressed or weak; to the traveller, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. The principle of zakat, a third pillar of Islam, if followed ethically, is not simply about distributing wealth to people in need, but about purifying one’s own wealth. Zakat is an obligatory tax, while charity is optional. Whether zakat is intended to provide only for all members of the Muslim community is now debated; many argue that our pluralist societies should not be divided in respect of material help. Charity or alms to anyone in need, Muslim or non-Muslim, is encouraged in the Qur’an. Such voluntary offerings, sadaqa, are to be used “for the poor, the needy, those whose hearts are being reconciled, to free captives and debtors, for those struggling in God’s way, and for the migrant, as a duty imposed by God” (Q9:60). The payment of zakat can alleviate the individual conscience, it can be about equitable wealth distribution, but it is first and foremost an act of mercy. The accumulation of wealth is not a private or individual exercise; it has consequences for the whole of society. This is why educational institutes and hospitals in which philanthropic giving connected the spiritual and the temporal realms has defined Islamic societies. The Qur’an also speaks of wealth being extended “to relatives, orphans, the needy and the migrant, so that it will not circulate merely among the wealthy among you” (Q59:7).
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The concept of sharing wealth and embracing the stranger with hospitality, has been institutionalized in Muslim cultures from the beginning. But the obligation to show mercy and act justly is met when the oppressed and the poor seek this justice. Justice is not an act of charity; it is a moral and social obligation on each of us. The right of the poor and the stranger does not arise because he is a victim of a merciless society; his rights are a test of our obedience to God. Philanthropic gestures and movements can help alleviate poverty and implement social justice, but personal piety and giving is a civic, global, and divine duty. A Prophetic tradition warns that he who sleeps with a full stomach while his neighbour goes hungry will be deprived of God’s mercy. The Qur’anic emphasizes the obligation to give to those in need through taxes, alms, or charity In Islam, giving is a religious obligation to address the right of the poor, as well as a voluntary charity, for the purpose of creating an appropriate social and moral order. Giving of one’s wealth and one’s time is about creating proper relationships with people. Only by recognizing the right measure of one’s needs and avoiding overindulgence that leads to deprivation for others do we acknowledge that we exist for one another. Jacques Derrida suggested that extending hospitality was not an act of power but one that required taking risks and becoming vulnerable. Edward Said’s words are particularly important as conflicts lead to new waves of migration: “The greatest single fact of the past three decades has been, I believe, the vast human migration attendant upon war, colonialism and decolonization, economic and political revolution, and such devastating occurrences as famine, ethnic cleansing, and great power machinations.” The sad experience of “contemporary exiles, émigrés, refugees, and expatriates has still to find its chroniclers.”clxxxvii Governments have a duty to look after citizens in need or on the margins of society, but also to rethink the stranger, the traveller, and the migrant. Sovereign, territorial nation-states must address ethical questions on borderless hospitality, which call for an unqualified welcoming of the “other,” who has been neither invited nor expected. Thomas Claviez asks, “Can a place possibly be imagined where unconditionality, which both Lévinas and Derrida helped to us think, can play a role – let alone be exercised – or does such an idea of hospitality represent a genuine utopia: a u-topos, a non-place, in which by definition, nothing, can ‘take place’?”clxxxviii While giving international aid is an act of mercy, it must also be an act of justice. This requires shared goals in dealing with poverty, corruption, and degradation, and more collaborative and strategic thinking. Gender and Justice The emphasis on the struggle for equality for women is a modern discourse; the classical traditions of most religions were not concerned with this objective. Our consciousness has been hugely transformed in the past few decades. In the second half of the 20th century, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, created an urgent international mandate or gender equality. Such international agreements, though contested and ineffective, speak of a moral imperative for justice for all. But when we look at the prism of contemporary notions of rights and justice, we get only a partial picture of more subtle realities. A passage in the Qur’an illustrates the virtues expected in the ideal Muslim whether male or female: Indeed, the Muslim men and Muslim women, the believing men and believing women, the obedient men and obedient women, the truthful men and truthful women, the patient men and patient women, the humble men and humble women, the charitable men and charitable
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women, the fasting men and fasting women, the men who guard their private parts and the women who do so, and the men who remember Allah often and the women who do so – for them Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward. (Q33:35) Many Muslim scholars have understood such verses as meaning spiritual and legal equality for men and women. But the whole gender debate in Islam has in the past century focused specifically on certain verses of the Qur’an, a sacred text that like all the monotheist scriptures has been reproached for gender bias in favour of men. These select readings have been incorporated into traditional legal thinking, which then reduced women’s status on many levels. Gender relations, of course, mean far more than equality between the sexes – ultimately determining how a society behaves economically, spiritually, psychologically and socially, including attitudes to sexuality and freedom in sexual orientation. But women in many Muslim societies have argued that the androcentric interpretation of scripture, which permeated the political and the personal arenas, fed into and off the patriarchal ideologies upon which much of Islam was established. In the area of personal law – including the laws of marriage, divorce, and child custody – women were unjustly discriminated against because male interpretation had convinced familial and social structures that this was the moral and social order prescribed by God, wherein movement away from women’s designated place would compromise their virtue and honour. All notions of justice (adl) and the right to seek knowledge (ilm) were distorted by human experience. The demand that women’s rights to make choices should be recognized, and that the choices they make should be valued in society – is still revolutionary. For many Muslim women, the struggle is how to reconcile their faith, cultural tradition, and familial context with the impetus of feminism, driven by the right to autonomy. This means taking risks and going against community expectations; for some, it can be the biggest struggle of their lives. Muslim women share some concerns with those of Western feminists as has become clear from much feminist literature in the past few decades. But they also have distinct struggles, not expressed in theory but lived through the realities of women who fear being silenced for threatening the male-dominated order. In 2001, Fatema Mernissi predicted that women would provoke more violent debate as globalization forced Muslim states to redefine themselves and create new cultural identities rooted more in economics than religion. She wrote: “The fear of the feminine represents the fear from within; the debate about globalization, the threat from without; and both discourses will necessarily be focused on women. Femininity is the emotional locus of all kinds of disruptive forces, in both the real world and in fantasy.”clxxxix Cultural struggles about rights between men and women are evident, with some differences but also with alarming similarities, all over the world. Moral living knows no gender boundaries in the Qur’an: “As for those who lead a righteous life, male or female, while believing, they enter Paradise; without the slightest injustice” (Q4:124. The Qur’an appear largely unconcerned about defining men and women in terms of socially constructed gender traits; in fact, it seldom speaks of women as a collective. It is far more concerned with the moral dimensions of human relationships to God and to one another. Gender and sexuality are present but in relational forms. Men and women are physically and emotionally connected in all kinds of ways; language, gender, and sexuality are essential. The Qur’an says, “O Mankind, keep your duty to your Lord who created you from a single soul and from it created its mate and spread from these many men and women” (Q4:1).
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The feminist scholar Asma Barlas repudiates the idea that God favoured men over women. She asks the question, Why would a God who is above sex/gender and who promises not to transgress against the rights of others, as the Qur’an teaches, fall prey to shoddy sexual partisanship or hatred by privileging men over women or advocating the oppression of women? Indeed, not only does the Qur’an not oppress women, but it also affirms that women and men originated in the same self, have the same capacity for moral choice and personality and, as God’s vice-regents on earth, have a mutual duty to enjoin the right and forbid the wrong.cxc Men and women need to accept one another in the fullness of human potential so that women are neither denied access to shaping the intellectual and practical aspects of their religious tradition, nor silenced because of their gender. According women respect, autonomy, and equality is fundamental to our understanding of the good society. Conclusion A more equal and just world where people can live without fear and oppression depends on our concept of “international morality.” Ideas of justice and the ways in which states conceive of human freedom and rights are central. Application of such concepts would create a moderate world order opposed to sectarian violence, ethnic conflicts, and bloody revolution. If politics is goal-oriented, international relations is the domain of moral choice. Norms cannot be reduced to individual belief, nor analysed outside the structures of power or social practices in which they are expressed. Although the world is characterized by diverse moral codes, competing theories and systems, this must not preclude us from international debates on the value of freedom and justice. As Stanley Hoffman wrote, “If death defines the human condition, injustice defines the social one. There is a duty, national and international, to reduce it as much as possible. But there is no definitive victory.”cxci Victory may be elusive, but the need to eliminate all forms of injustice must be at the forefront of international ethics. Globalization, innovative technology, and ease of travel mean that we are more connected than before to the hopes and suffering of others. In many ways, it has never been easier to foster the sense of a shared earth, shared values, and a shared humanity. Human freedom, charity and hospitality, and gender and justice are not philosophical abstracts; rather, they are the rudiments of a more just and pluralist society. We all speak from a particular place, but know that modernity has done away with many pre-modern ideas of justice, male-female relations, and the common good. Humankind is a locus of unending growth and possibility. Law is a cultural construct, not only an expression of natural or divine law. International legal norms are applied in largely multicultural Diasporas with competing interests and mores. Shared values are not about the homogenization of norms or ignoring the moral, legal, and social complexity of any society. Indeed, they ought to help us realize a more authentic self and a more authentic society. Religious institutions may be on the decline in the global north, but religious life and values still shape how we think of the world and the questions we ask. If religion is to be a force for moral good, we need to rethink our human concerns in the light of our faith and the effects of modernity. Professor Siddiqui ends her paper with three recommendations:
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Re-establish the Islamic value of human freedom, without which human dignity is impossible; and freedom of conscience with respect to religion. Freedom of religion today, whether understood as an individual or collective right to practice a faith, to convert, or to worship in public, is a moral good indispensable among free individuals. The Qur’anic verse “There is no compulsion in religion” (Q2:256) must be understood in the context of contemporary pluralist societies in which individuals need to experience freedoms, before the full meaning of a religious conscience can be understood. Charity and hospitality are key to the international social transformation. States can aid those facing disasters in distant lands, but hospitality is a humility allowing citizens us to be open to the plight of others and to be challenged by those around us. Charity is not about rich nations giving to the poor, nor about helping those facing natural disasters. The Qur’an sees charity toward the poor, the migrant, and the stranger as a duty, as all these have rights over our wealth. We need to rethink our responsibility to one another. We need a global commitment to protect the lives of women around the world, and to ensure their rights. Despite several Conventions aiming to eradicate violence, oppression and inequalities, patriarchal structures and discriminatory state legislation still limit women’s rights. This is a religious and a secular value and should be a universal priority, irrespective of religious culture. There is no virtue in being born male or female; coexistence demands that men and women work together for the greater good of society.
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IV.
INSIGHTS AND CONCLUSIONS The thesis underpinning the project on Norms for Global Governance is that we need to identify the key parameters of a frame within which to manage collective human behaviour at significant scales, to reduce conflict, enhance aggregate wellbeing, and enable appropriate conduct within the limits of the bio-geosphere in which humankind is embedded. Because of the need for integrated intellectual and disciplinary approaches, each challenge on the Global Agendacxcii is defined comprehensively. Growth must be socially and environmentally sustainable; considerations of equity must frame our attention to poverty and inequality; the aim of reducing human vulnerability and strengthening agency and resilience at individual, national and global scales must integrate our discussions on security. Comprehensive inter-disciplinary dialogue, in which specialists communicate their insights to one another effectively, and share perspectives on means to achieve success, is needed to address these challenges. Two examples have already been defined: If respect for planetary boundaries requires transformation of present models of growth, we need both (i) an ethos that legitimizes restraints on carbon emissions and excessive consumption; and (ii) new development models that enable poverty reduction despite an aggregate reduction in current levels of production, trade, transportation and wholesale and retail distribution around the world. If security is to be enhanced, and potentially catastrophic systemic risks managed and mitigated more effectively in an increasingly connected world, we need both (i) a better understanding of the workings of the complex social, economic and technological systems we have built, and the ecosystems in which we are embeddedcxciii; and (ii) broader and deeper agreement on the norms we shall employ to mitigate risk and enhance security and sustainability. To achieve these, we need a deeper insight into the workings of complex systemscxciv; and the worldviews of different state actors, to allow us to understand their [sense of their national] interests, and the values they employ in determining these. We need an understanding of the interests and values that lead each major societal cluster, and each influential polity, to adopt positions that must be accommodated by others in our collective efforts to agree on the provision and use of important public goods, and to manage the global commons. A consultation in May 2015 by New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, on updating the rules and infrastructure for globalization cxcv , involving senior officials and experts in diplomacy, security, development and law led to certain simple conclusions: The next UN Secretary-General (UNSG) will need both to defend and generate political support to operationalize existing norms – such as R2Pcxcvi and commitments to mitigating and adapting effectively to climate change – and to innovate in key areas where significant normative gaps hamper collective action, and can and should be filled by the UN: Illicit globalization (including illicit financial flows, maritime security, drug controls, illegal migration,
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and modern slavery) and sustainable development (requiring transnational action on health, development technologies and resource scarcity). The UN may not be well placed to deal with other normative gaps as vested interests may lead Western governmental and emerging power market leaders in new security and cyber technologies to oppose the UN’s playing an effective role. Making normative progress will thus require high leadership skills of the next UNSG, both negotiation skills to create political space for innovation, and corporate leadership skills to build a team that can secure and regulate important international agreements in technically challenging areas. ---------The fourth pillar of the Global Agenda is defined as – Sharing the norms and values that enable global coexistence, and working to respect and reconcile cultural differences. The reason for its inclusion in the list of priority actions in the Global Agenda is the proposition that respect for the values that are core to human nature, and adherence to norms that have secured widespread acceptance across the borders of states and civilizations over time, are necessary for us to live in harmony on one planet; while appreciation of the diversity of cultural experiences and memes enriches our understanding of what it means to be human, and enables us to draw on a richer, more comprehensive source of insight. We have sought to interrogate the similarities and differences of values and norms in the research papers on Russia, China, and in the Islamic world, and in the trans-civilizational, though substantially Western-influenced, paper by Dr Marshall. The key conclusions from these papers is that, on the surface, many of the underlying values - reciprocity, the Golden Rule, ren/shu, justice (adl) mercy (rahma) - are broadly similar in these societies. Even the Chinese traditional ethos - ren 仁 (kindness), yi 义 (righteousness), li 礼 (propriety), zhi 智 (wisdom), and xin 信 (trustworthiness) - is intelligible to other cultures, at least at a superficial level. The concepts of ”ultimate goodness” (zhi yu zhi shan 止于至善) and “the course of the Mean” (zhong yong 中庸), are indeed elusive, but not necessarily more so than Aristotle’s “golden mean” (the desirable middle between the extremes of excess and deficiency, which the Greeks saw as an attribute of beauty, defined by symmetry, proportion, and harmony), or the Buddhist concept of the Middle Waycxcvii. Likewise, the principle that, in Islam, divine sovereignty is expressed through the collective vicegerency (khilāfah) of the community, and the supremacy of shari’a, God’s Law, is not difficult for anyone schooled in the Judaeo-Christian precepts of European civilization. The concept that, as a part of that collective vicegerency, each individual has the right to participate in the community, and that each voice must be heard, are likewise familiar. The classical legal requirements for Islamic statehood are shura (consultation), ijma’ (consensus) and bay`ah (legitimacy arising from the allegiance of Muslims), all of which can be accomplished through democratic elections and parliamentary processes. The principle of Islamic jurisprudence that the supremacy of God’s Law is effected through the rulers’ fulfilling the six objectives of Islamic law (al maqāsid al-sharī`a) - the protection, preservation and advancement of life (nafs), religion (din), family/progeny (nasl), mind (`aql), property (mal), and dignity (‘ird/karāmah), interpreted by a judiciary independent of the political authority – is quite familiar, again superficially, to a Western, and perhaps a Chinese jurisprudent.
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Meanwhile, as Dr Kulik has pointed out, when Dmitry Medvedev was President of Russia from 2008-2012, he referred to three branches of European civilization – those of Russia, the European Union and North America. Dr Marshall, in her discussion of an embracing ethical scaffold has referred not only to Hillel (Shabbat 31a), in the Talmudic tradition, Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, but also to Gandhi’s catalogue of Social Sins (1926), the Buddhist noble eightfold path (āryāṣṭāṅgamārga) – the fourth of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths – and the ladder of meritorious acts proffered by Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) in the 12th century. This approach to identifying the communalities between the value systems of different religions and civilizations is important, in that it provides a framework for collective understanding. In the past fifteen years many authorscxcviii have found it necessary to clarify that Islam, for example, is an Abrahamic faith with Hellenistic roots, which was the prime source of the European renaissance.cxcix It is also certainly true that, for centuries, Muslims demonstrated greater tolerance of Jews and Christians, than Christians did of the other two faiths. Some modern Arab scholars and political reformers, moreover, have called for a renaissance embodying human rights as the cornerstone of governance, the empowerment of women, and the development of knowledge societies. Coexistence and cooperation are quite possible. But there is a risk that emphasising what is common can conceal what is different, and lead to illusions of identity that are doomed to failure. As Professor YANG Huilin and Dr ZHANG Jing have pointed out: “…while ‘constructive global coexistence’ should be based on shared values, egocentric assertion of our own values as those shared by all human beings, divorces us from the true meaning of “value.” The significance of value does not depend on endowing nouns arbitrarily with meaning, but on the process that generates the value. It is not a matter of sharing values as nouns, but one of participating in sharing, in making values “sharable.” On the other hand, Abdulaziz Sachedina has said, “The term pluralism is one of the catchwords of a new world order whose diversity of cultures, belief systems, and values inspires both exhilaration at the endless shadings of human expression and dread of irreconcilable conflict. The invocation of pluralism has become as much a summons, as a celebration, an urgent exhortation to the citizens of the world to come to terms with their dizzying diversity.” Lord Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, offers a third perspective. While celebrating his friendships with religious leaders of an exceptionally wide range of faiths, he called for the unequivocal exorcism of “Plato’s ghost” in 2002, in a book in which he extolled The Dignity of Differencecc. He sought to eradicate the “mistaken and deeply dangerous” idea that “as we search for truth…we progress from the particular to the universal”, in the belief that ”[p]particularities are imperfections, the source of error, parochialism and prejudice”, while “[t]ruth is…abstract, timeless, universal, the same for everyone.” The result, he argues, is that “[i]f all truth – religious as well as scientific – is the same for everyone at all times, then if I am right, you are wrong. If I care about truth I must convert you to my point of view, and if you refuse to be converted, beware. From this flowed some of the great crimes of history and much human blood.”
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Citing Freud’s reference to “the narcissism of small differences” he argued that the allegedly “superficial and trivial” differences between faiths emphasised in ecumenical dialogues often take on immense significance in conflicts, “dividing neighbourhoods and turning erstwhile friends into enemies.” He continues: “There is nothing so slight that it cannot, under pressure, be turned into a marker of identity and thus of mutual estrangement. We need, in other worlds, not only a theology of communality – of the universals of mankind – but also a theology of difference: why it exists, why it matters, why it is constitutive of our humanity, why it represents the will of God.” Rabbi Sacks makes an impassioned case for respect for the “dignity of difference”: “The world is not a single machine. It is a complex interactive ecology in which diversity – ideological, personal, cultural and religious – is of the essence. Any proposed reduction of that diversity through the many forms of fundamentalism that exist today – market, scientific or religious – would result in a diminution of the rich texture of our shared life, a potentially disastrous narrowing of the horizons of possibility. Nature, and humanly constructed societies, economies and polities, are systems of ordered complexity. That is what makes them creative and unpredictable. Any attempt to impose on them an artificial uniformity in the name of a single culture or faith, represents a tragic misunderstanding of what it takes for a system to flourish. Because we are different, we each have something unique to contribute and each contribution counts. A primordial instinct going back to humanity’s tribal past makes us see difference as a threat. That instinct is massively dysfunctional in an age in which our several destinies are interlinked.” In a core observation, Sacks asserts: “Plato’s assertion of the universality of truth is valid when applied to science and the description of what is. It is invalid when applied to ethics, spirituality and our sense of what ought to be. There is a difference between physis and nomos; description and prescription, nature and culture, or to put it in biblical terms – between creation and revelation. Cultures are like languages. The world they describe is the same, but the ways they do so are almost infinitely varied. … Each language is the product of a specific community and its history, its shared experiences and sensibilities. There is no universal language….What we cannot do is place ourselves outside the particularities of language to arrive at a truth, a way of understanding and responding to the world that applies to everyone at all times. That is not the essence of humanity, but an attempt to escape from humanity.” What can we learn from these different perspectives, each of which reflects certain central truths? Individual humans, communities, societies, cultures, faiths, nations and perhaps civilizations, are both alike and different in distinct ways. Let’s consider the implications at the individual level, and compare it to man’s closest relatives. There is a common, identifiable human genome cci , which exhibits significant differences (around 0.1%) between human individuals ccii . These are, however, considerably smaller than the differences between humans and their closest living relatives, the chimpanzees (approximately 4%)cciii, and bonobos. Comparative studies of mammalian genomes suggest that approximately 5% of the human genome has been conserved by evolution since the divergence of lineages some 200 million years ago.cciv The published chimpanzee genome differs from that of the human genome by 1.23% in direct sequence comparisons.ccv Around 20 percent is accounted for by variation within each species, leaving
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only ~1.06% consistent sequence divergence between humans and chimpanzees at the level of shared genes.ccvi This difference, nucleotide by nucleotide, is far smaller than the portion of each genome that is not shared, including around 6 percent of functional genes that are unique to either humans or chimpanzees.ccvii Observable differences between humans and chimps may thus be due as much to genome level variation in the number, function and expression of genes, rather than to DNA sequence changes in shared genes. Indeed, even within humans, there is an appreciable amount of copy number variation (CNV) which can make up as much as 5 – 15 percent of the human genome. There could thus be +/- 500,000,000 base pairs of DNA among humans, some being active genes, others inactivated, or active at different levels. But the full significance of this finding is unclear. On average, a typical human protein-coding gene differs from its chimpanzee orthologue by only two amino acid substitutions; nearly one third of human genes have exactly the same protein translation as their chimpanzee orthologues. A major difference between the two genomes is human chromosome 2, which is equivalent to the fusion of chimpanzee chromosomes chromosomes 2A and 2B.ccviii Before there was any possibility of mapping the genomes, Carl Jung had postulated the existence of a collective unconscious. His thesis was: “… just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial differences, so, too, the psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in culture and consciousness. I have called this substratum the collective unconscious. This unconscious psyche, common to all mankind, does not consist merely of contents capable of becoming conscious, but of latent dispositions towards certain identical reactions. Thus the fact of the collective unconscious is simply the psychic expression of the identity of brain-structure irrespective of all racial differences. This explains the analogy, sometimes even identity, between various myth-motifs, and symbols, and the possibility of human beings making themselves mutually understood. The various lines of psychic development start from one common stock whose roots reach back into all the strata of the past. This also explains the psychological parallelisms with animals.”ccix Each of these approaches - the analytical comparative genomic, and the ontologicalepistemological postulate of a collective unconsciousness – reflects both the communality of humanity, and its different manifestations in different cultural contexts. The question, for purposes of policy, is how to address this polymorphic reality most effectively. Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg have undertaken an interesting empirical enquiry into the extent to which ancestry and language remain connected to group culture in contemporary times, evidencing continuation of what anthropologists call vertical transmission of culture, as opposed to the diffusion of cultural traits within generations, usually described as horizontal transmission.ccx Horizontal transmission and cultural diffusion have always occurred, but the access of once isolated groups to new transportation and communication technologies has accelerated it. Horizontal learning and change may weaken the links between a population’s current culture and that of its forebears, but genealogical heritages count even in the face of extensive horizontal exchanges, because societies that share cultures face lower barriers in intra-group learning, making new ideas and novel behaviours that arise within one cultural group, more accessible to other group members. To measure common ancestry and relatedness between countries, Spolaore and Wacziarg use genetic distance, which captures differences in gene distributions across populations.ccxi To measure differences in culturally transmitted traits, they have reviewed a range of linguistic, religious, and
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other cultural distances [values, norms, and attitudes] between countries, which they collectively style memetic differences, to designate differences in memes, or culturally transmitted traits.ccxii The researchers find strong correlations between genetic distance and linguistic distance, notably in European populations.ccxiii There is a positive statistically significant coefficient in most specifications of religious distance with genetic distance, but the magnitude is generally smaller than in the case of linguistic difference.ccxiv In considering values, attitudes, and norms, the researchers computed several measures of distance in the answers of respondents to questions in the World Values Surveyccxv (WVS) and conclude that 66.9% of the effects are positive, and 47.2% are both positive and significant at the 5% level – far in excess of the shares one could expect from randomness. They also found 20% of the effects greater than 0.20. In sum, across a wide range of questions, they concluded that having recent common ancestors is associated with answering more similarly on questions relating to values, norms and attitudes.ccxvi To distinguish more closely between signals and noise, they calculated summary indices of memetic distance based on categorical groupings of WVS questions, and on the average of 98 questions available for all 74 countries in the sample, and found that genetic distance is positively correlated with all but one of the summary indices of cultural distance. They record a large, statistically significant positive relationship between genetic distance and the overall index of cultural distance based on the 98 questions.ccxvii By question category, there were positive and significant effects of genetic distance on cultural distance for all categories other than D (Family). The largest effects, are for categories A (Perceptions of Life), E (Politics and Society) and F (Religion and Morale). Spolaore and Wacziarg conclude that ancestry and culture are closely associated as a broad range of cultural traits are transmitted, with variation, across generations. The corollary is that a lower degree of genealogical relatedness is associated with greater cultural differences. Cultural traits do, of course, change over time within societies, and diffuse horizontally between them, but the researchers conclude: “Measures of ancestral, linguistic, and cultural distances can help us understand exchanges and interactions across different individuals and populations. As we obtain a better understanding of the complex links between long-term relatedness and cultural similarities and differences across populations, we can also gain important insights on the scope and limits of policies aimed at reducing barriers to the spread of innovations and modern patterns of behaviour across societies …. In this respect, this … is a first step towards addressing the fundamental dilemma of modern development … how populations that differ in inherited cultural traits and historical legacies can more effectively … learn from each other, and adopt each other’s best ideas and innovations, while maintaining the benefits associated with deeply-rooted cultural diversity.”ccxviii (emphasis added) To clarify the salience of this assertion, we need to revert to the discussion of values and norms, and their impact on laws and political systems, provided in the research brief: We defined ethical, ideological and aesthetic values as being embedded by nurture, schooling and experience in individuals, serving to guide personal behavior and maintain equilibrium. Certain physiologically determined values are common to most humans, including the desire to avoid pain, to seek pleasure, and to acquire assets for survival. Others, including ethical values, are aligned with individual beliefs and communities, and thus vary across cultures and between individuals. The values of persons within groupsccxix, societiesccxx and culturesccxxi are largely common to their members, being transmitted through schooling and reinforced by social norms. Values that are shared by the members
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of a group are associated with circumstances that its members consider important for their identity and survival. Values thus both derive from, and inform, the norms of a society or group. [Social] normsccxxii are the explicit or implicit cues within a society that clarify and enforce appropriate values, beliefs, attitudes and behavior.ccxxiii They represent collective expectations about proper behavior for a given identity.ccxxiv Deference to social norms within a group enables acceptance by other members, while flouting them results in criticism, ostracism and sanctions, and may lead to expulsion. Within a group, norms promote coherent behavior, allowing members to predict the responses of others. Social norms vary between groupsccxxv and evolve over time, often differing from one age group to another. Most individuals today belong to many social groups at the same time. Some normative behaviors expected of members in one group may differ from those expected in anotherccxxvi, and some of the norms of any group may differ from the personal values of a member when [s]he is outside that group. As long as the contrast is not too great, however, individuals can reconcile the differences Law is a system of codified social norms, applicable to the whole of a society and enforced through its institutions. The law clarifies the rights and responsibilities of members, balancing their interests, and regulating the behavior of individuals and groups in line with that balance. The society to which the law applies, in our era, is usually the persons present on the national territory of the lawmaker, and subject to the jurisdiction of its courts. There are some exceptions to national jurisdiction, including diplomatic and consular immunity, public international law, and the extraterritorial reach of certain taxation regimes. Political systems allow individuals, with different interests, to live together in society. The political system of a society reflects the values of its members and the norms they employ to promote appropriate behavior. All political systems have six functions: (i) to allow for the expression of diverse needs and interests; (ii) to aggregate similar needs and interests and facilitate reconciliation of those that diverge; (ii) to make explicit the normative context within which the expression, aggregation and reconciliation will occur; (iv) to elevate certain norms to the status of laws and attach penal sanction to their violation; (v) to provide institutions to implement the laws; and (vi) courts whose legitimacy is widely accepted, to adjudicate cases where rights are disputed between persons, or between one or more persons and the state. The social norms of each (national) society thus provide the bedrock of its political system. When a national executive, a legislature or a judiciary is seen to deviate from the norms of the society it purports to govern, social tensions erupt. In extreme cases, these may either displace the government, or force political reform. This summary clarifies our dilemma in enabling collective action at transnational scales, whether regional, or global. The absence of coherent norms at transnational levels, akin to those that give national societies, cultures and religions a sense of community, makes it difficult to balance divergent interests, enable sustainable growth, provide for effective security, or resolve debilitating conflicts. These core functions of political systems can only be delivered if there is agreement on the norms that regulate these functions. Historical precedents The 17th century saw the establishment of a binding normative framework in Europe. First, the Peace of Augsburg, a treaty between Charles V and the Schmalkaldic League of Lutheran princes, on September 25, 1555, officially ended the religious struggle between Catholic and Lutheran princesccxxvii, and effected the legal division of Christendom in the Holy Roman Empire, in accordance with three principles: Cuius regio, eius religio established religious unity within a principality by making the religion of the prince that of the state and its inhabitants. Any subject who did not wish to accept the prince's religion could leave the State. The reservatum ecclesiasticum provided that if the prelate of an ecclesiastic state changed his religion, the inhabitants of that state had no obligation to follow him. If they did not, the prelate was
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expected to resign his post. The declaratio Ferdinandei (which was kept secret for some two decades) exempted knights and some Lutheran ecclesiastical cities from the obligation of religious uniformity, if Lutheranism had been practiced there since the mid-1520s. The provisions of the Augsburg Settlement did not include Calvinists or Anabaptists ccxxviii , however, so many Protestants living under Lutheran princes were still exposed to the charge of heresy, and did not achieve legal protection until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which extended the terms of the Augsburg Settlement to all Christians.ccxxix The intolerance towards Calvinists led them to take desperate measures that gave rise to the Thirty Years' War in 1618.ccxxx Grotius (Hugo de Groot), lived from 1583 – fifteen years after the Netherlands began its Eighty Years War of independence from Spain – to 1645, three years before it ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. All but the last three years of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) fell within his lifespan. Grotius’ greatest work, De iure belli ac pacis, published in Paris in 1625, set out the principles of the lex naturalis, or natural law ccxxxi - believed to binding on all, irrespective of their culture or religion – that governed (i) the circumstances in which a resort to war was justified (ius ad bellum), and (ii) the rules governing its conduct (ius in bello), once hostilities were engaged. Grotius founded his argument on the lex naturalis, recognized by educated Europeans as binding on all. He thus established an extensive normative paradigm, accepted as binding by all European princes, which also had a profound, foundational influence on the subsequent development of public international lawccxxxii. The significance of De iure belli ac pacis lies not in its enforceability – the distinguishing aspect of law – but in its normative importance. It shaped the behavior of European courts, and of those who came into contact with them, from the 17th century onwards, and laid the foundations of the Geneva Conventionsccxxxiii two and a quarter centuries later, and over the century following that. It would be a mistake however, to believe that European leaders were inherently more advanced in this realm. Indeed, many of the principles of war were already widespread. In the early 7th century, the first Rashidun Caliph, Abu Bakr ccxxxiv , laid down civilized rules of warfare for his armies.ccxxxv Islamic legal treatises on international law from the 9th century onward applied Islamic military jurisprudence to international law, regulating conduct on the battlefield; respect for treaties; the treatment of diplomats, hostages, refugees and prisoners of war; the right of asylum; the protection of women, children and non-combatant civilians; the use of poisonous weapons; and restrictions on the devastation of enemy territory. Muslim armies in the Crusades, notably those commanded by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb and Sultan al-Kamil, applied these laws.ccxxxvi There are, moreover, similar writings by Hindu and Chinese authorities. Applying these principles more generally The core principle underpinning the lex naturalis is that certain norms are applicable to all humans and must be applied in all societies. The lex naturalis is contrasted with positive law, which is human-made, contextual and subject to change. The norms comprising the lex naturalis are premised on human nature, and derived from rational analysis of its accidents. This ontological debate has extended for millennia in Western philosophyccxxxvii, while YANG Huilin and ZHANG Jing have discussed important dimensions of Chinese ontology and epistemology in their research paper, summarised here. One might argue that these core norms have emerged because they have proved essential to enable individuals to coexist in community since the establishment of small, egalitarian societies in the Pleistocene era in which human social instincts emerged.ccxxxviii Complex modern societies, premised on specialisation, division of labour and social and economic coordination, have emerged through a process of continuous adaptation and experimentation in different environments, each testing the limits of humans’ innate capacity, and disposition, to cooperate. Facing the ever-present risk of fragmentation into cliques and cabals, those
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concerned to maintain scale have employed techniques of coercive dominance, hierarchical nesting, symbolic ascriptionccxxxix, and institution-building.ccxl Elements of each of these management strategies – embodied in political systems – are evident in all societies today, and are replete in human historyccxli, but they have taken many different forms. The norms underpinning each polity may be similar, particularly at higher levels of abstraction, but are not identical. Actions by states, based on the perceptions of their governments and other elites, of the national interest, and the different quanta of military, economic, political and cultural capacity that constitute each state’s power, influence their behaviour, and often determine outcomes in interstate relations. The role of norms in constraining the naked pursuit of national interest, and in constituting a sense of national identity and purposeccxlii is not constant.ccxliii Likewise, the extent to which particular emergent norms have permeated national societies – or transnational elitesccxliv – is always uncertain until empirically determined.ccxlv Both cultural anthropologyccxlvi and cross-cultural psychologyccxlvii offer insights that enrich our understanding of the challenge. Biological inheritance, variations in the ecological context of habitation, and the socio-political organisational forms applied in particular societies over long periods, collectively shape both the social, economic and cultural behaviours observable in each society, and the norms that emerge to sustain these behaviours. Biological and cultural coevolution in the context of particular evolving, ecological circumstances, shape the cultures of particular societies. Individuals within each are socialisedccxlviii through conscious tutelage reinforced by reward and punishment – and encultured ccxlix – through observation and emulation of the behaviour of others within their society. This predisposes to cultural diversity across societies, and consistency within each.ccl But individual cultures are neither static – they adapt to changing ecological contextsccli – nor do they usually exist in isolation. Cultural diffusion, or acculturation – the adoption of particular cultural traits from another society – is thus another feature of cultural evolution. Despite elaborate theories of the conditions that inhibit and encourage cultural transmission, it appears that the adoption of exogenous cultural behaviours is always selective, never indiscriminate, and that selection serves the purposes of each society, interpreted in the context of its culture. cclii It is thus understandable that efforts to impose comprehensive normative frameworks, or other cultural artefacts, from outside a society, have failed in the past and will likely do so in future. Implications for global coexistence The thesis underpinning the research agenda into the fourth pillar of the Global Agenda is that our ability to co-exist on one planet requires Firstly, universal acceptance and effective application of a certain quantum of agreed norms that constitute collective expectations about proper behavior by state actors in an inter-state system; and secondly, agreement on the norms that will guide state behaviour towards non-state actors that threaten the survival or effective functioning of that system. We have already noted that adherence to norms promotes coherent behavior within a group, allowing members to predict the responses of others. Deference to universally accepted norms within the global system thus promotes acceptance of each state actor by others, while flouting them results in criticism, and, in more serious cases, sanctions of various sorts. To the same effect, Hedley Bullccliii observed that a global society must comprise: ’ . . . a group of states, conscious of . . . common interests and common values . . . conceiv[ing] themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations to one another.” This does not require uniformity of either personal or national interests, or of personal or societal values. It requires states, to paraphrase Bull, to recognise the existence of a certain quantum of common interests and common values that justify the subordination of unfettered national
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discretions in order to achieve a superior purpose. For this reason, they “conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations to one another.” There is nothing in this construct that requires national entities to abandon their cultures, or that obliges states to desist from pursuit of the interests of their national populations. Effective application of the paradigm does however require that states recognise that the exclusive pursuit of their national interests, without reference to the interests of others, or indeed of humanity as a whole, is dangerous and potentially destructive of aggregate human welfare. Efforts have, of course been made on many occasions in human history, usually in the aftermath of debilitating wars and other crises, to construct such arrangements. European history is replete with such arrangements, the Augsburg Settlement, the Peace of Westphalia and the arrangements made for a new European order at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic wars, being most familiar. On a global scale, the arrangements made after the First and World War, in the Peace of Versailles, and at Bretton Woods and San Francisco after World War II, have been discussed extensively. The latter arrangements established the structural elements of the global architecture still in place today. But the world had changed greatly since 1945, first through the expansion of the inter-state system through progressive decolonization after India’s independence in 1947; and secondly through the transformation of the global economy in the 1990s.ccliv Today, the three elements of a putative global society of the sort envisaged by Hedley Bull are characterized by profound, multivariate asymmetry: The defective interactions between the scale and depth of a highly integrated global economy, the absence of any commensurate, inclusive sense of global community, and the defective state of the global polity, may make [a metaphorical] spontaneous symmetry breakcclv inevitable. At the least, the asymmetry between the scale and character of the economy, society and polity, guarantee weak economic governance, economic and social volatility, normative clashes, and consequent social and geopolitical turbulence. To enable dynamic systemic stability, one needs symmetry between the scale of the economy, the cohesion of the society whose interests the economy must serve, and the reach and efficacy of the polity, which is the authoritative means of allocating economic and social goods within a society. This tends to work well on the scale of a village, tolerably well on the scale of a town or city; quite well at national scale in certain (often smaller) states; less well at regional scale (e.g. the Eurozone or European Union) as the past six years have shown; and not at all well at a global scale. We hypothesize that this is due simply to the fact that the diverse interests of (sub-national) groups, or national states; and the fact that different values are prioritised differently in different cultures, makes it very difficult to achieve agreement on the normative formula that will found solutions to questions that distribute benefits unevenly, both immediately, and over time, not least across generations. On a related plane – partially, but not wholly, orthogonal to the first – the impact of a far more numerous (7.2+ billion), economically and technologically empowered human species is influencing the workings of the bio-geosphere in unprecedented ways that we can identify individually, but not comprehend systemically, might prompt a spontaneous symmetry break on a much larger scale, extending far beyond climate: The concept of planetary boundaries and the risk of severe indeterminate consequences if they are infringed, has been explored at some length in recent yearscclvi. Building on James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulies’ lyrical description of the earth system as Gaia cclvii , a growing number of earth scientists have suggested that, in a period dubbed as the Anthropocene due to the impacts of the aggregate footprint of humankind on the earth system, homo sapiens is existentially at risk.cclviii
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Well before that point is reached, however, we face significant challenges. Our capacity for constructive collective action at substantial scales in this highly connected world is very limited. Systemic failure on several levels simultaneously, is straining our capacity to manage economies, stabilize societies, manage conflicts and respect ecologies, individually and collectively. Symmetry breaks on each level seem to be shifting established patterns to asymmetrical states. In inter-state and inter-community relations, symmetry breaks put cooperative existence at risk and encourage efforts at domination, due to the destruction of the normative conditions that enable constructive equilibrium. There are numerous examples of this at present, from Eurasia, through Europe and the Mediterranean, to the Levant and other parts of the Arab region, as well as Africa and Central Asia. Tensions in East Asia, not least in the East and South China seas, are further sources of concern. Few states around the world have not experienced domestic social stress in the past five years, much of it related to the economic crisis. With weakened domestic institutions, however, governments lack effective instruments to respond to social needs.cclix Restoring an appropriate measure of symmetry between economy, society and polity demands rebalancing at several scales. This requires us to develop better understanding of the workings of these systems; and the perceived interests and prioritised values of the political actors (chiefly, states, but also multilateral institutions); in order to determine at what scales, collective agreement on particular outcomes can be accommodated in one set of collectively-agreed rules (a normative framework), in respect of each of the five elements of the Global Agenda.cclx Tentatively, based on research to date, we suggest a triadic structure of governance that recognizes the need to (i) subordinate key global public goods (climate, oceans, etc.) and certain areas of behaviour that threaten a tragedy of the commons, to supranational systems; (ii) cooperate more closely and harmonize rules on human rights, trade, financial flows and security (e.g. weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, pandemic control) through international conventions and treaties; and; (iii) commit to common objectives in other areas, without creating institutions to control or enforce compliance. This can be expressed algebraically, in functions computing the range of (i) information and insights, (ii) perceived interests and (iii) prioritized values, of (iv) the quantum of political actors whose collective agreement to particular outcomes in respect of security, welfare and sustainability, (v) is needed for acceptable solutions; and (vi) can be accommodated in one normative framework. We shall interrogate these questions in the sessions on Norms for Global Governance at the Global Economic Symposium 2015, in order further to define key components of the research agenda. In two sessions on October 13, we shall address the content of our Diverse Cultural Heritages; and then explore the Challenges of Collective Action that arise from these.
ZÜRICH September 10th, 2015
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United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2014), World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, Highlights (ST/ESA/SER.A/352). ii Alexandra Philips, African Urbanization, Harvard International Review, 23 April 2014, http://hir.harvard.edu/archives/6038 iii United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2014), op. cit. iv WBCSD, Energy Efficiency in Buildings; Business realities and opportunities, October 2007, p 28 v U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: http://www.epa.gov/heatisland/ vi UN-HABITAT, Cities and Climate Change: Global Report on Human Settlements, 2011 vii UN-HABITAT, Cities and Climate Change: Policy Directions, 2011 viii Alexandra Philips, African Urbanization, Harvard International Review, 23 April 2014, op. cit. ix http://survey.telefonica.com/globalreports/ x http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement xi The Club de Madrid has launched an important multi-year program to explore the implications of these changes for representative democracy http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/programa/next_generation_democracy xii The Economist essay, What’s gone wrong with democracy?, print edition 1 March, 2014; http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-most-successful-political-idea-20thcentury-why-has-it-run-trouble-and-what-can-be-do xiii Despite an upturn in 2013, trust in government, measured by the Edelman Trust Barometer in 20 leading economies, was only 48 percent in aggregate. (It was 38 percent in 2012.) China, India, UAE, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia top 60 percent, while Mexico, Hong Kong, Canada, Brazil and the Netherlands are between 50-60 percent. http://www.slideshare.net/EdelmanInsights/global-deck-2013-edelman-trustbarometer-16086761 xiv The Central Treaty Organization (originally the Middle East Treaty Organization, or the Baghdad Pact) was adopted in 1955 by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and the United Kingdom and dissolved in 1979. xv The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was an international organization for collective defence in Southeast Asia created by the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, or Manila Pact, in September 1954. Its members were Australia, France, New Zealand, Pakistan (including East Pakistan, later Bangladesh), the Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. SEATO was established on February 19, 1955 and dissolved on June 30, 1977. xvi Yugoslavia (President Josip Broz Tito, India (Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt (President Gamal Abdel Nasser), Ghana (President Kwame Nkrumah), and Indonesia (President Sukarno). xvii Prime Minister Nehru coined the term "non-alignment" in a speech in 1954 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Referring to the five pillars of relations between India and China advanced by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, Nehru proposed that these should serve as the basis of non-alignment. The five principles are: mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual non-aggression; non-interference in domestic affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful co-existence. In 1955, President Sukarno hosted a conference of Asian and African states at Bandung, at which the participating states declared their desire not to become involved in the Cold War and adopted a "declaration on promotion of world peace and cooperation", which included Nehru's five principles. The first Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries was held in Belgrade, in September. xviii Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, Public Affairs, 1991, p. 741 xix Mikael Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, New York, Harper, 1988 xx Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Penguin, 1992 xxi Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995 xxii President GHW Bush, September 1991, in an address to the Joint Houses of Congress on the eve of the first Gulf War, after meeting Mikhail Gorbachev in Helsinki. xxiii The first time was after WW I, when President Woodrow Wilson dominated the proceedings at Versailles; the second after WW II when Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman were equally influential. xxiv Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, Simon and Schuster, 1994, p. 805 xxv It is worth recalling that Asia contributed well over 50 percent of global GDP until 1820, and that Europe exceeded Asia’s share for the first time in the 1860s. xxvi Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, Foreign Affairs, September 1993 i
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A Salafi takes the pious forefathers (the first three Muslim generations: the Sahabah ("companions"), the Tabi‘un ("followers") and the Tabi‘ al-Tabi‘in ("those after the followers") as exemplary models: See Salafipublications.com: The Principles of Salafiyyah: “It means adherence to the Path of the Messenger, may the peace of Allah upon him, and the Faithful Believers, namely the Pious Forefathers (i.e. As-Salaf as-Saalih) of the Islamic Community of Believers and all those who follow in their footsteps in belief, actions and morals.” xxviii After an extensive analysis of Ibn Taymiyah’s writings, Yahya Michot argues that he was in favour of resisting foreign invaders but rejected internal rebellion and insurgency, See Yahya Michot, Muslims Under Non-Muslim Rule, Oxford: Interface Publications, 2006 xxix See Bassem Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder, University of California Press, 1998 (revised edition 2002); and more generally Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld,, Crown, 1995 (revised edition 2001) xxx Vladimir Putin Meets with Members the Valdai International Discussion Club. Transcript of the Speech and Beginning of the Meeting, http://valdaiclub.com/politics/62880.html xxxi National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, US Government Printing Office, ISBN 978-0-16-081834-9, Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov xxxii The fifteen decades after the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, preceded by the Peace of Augsburg (1555) (cuius regio, eius religio, being the defining principle); and the almost ten decades after the Congress of Vienna, are illustrative examples in Europe. xxxiii Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 1997 xxxiv The Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, August 5, 1990, illustrates this normative communality, anchored in a distinctive cultural identity: "Reaffirming the civilizing and historical role of the Islamic Umma which God made the best nation that has given mankind an universal and well-balanced civilization... wishing to contribute to the efforts of mankind to assert human rights,... believing that fundamental rights and universal freedom in Islam are an integral part of the Islamic religion and that no-one as a matter of principle has the right to suspend them in whole or in part... declare that... all men are equal in terms of basic human dignity and basic obligations and responsibilities, without any discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, language, sex, religious belief, political affiliation, social status or other considerations." xxxv A group comprises two or more persons who interact with one another, accept expectations and obligations as members of the group, and display a degree of social cohesion. Society is, of course, a large group, although most social groups are far smaller. xxxvi A society is a group of people with persistent relations defined by differentiated social status, roles and social networks in a particular cultural context (see following endnote), who often share one geographical territory and are subject to a single political authority. xxxvii A culture, in this sense, is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a group or society, the patterns of activity in a society or social group, and the symbolic structures that make this activity meaningful for group identity. The civilization of which one is a part, defines one’s broadest cultural identity. Herskovits (Man and His Works, 1960) distinguishes culture from society crisply: “A culture is the way of life of a people; while a society is the organised aggregate of individuals who follow a given way of life.” (p. 29) xxxviii Social norms, New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, ed. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume, Macmillan xxxix Emile Durkheim (Suicide. 1897), drawing on Jean-Marie Guyau, used the concept anomie to describe a condition in which the actions legitimately available to an individual are mismatched with the prevailing system of social norms. This leads to potentially irreconcilable tension between personal values and social norms. C.f. Hermann Hesse (Der Steppenwolf, 1927. This is also akin to the concept of alienation explored extensively by Albert Camus, L’Étranger (1942), Jean-Paul Sartre, (La Nausée, 1938). xl Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein, ch.2, in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter Katzenstein, Columbia University Press, 1996. See also Martha Finnemore. National Interests in International Society, Cornell University Press, 1996, and Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle against Apartheid, Cornell University Press, 1995, and comment thereon in Jeffrey T. Checkel, The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory, 1996 convention, American Political Science Association, and workshop on Structural Change in International Politics, sponsored by the German Political Science Association, February 1997. xli Michele J. Gelfand et al., Differences between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33 Nation Study, Science, vol.332, 27 May 2011 distinguish between cultures with strong norms and a low tolerance of deviant behavior (“tight” xxvii
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cultures) and cultures with weak norms and a high tolerance of deviant behavior (“loose” cultures). Long exposure to ecological or human threats that require effective social coordination for survival, predisposes to the emergence of strong norms and intolerance of deviance. Nations that have not experienced such threats have a lesser need for ordered social coordination, leading to weaker norms and greater social latitude. The notional dichotomy translates into different institutional structures and systems, and personal behaviors. Tight cultures with long historical experiences that threatened group survival tend to have political systems that suppress dissent, justice systems that use harsh measures to deter and punish crime, and circumscribed media content. Similarly, appropriate behavior in social situations is more restricted, leaving little room for individual discretion. The authors suggest that these situational constraints, or freedoms, lead to habitual psychological processes, which reflect, and sustain, the cultural context of each society. Pakistan (12.3), Malaysia (11.8), India (11.0), Singapore (10.4) and South Korea (10.0) were the five “tightest” cultures among the 33 surveyed; Ukraine (1.6), Estonia (2.6), Hungary (2.9), Israel (3.1) and the Netherlands (3.3) were the five “loosest”. xlii Think of the different norms applied by a parish (or synagogue, or mosque), a football club, a music society, a university faculty, a garden club and a professional or scientific association, to all of which an individual might simultaneously belong. xliii The earliest recorded legal framework is Ma’at, the Ancient Egyptian concept of truth, balance, order, law, morality, and justice, personified as a goddess regulating the stars, the seasons, deities and humans from the point of creation from chaos. Ma’at is recorded as the norm for nature and society in pyramid texts between 2780-2250 BCE. See Siegfried Morenz, Ann E. Keep, Egyptian Religion, Cornell University Press, 1992, p. 273 xliv In the sense used here, the word civilization refers to societies with complex social hierarchies and institutional governments. See Beck, Roger B.; Linda Black, Larry S. Krieger, Phillip C. Naylor, Dahia Ibo Shabaka, (1999). World History: Patterns of Interaction. Evanston, IL: McDougal Littell. Samuel P. Huntington similarly defines a civilization as "the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species." Within this class, civilizations may be distinguished from one another by means of subsistence, types of livelihood, settlement patterns, forms of government, social stratification, economic systems, levels of literacy, and other cultural traits. xlv Francis Fukuyama, summer issue of The National Interest, Summer 1989 and Samuel Huntington, The End of Civilization?” Foreign Affairs, 1993. Both arguments were articulated further in book form. xlvi State, Bogdan; et al. “The Mesh of Civilizations in the Global Network of Digital Communication,” PLoS One, May 2015. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0122543 - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/international/globalization/small-worlds-clash-civilizations-new-datadimensions-globalized-world#sthash.ZMWnPbp7.dpuf xlvii http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ xlviii Mary Ann Glendon, 2002. A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Random House xlix Mary Ann Glendon and Elliot Abrams, “Reflections on the UDHR”, First Things, April 1998. l Human Dignity and the Future of Global Institutions. 2014. - See more at: http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/human-dignity-and-future-globalinstitutions#sthash.Q58kxg2I.dpuf li See for example a Human Rights Report highlighting actions in Egypt relating to women’s rights. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2013/country-chapters/egypt lii http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm liii http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/goals/ liv Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. draft outcome document of the United Nations Summit for the adoption of the post-20 15 development agenda was agreed by consensus by the member States on Sunday 2 August 2015. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/7891Transforming%20Our%20World.pdf lv Report on SDGs lvi http://charterforcompassion.org/ lvii http://repository.berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/930904KungParliamentDeclarationTowardGlobalEthic.pdf lviii Hans Kung, “Global Ethic and Human Responsibilities”, Submitted to the High-level Expert Group Meeting on "Human Rights and Human Responsibilities in the Age of Terrorism" 1-2, April 2005, Santa Clara University http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/global_ethics/laughlin-lectures/global-ethic-humanresponsibility.html
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lix
http://interactioncouncil.org/universal-declaration-human-responsibilities http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/ lxi Pew Forum, The Global Religious Landscape, 2012 http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religiouslandscape-exec/. Katherine Marshall, Global Institutions of Religion: Ancient Movers, Modern Shakers. 2013. Routledge. lxii http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/hillel/ lxiii http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclicalaudato-si.html lxiv https://www.charitywatch.org/charitywatch-articles/eight-rungs-of-the-giving-ladder/73 lxv Denis Goulet, (1980) “Development Experts: The One-Eyed Giants.” World Development, Vol. 8, pp. 481-489, Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in Great Britain lxvi Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. Bloomsbury, 2003 (revised edition). lxvii https://www.solonline.org/?tool_ladder_of_infer lxviii Robin Wright’s July 27, 2015 New Yorker Magazine article on the recent Iran talks (“Terhan’s Promise”) highlights the critical importance of the human dimensions of the protracted and complex negotiation process. lxix Katherine Marshall. "Climbing up to the Light." Reflections: Yale Divinity School: No More Excuses: Confronting Poverty 97 2.2010 (2010): 5-7. lxx http://www.socialprogressimperative.org/ lxxi Robert Rotberg (ed) (2015), On Governance: What it is, what it measures and its Policy Uses (Waterloo, Canada: Centre for International Governance Innovation). lxxii https://www.unglobalcompact.org/ lxxiii http://www.transparency.org/cpi2014 lxxiv http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings lxxv http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/fes-festival-of-world-sacred-music/ lxxvi Katherine Marshall and Sally Smith, “Religion and Ebola, Learning from Experience,” The Lancet, July 7, 2015 http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)61082-0/references lxxvii http://theelders.org/ lxxviii LI Bingquan, Marion, Zizioulas and the Overcoming of Onto-Theology (Hong Kong: Institute of SinoChristian Studies Ltd., 2015). lxxix For the distinction between “life-world” and “system,” please see Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, chapter 6, trans. by T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984). lxxx Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). lx
Here, in a reference to one book in Liji 礼记, the first letter will be capitalized. When the reference is to the concept, it is lowercase. lxxxii Zhong Yong (The Doctrine of The Mean), chapter IX. Please see James Legge, The Chinese Classics, with a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes, vol. I (Taipei: SMC Publishing Inc., 2001), 389. lxxxiii Many discussions between cultures and interfaith dialogues in the world today have stopped at this stage, which deserves our reflections: if human beings do not lack shared values and resources; then why have these values never worked out? lxxxiv These 12 phrases are in three groups: prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony; freedom, equality, justice, rule of law; patriotism, dedication, integrity, friendship. lxxxv “Eight Honors, Eight Disgraces” is the abbreviation for “Socialist Perspectives on Honors and Disgraces” proposed by President HU Jintao in 2006. The details are as follows: “Love the country; do it no harm. /Serve the people; do no disservice./Follow science; discard ignorance./Be diligent; not indolent./Be united, help each other; make no gains at other's expense./Be honest and trustworthy; do not spend ethics for profits./Be disciplined and law-abiding; not chaotic and lawless./Live plainly, struggle hard; do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures.” lxxxvi NI Guanghui, “XI Jinping Stresses the Need to be Open Minded in Order That the Propaganda Work Can Be Improved at the National Conference on Propaganda,” People’s Daily, August 21, 2013. See also http://cpc.people.com.cn/n/2013/0821/c64094-22636876.html. lxxxi
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Jaroslav Pelikan, Jidu jiao chuan tong: da gong jiao chuan tong de xing cheng (The Christian Tradition 1: The Emergence of Catholic Tradition 100–600), trans. WENG Shaojun, CHEN Zuoren (Hong Kong: Institute of Sino-Christian Studies Ltd., 2002), xix, xxxii. lxxxviii For instance, Steven Shankman and Stephen V. Durrant, Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 187–206. lxxxix HUANG Kejian, “Preface,” in Plato, Zheng zhi jia (Statesman), trans. HUANG Kejian (Beijing: China Youth Press, 2002), 10–16. lxxxvii
xc
WANG Guowei, “After Reading Gu’s English Translation of Zhong Yong 读辜氏汤生英译《中庸》后,” Xue
Heng 学衡, no. 43 (1925): 204. Cf. FU Jie, ed., WANG Guowei lun xue ji 王国维论学集 [WANG Guowei on Learning] (Kunming: Yunnan People’s Press, 2008), 473–474. WANG Guowei, “After Reading Gu’s English Translation of Zhong Yong 读辜氏汤生英译《中庸》后,” 204. The two Chinese verses WANG refers to are from the first paragraph of Zhong Yong: “Zhong ye zhe tian xia zhi da ben 中也者天下之大本”; Legge’s translation is “This Equilibrium is the great root from which grow all the xci
human actings in the world.” “Junzi er shi zhong 君子而时中”; Legge’s translation is “The superior man always maintains the Mean.” xcii
WANG Guowei, “After Reading Gu’s English Translation of Zhong Yong 读辜氏汤生英译《中庸》后,” 204.
xciii
The first sentence of Zhong Yong is “Tian ming zhi wei xing 天命之谓性, shuai xing zhi wei dao 率性之谓道,
xiu dao zh wei jiao 修道之谓教” (What Heaven has conferred is called the Nature; an accordance with this nature is called The Path of Duty; the regulations of this path are called Instruction). xciv
WANG, “After Reading Gu’s English Translation of Zhong Yong”; cf. FU, ed., WANG Guowei lun xue ji 王国维
论学集 [WANG Guowei on Learning]. Translated from the Chinese version. See José Frèches, “From French Sinology to International Sinology,” trans. GENG Sheng, in Faguo Zhongguo xue de li shi yu xian Zhuang (French Sinology: Past and Present), ed. Jean-Pierre Drège (Shanghai: Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House, 2010), 3. xcvi Lindsay Ride, “Biographical Note for the Third Edition,” in James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I, 10. xcvii GU Hongming (Ku Hung-Ming), The Discourses and Sayings of Confucius, A New Special Translation, Illustrated with Quotations from Goethe and Other Writers (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, Limited, 1898), vii–viii. xcviii GU Hongming, The Spirit of the Chinese People (Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1999), 115–116. xcix Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I. c See CAI Zhongxiang and YUAN Jixi, Zhongguo gu dai wen yi xue (Ancient Chinese Literary Theories) (Beijing: People’s Press, 2011), 194–196. xcv
ci
For the recent study about the meaning of “xian wen zhi” (宪问耻) and the interpretative intention of following Zhu Xi instead of Kong Xiangdong, please see CHEN Xu, “‘You dao’ and ‘Wu dao’: The Scriptural
Tradition of Analects and James Legge’s “bian jing quan yi (辩经权释),” Chinese Cultural Research, no. 1 (2013): 21–31. cii “Different ages have a Confucius of their own times, and even in one age there are various kinds of Confucius’.” See GU Xiegang, Gus hi bian (Debates on Ancient History), vol. 2 (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Press, 1981), 103. See also GAO Zhiqiang, “‘Qu sheng (去圣)’ and ‘Yi ci yi yi (一词一译)’: A Study on Arthur Wayley’s Translation of Analects,” Chinese Cultural Research, no. 1 (2013): 32–42. ciii YANG Bojun, trans. and annot., Lun yu yi zhu (Translation and Annotation of Analects) (Beijing: Zhuanghua Shuju, 2005), 1. See JIANG Zhe, “Xue er shi xi zhi, bu yi yue hu (学而时习之，不亦说乎): English Translation of Analects by Late Qing Protestant Missionaries,” Chinese Cultural Research, no.1 (2013): 43–52. civ Michael Gibbs Hill, Liu Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 28. cv GU Hongming, The Discourses and Sayings of Confucius, x. cvi GU Hongming, The Spirit of the Chinese, 5. cvii Ibid., 112.
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WANG “After Reading Gu’s English Translation of Zhong Yong”; cf. FU, ed., WANG Guowei lun xue ji (WANG Guowei on Learning). cix Translated from Chinese. François Jullien, Sheng ren wu yi (Un Sage Est Sans Idee : Ou L'autre de la Philosophie), trans. YAN Suwei (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2004), 23. cx Translated from Chinese. François Jullien and Thierry Marchaisse, (Jing you Zhongguo) cong wai bu fan si ou zhou: yuan xi dui hua (Penser D’un Dehors [La Chine] Entretiens d’Extrême-Occident), trans. ZHANG Fang (Zhengzhou: Daxiang Press, 2005), 23–24. cviii
cxi
In volume 4 of the Shurangama Sutra 楞严经, it is said: What is the meaning of shi jie? Shi means moving
and shifting, jie means positions or directions. In Xu Shen’s Shuo wen jie zi 说文解字 (Meaning of words), it is explained as follows: shi, 30 years makes one shi; jie, is the end. ... When the music finishes, it is called the end. Later jie is extended to boundaries. cxii Joseph Adler, “Zhou Dunyi: The Metaphysics and Practice of Sagehood,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition, eds. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 673–674. cxiii Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks, section 3. Quoted from Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy: Greece & Rome, vol. 1 (New York: Image Books, 1962), 76–77. cxiv For related discussions, see LI Bingquan, Marion, Zizioulas and the Overcoming of Onto-Theology (Hong Kong: Institute of Sino-Christian Studies Ltd., 2015). cxv Alan Badiou, Zhexue xuan yan (Manifesto for Philosophy), trans. LAN Jiang (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2014), 17–18, 37, 115. cxvi Gerhard Ebeling, Shen xue yan jiu: yi zhong bai ke quan shu shi de ding wei (The Study of Theology), trans. LI Qiulin (Hong Kong: Institute of Sino-Christian Studies, 1999), 23–28. cxvii Werner G. Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (London: Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd., 1991), 153. cxviii Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith, trans. James W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), 329. See also John Macquarrie, 20th Century Religious Thought (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1989), 392. cxix Gerhard Ebeling, Theology and Proclamation: Dialogue with Bultmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 27; see also Macquarrie, 20th Century Religious Thought, 393. cxx Karl Barth, The Epistle to Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 1411– 1142. Emphasis is in the original. cxxi Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters & Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1971), 360. cxxii Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I, 177. cxxiii George Brockwell King, “The Negative Golden Rule,” The Journal of Religion, 8, no. 2 (Apr., 1928): 27. cxxiv See http://globalethic.org/Center/kung.htm. cxxv Quoted from XU Minglong, “Ji suo bu yu wu shi yu ren and Moral Golden Rule 己所不欲勿施于人与金律,” China Reading Weekly, June 13, 2012, section 10. For more details about the history of the Golden Rule, see Olivier du Roy, La règle d’or: Histoire et portée d’une maxime éthique, vol. 1 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2012). cxxvi Thomas Hobbes, Li wei tan (Leviathan), trans. LI Sifu et al. (Beijing: Commerce Press, 2009), 99. See The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir William Molesworth (London: Bohn, 1839–1845), vol. 3, 76. cxxvii Hobbes, Li wei tan (Leviathan), 120. See The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, vol. 3, 90. cxxviii M. De Voltaire, Feng su lun (Essai Sur Les Moeurs et L’esprit des Nations), vol. 1, trans. LIANG Shoujiang (Beijing: Commerce Press, 2009), 253. cxxix M. De Voltaire, “Of the Expulsion of the Missionaries from China,” in A Philosophical Dictionary, vol. 1 (Strand: W. Dugdale, 1843), 265–267. Also see M. De Voltaire, Zhe xue ci dian (A Philosophical Dictionary), trans. WANG Yansheng (Beijing: Commerce Press, 1991), 319–331. cxxx M. De Voltaire, “Of the Pretended Atheism of China,” in A Philosophical Dictionary, vol. 1, 268. cxxxi YANG Huilin, “Historical Ruins and Cultural Memory,” Journal for the Study of Christian Culture, 30, no. 2 (2013): 4. cxxxii M. De Voltaire, “China,” in A Philosophical Dictionary, vol. 1, 264-270, esp. 268, 270. cxxxiii Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I, 251. cxxxiv GU, The Discourses and Sayings of Confucius, 96. cxxxv GU, The Spirit of the Chinese People, 121.
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This is the first paragraph of “Yan Yuan,” “ke ji fu lli wei ren 克己复礼为仁.” Legge’s translation: "To subdue one's self and return to propriety, is perfect virtue.” See Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I., 250. cxxxvii GU, The Discourses and Sayings of Confucius, 95. cxxxviii GU, The Discourses and Sayings of Confucius, 96. cxxxix Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I, 251. cxl GU, The Discourses and Sayings of Confucius, 55. cxli Ibid., 95. cxlii James Legge, The Sacred Books of China, the Texts of Taoism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1891; New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1962), 80. cxliii Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I, 204. cxliv Ibid., 250. cxxxvi
ZHANG Zhentao, Si shu yi zhu 四书翼注(A Supplemental Commentary, a Literary Discussion, on the Four Books). See Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I, 251. cxlvi Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I, 251. cxlvii The Four Books, with a Complete Digest of Supplements to the Commentary, and Additional Suggestions. cxlviii Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I, 204. cxlix Ibid., 250. cl Ibid., 251. cli GU, The Spirit of the Chinese People, 43–44. clii GU, The Discourses and Sayings of Confucius, 8. cliii Ibid., 182. cliv Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I, 146. clv Ibid., 354. clvi Ibid., 301. clvii GU, The Discourses and Sayings of Confucius, 138. clviii Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I, 301. clix Emanuel Kang, Pan duan li pi pan (Critique of Judgment), trans. DENG Xiaomang (Beijing: People’s Press, 2002), 45. clx “Reciprocity,” Christian Theological Lexicon (Shanghai: Catholic Shanghai Diocese, 2007), 869. clxi Paul Tillich, Xi tong shen xue (Systematic Theology), vol. 1, trans. GONG Shusen et al. (Tainan: The Southeast Asia Theological Association, 1988), 84. clxii Thomas Renard, The Treachery of Strategies: A Call for True EU Strategic Partnerships, Egmont Paper 45 (Brussels: Academia Press, 2011), 16. clxiii “Reciprocity is a very important notion in the framework of strategic partnerships.” See Invitation Letter by President Herman Van Rompuy to the European Council (PCE 187/10), Brussels, 14 September 2010. clxiv Gerhard Ebeling, Shen xue yan jiu: yi zhong bai ke quan shu shi de ding wei (The Study of Theolog), trans. LI Qiulin, 23–28. clxv Jullien and Marchaisse, (Jin you Zhongguo) cong wai bu fan si Ouzhou, trans. ZHANG Fang, 23–24. clxvi Ibid., 16. clxvii This is a summary Paul Knitter made in his conversation with Masao Abe. Please see Masao Abe, Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue, ed. Steven Heine (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), Chapter 19, esp. 231– 235. clxviii Translated from Chinese. Jullien and Marchaisse, (Jin you Zhongguo) cong wai bu fan si Ouzhou, trans. ZHANG Fang, 17 (28). clxix David Ford, “An Inter-Faith Wisdom: Scriptural Reasoning Between Jews, Christians and Muslims,” in Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chapter 8. clxx Translated from Chinese. Jullien and Marchaisse, (Jin you Zhongguo) cong wai bu fan si Ouzhou, trans. ZHANG Fang, 16. clxxi Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 19. clxxii Mohammad Samiei, “Neo-Orientalism? The Relationship between the West and Islam in Our Globalised World,” Third World Quarterly, 1999, 31:7, 1145–1160, 1148. clxxiii Abdulaziz Sachedina, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22. cxlv
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Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992), 330 and 45–46. Jose Casanova, “Which kind of religion do humans need? Theories of religious change in a global age of contingency” (paper presented at the Hans Joas 60th Jubileum Conference “Handlung und Erfahrung: Sozialtheorie zwischen Pragmatismus und Historismus,” Erfurt, November 28-29, 2008). clxxvi Samiei, “Neo-Orientalism?” clxxvii Jocelyne Cesari, “Muslims in Western Europe after 9/11: Local and Global Components of the Integration Process,” in Gabriel Motzkin and Yochi Fischer (eds.), Religion and Democracy in Contemporary Europe (London: Alliance Publishing Trust, 2008), 153. clxxviii Cesari, “Muslims,” 159–160. clxxix Fazlur Rahman, Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 100, 102. clxxx Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 13. clxxxi Mohammed Arkoun, “Rethinking Islam Today,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2003, Vol. 588, “Islam: Enduring Myths and Changing Realities,” 18–39; here, 21–24. clxxxii John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in The Utilitarians: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1973), 485. clxxxiii Sachedina, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism, 35. clxxxiv Hadith no. 214, cited in Mirza Abu’l-Fadl, Sayings of Muhammad (Karachi: Dar ul-Ishaat, 1994), 50. clxxxv ‘Abd Allah al-Khatib al-Tabrizi, Mishkat al-Masabih, 2nd ed., in Muhammed Nasir al-Din al-Albani (ed.) (Beirut, 1979), Vol. 3, hadith no. 4678. clxxxvi Hadith 25 related by Bukhari and 34 related by al-Tirmidhi respectively, cited in Ezzeddin Ibrahim and Denys Johnson Davies, Forty Hadith Qudsi (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1997), 126. clxxxvii Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2001), xiv. clxxxviii Thomas Claviez, “Introduction: Taking Place – Conditional/Unconditional Hospitality,” in Thomas Claviez (ed.), The Conditions of Hospitality – Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 3. clxxxix Fatema Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West (New York: Washington Square Press, 2001), 24. cxc Asma Barlas, “Uncrossed Bridges: Islam, Feminism and Secular Democracy,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2013, 39:4–5, 417–425, 421. The quote is from Ebrahim Moosa, “The Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam,” in Omid Safi (ed.), Progressive Muslims (Oxford: One World Publication, 2003), 421. cxci Stanley Hoffman, Duties Beyond Borders: On the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical International Politics (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981), 187. cxcii The five components fall into two classes: the first three are partly overlapping challenges, whose management is essential for continued human progress; and the last two, essential enablers for success. • Delivering environmentally and socially sustainable economic growth – for without this, we shall not be able to achieve anything else • Reducing poverty and improving equity – because exceptional prosperity for the few at the expense of the many is neither morally justifiable nor politically sustainable • Addressing the sources of global and national vulnerability and promoting security – for security underpins both community and progress • Sharing the norms and values that enable global coexistence, and working to respect and reconcile cultural differences – because respect for core values and universal norms allows us to live in harmony, while appreciation of cultural diversity enriches our understanding; and • Improving the quality of global governance and our global institutions – for most of the important challenges we face in a highly-connected world cannot otherwise be resolved. cxciii See Sean Cleary, https://www.futureworldfoundation.org/Content/Article.aspx?ArticleID=9868, pp 27-28; and https://www.futureworldfoundation.org/Content/Article.aspx?ArticleID=14330 cxciv Complex systems are defined by many strongly interdependent variables, interacting in non-linear ways, with multiple inputs contributing to observed outputs, complicating the attribution of causes and effects; chaotic behaviour, defined chiefly by extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, fractal geometry, and selforganizing criticality; multiple (meta)stable states, where a small change in the prevailing conditions may precipitate a major change in the system; and a non-Gaussian distribution of outputs. (c.f. i J. Stephen Lansing, Complex Adaptive Systems, Annual Review Anthropology. 2003. 32:183–204 doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093440; Kim A. Kastens et al., How Geoscientists Think and Learn, EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, vol. 90, no 31, 4 August 2009, pp.265–272 clxxiv clxxv
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cxcv
http://cic.es.its.nyu.edu/publications/meeting-summary-updating-rules-and-infrastructure-globalization The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect, a deviation from the earlier principle of the sovereign immunity of states. cxcvii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Way cxcviii E.g. Feisal Abdul Rauf, What's Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West, HarperOne; 1st ed. (May 11, 2004); John L. Esposito, Who Speaks For Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, Gallup Press, 1st ed. (February 25, 2008) cxcix See Seán Cleary, The End of the West (2006), https://www.futureworldfoundation.org/Content/Article.aspx?ArticleID=15399 cc Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, Continuum (2002) cci The human genome is the complete set of nucleic acid sequence for humans (Homo sapiens), encoded as DNA within the 23 chromosome pairs in cell nuclei, and in a small DNA molecule found within individual mitochondria. Human genomes include both protein-coding DNA genes and noncoding DNA. Haploid human genomes, contained in germ cells (egg and sperm gamete cells created in the meiosis phase of sexual reproduction before fertilization creates a zygote) consist of three billion DNA base pairs, while diploid genomes (found in somatic cells) have twice the DNA content. ccii Abecasis GR, et al., An integrated map of genetic variation from 1,092 human genomes, Nature 491 (7422): 56–65. (Nov 2012), doi:10.1038/nature11632 cciii Varki A, Altheide TK, Comparing the human and chimpanzee genomes: searching for needles in a haystack, Genome Research 15 (12): 1746–58 (Dec 2005), doi:10.1101/gr.3737405 cciv Waterston RH, et al., Initial sequencing and comparative analysis of the mouse genome, Nature 420 (6915): 520–62., doi:10.1038/nature01262, (Dec 2002). ccv The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome, Nature 437 (7055): 69–87, (Sep 2005). doi:10.1038/nature04072. “We calculate the genome-wide nucleotide divergence between human and chimpanzee to be 1.23%, confirming recent results from more limited studies.” ccvi Ibid. (Sep 2005) “We estimate that polymorphism accounts for 14–22% of the observed divergence rate and thus that the fixed divergence is ~1.06% or less.” ccvii Demuth JP, et al. The evolution of mammalian gene families, PloS One 1 (1): e85. (2006). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000085. “Our results imply that humans and chimpanzees differ by at least 6% (1,418 of 22,000 genes) in their complement of genes, which stands in stark contrast to the oft-cited 1.5% difference between orthologous nucleotide sequences.” ccviii The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium op.cit (Sep 2005), "Human chromosome 2 resulted from a fusion of two ancestral chromosomes that remained separate in the chimpanzee lineage.” ccix C.G. Jung, Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/commentary-of-secret-of-golden-flower.html, accessed 20150907 ccx See Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg, When is Culture transmitted between populations?, Agenda, World Economic Forum, June 30, 2015 - https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/06/when-is-culture-transmittedbetween-populations/; See also Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg, Ancestry and Culture, Vox, June 30, 2015 - http://www.voxeu.org/article/ancestry-and-culture#fn; and Enrico Spolaore and Romail Wacziarg, Ancestry, language and culture, forthcoming for the Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language, V Ginsburgh and S Weber (eds), CEPR Discussion Paper 10644. ccxi “This measure is based on neutral genes that change randomly over time, and therefore work as a molecular clock, reflecting the time since different populations were separated – that is, since they were the same population. The idea is analogous to relatedness between individuals…”, op. cit. Agenda, World Economic Forum (2015) ccxii These measures are derived from differences, across pairs of countries, in average responses to questions in the World Values Survey - http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp ccxiii “Using measures of distance based on counting the number of common nodes between two languages on a linguistic tree (the subject of the field of cladistics), we find that a one standard deviation increase in genetic distance is associated with a 0.15 to 0.22 standard deviation increase in linguistic distance, depending on the measure and specification. These correlations are stronger when focusing on the Old World only. Indeed the population movements that followed the discovery of the New World were important factors breaking the link between genetic and linguistic distance. For instance large parts of Latin America are composed of Spanish cxcvi
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speakers who are nonetheless descended from Amerindian populations.” op. cit, Agenda World Economic Forum (2015) ccxiv “… the emergence of major monotheistic religions is a recent phenomenon and religious ‘innovation’ (the entry of new religions) occurs at a faster rate than both genetic and linguistic drift. Moreover, religious conversions are a more widespread phenomenon than the wholesale replacement of a language. Historical examples abound of entire populations switching religions as a result of an innovation (such as the Protestant Reformation) or as a result of colonisation and the forced conversions that it often implied.” op. cit, Agenda World Economic Forum (2015) ccxv http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp ccxvi “We start with an analysis of the relationship between genetic distance and question-specific memetic distances, for 740 questions from the WVS. If there were no relationship between genetic and cultural distances we would expect 2.5% of the correlations to be positive and significant at the 5% significance level. Yet Figure 1, a histogram of the standardised effect of genetic distance, representing the effect of a one standard deviation change in genetic distance as a share of a standard deviation in the dependent variable, shows that 66.9% of the effects are positive, and 47.2% are both positive and significant at the 5% level – far in far in excess of the shares we would expect out of randomness. We also find a number of large effects, with 20% of the effects greater than 0.20. In sum, across a wide range of questions, having recent common ancestors is associated with answering more similarly on questions relating to values, norms and attitudes.” op. cit, Agenda World Economic Forum (2015) ccxvii “…the standardised effect of genetic distance was 25.5%.” op. cit, Agenda World Economic Forum (2015) ccxviii Op. cit, Agenda World Economic Forum (2015) ccxix A group comprises two or more persons who interact with one another, accept expectations and obligations as members of the group, and display a degree of social cohesion. Society is, of course, a large group, although most social groups are far smaller. ccxx A society is a group of people with persistent relations defined by differentiated social status, roles and social networks in a particular cultural context (see following endnote), who often share one geographical territory and are subject to a single political authority. ccxxi A culture, in this sense, is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a group or society, the patterns of activity in a society or social group, and the symbolic structures that make this activity meaningful for group identity. The civilization of which one is a part, defines one’s broadest cultural identity. Herskovits (Man and His Works, 1960) distinguishes culture from society crisply: “A culture is the way of life of a people; while a society is the organised aggregate of individuals who follow a given way of life.” (p. 29) ccxxii Social norms, New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, ed. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume, Macmillan ccxxiii Emile Durkheim (Suicide. 1897), drawing on Jean-Marie Guyau, used the concept anomie to describe a condition in which the actions legitimately available to an individual are mismatched with the prevailing system of social norms. This leads to potentially irreconcilable tension between personal values and social norms. C.f. Hermann Hesse (Der Steppenwolf, 1927. This is also akin to the concept of alienation explored extensively by Albert Camus, L’Étranger (1942), Jean-Paul Sartre, (La Nausée, 1938). ccxxiv Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein, ch.2, in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter Katzenstein, Columbia University Press, 1996. See also Martha Finnemore. National Interests in International Society, Cornell University Press, 1996, and Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle against Apartheid, Cornell University Press, 1995, and comment thereon in Jeffrey T. Checkel, The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory, 1996 convention, American Political Science Association, and workshop on Structural Change in International Politics, sponsored by the German Political Science Association, February 1997. ccxxv Michele J. Gelfand et al., Differences between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33 Nation Study, Science, vol.332, 27 May 2011 distinguish between cultures with strong norms and a low tolerance of deviant behavior (“tight” cultures) and cultures with weak norms and a high tolerance of deviant behavior (“loose” cultures). Long exposure to ecological or human threats that require effective social coordination for survival, predisposes to the emergence of strong norms and intolerance of deviance. Nations that have not experienced such threats have a lesser need for ordered social coordination, leading to weaker norms and greater social latitude. The notional dichotomy translates into different institutional structures and systems, and personal behaviors. Tight cultures with long historical experiences that threatened group survival tend to have political
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systems that suppress dissent, justice systems that use harsh measures to deter and punish crime, and circumscribed media content. Similarly, appropriate behavior in social situations is more restricted, leaving little room for individual discretion. The authors suggest that these situational constraints, or freedoms, lead to habitual psychological processes, which reflect, and sustain, the cultural context of each society. Pakistan (12.3), Malaysia (11.8), India (11.0), Singapore (10.4) and South Korea (10.0) were the five “tightest” cultures among the 33 surveyed; Ukraine (1.6), Estonia (2.6), Hungary (2.9), Israel (3.1) and the Netherlands (3.3) were the five “loosest”. ccxxvi Think of the different norms applied by a parish (or synagogue, or mosque), a football club, a music society, a university faculty, a garden club and a professional or scientific association, to all of which an individual might simultaneously belong. ccxxvii The virulence of the conflict between Catholic and Protestant princes in the 16th and 17th centuries, each convinced that they were fighting for the true faith, should not be underestimated. ccxxviii Article 17: "However, all such as do not belong to the two above named religions [Catholicism and Lutheranism] shall not be included in the present peace but be totally excluded from it." ccxxix The Peace of Westphalia (Westfälischer Friede) was effected in peace treaties signed between May and October 1648 in Osnabrück and Münster, by representatives of the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand III; the Kingdom of Spain; the Kingdom of France; the Swedish Empire; the Dutch Republic; the Princes of the Holy Roman Empire; and sovereigns of the free imperial cities The treaties ended the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) in the Holy Roman Empire, and the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648), with Spain formally recognising the independence of the Dutch Republic. The peace comprised: • The Peace of Münster between the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of Spain on 30 January 1648, ratified in Münster on 15 May 1648; and • Two complementary treaties signed on 24 October 1648: • The Treaty of Münster (Instrumentum Pacis Monasteriensis) between the Holy Roman Emperor and France and their respective allies. • The Treaty of Osnabrück (Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugensis) between the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of France, Sweden and their respective allies. The treaties established self-determination of sovereign states as the basis of political order in central Europe, discouraging intervention in the domestic affairs of other states both normatively, and through a balance of power. All parties recognized the Peace of Augsburg (1555), agreed to extend the principle of cuius regio, eius religion to Calvinism, and granting Christians of confessions other than the established church of each principality, the right to practice their faith in public during allotted hours and in private at their will. All parties recognised the exclusive sovereignty of each party over its lands, people, and agents abroad, and took responsibility for warlike acts by any of its citizens or agents. As European influence spread across the globe, the Westphalian principles of sovereign states became central to international law and world order. ccxxx One of the more notable measures was the Second Defenestration of Prague (1618) in which two representatives of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II were thrown out of a castle window in Prague. ccxxxi Lex naturalis, the content of which is set by nature and thus universal. It is derived by using reason to analyze and define the accidents of human nature and thus to deduce binding rules of moral behavior. It is contrasted with positive law, which is human-made, contextual and subject to change. The Stoics argued that the fundamental principles that underpin the legal systems of all nations constitute natural law. Roman law postulated a common code regulating the conduct of all peoples alongside the positive law applicable in specific locations. Thomas Aquinas asserted that lex naturalis was common to all peoples – Christian and nonChristian – while revealed law gave Christians further moral guidance. Natural law was the basis of Grotius’ international law. Spinoza and Leibniz saw it as the basis of ethics and morality; Rousseau relied on it to provide a basis for democratic and egalitarian principles. The influence of natural law theory waned in the 19th C due to positivism, empiricism and materialism, but especially Immanuel Kant. (Kant, 1. 1781/1787. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Kant, 1. 1783: Prolegomena zu einder jeden kunftigen Metaphysik.) ccxxxii Both the ius gentium and the ius inter gentes. ccxxxiii The Geneva Conventions are four in number: First Geneva Convention (1864) for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field; Second Geneva Convention (1906) for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea; Third Geneva Convention (1929) on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The first three Geneva Conventions were revised and expanded in 1949, and the fourth added: Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 1949. The conventions have been modified with three protocols: Protocol I
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(1977) on the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts; Protocol II (1977) on the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts; Protocol III (2005) on the Adoption of an Additional Distinctive Emblem ccxxxiv Abu Bakr (Abdullah ibn Abi Qahafa) was the father-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad. He ruled over the Rashidun Caliphate from 632-634 CE, after Mohammad's death. ccxxxv “Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies. Neither kill a child, nor a woman, nor an aged man. Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially those which are fruitful. Slay not any of the enemy's flock, save for your food. You are likely to pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services; leave them alone.” Al-Muwatta; Book 21, Number 21.3.10; Aboul-Enein, H. Yousuf and Zuhur, Sherifa, Islamic Rulings on Warfare, p. 22, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, Diane Publishing Co., Darby PA, ISBN 1-4289-1039-5 ccxxxvi J. Kelsay, Al-Shaybani and the Islamic Law of War, Journal of Military Ethics Routledge (March 2003), 2 (1): 63–75, doi:10.1080/15027570310000027 ccxxxvii Plato has Socrates declare in The Republic, that the human soul has three parts – the desiring eros; the spirited or prideful thymos; the rational nuos. Thucidides extrapolates from this that society is motivated by fear, honour and interest. Over 2000 years later, the British military historian, Basil Liddell Hart observes that the causes of war – economic, psychological and personal – arise from the ambitions and defects of those who have power to influence the currents of nations. Aristotle, meanwhile, had argued that man is conjugal (born to couple as an adult, to build a household [oikos] and, in more successful cases, a clan or small village organized on patriarchal lines); political (with a propensity for more complex communities, based on a division of labour, and well-defined laws); and mimetic ("We enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses….we enjoy seeing likenesses [because], as we look, we learn and infer what each is…”). Modern anthropological study of “human universals” – defined by a single distinct median and a small standard deviation around it –suggests six distinguishing human characteristics - playfulness involving imagination; an epicurean propensity due to cooking, which delivers more calories with less chewing, enabling the evolution of larger energy-hungry brains and social culture; clandestine sexuality, based on continuous female receptivity and concealed ovulation; knowledge defined by epistemological catergorisation, prediction and experimentation; language-based rule-setting, involving norms, taboos and etiquette; and extensive communication, employing language-based compliments, insults, folklore and prophesy, and enabling to medicine, education and trade. Although John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, postulated that the human mind was a tabula rasa at birth, devoid of innate ideas, and particularly, moral ideas, which thesis was developed by the mid-20th century behavioralists Watson and Skinner, modern cognitive neuroscience suggests that there are a number of species-typical forms of [human] cognition, and indeed, species-typical emotional responses to cognition. This suggests that there may be innate human emotional responses that guide the formation of moral ideas, like reciprocity, affinity with genetic offspring, etc. ccxxxviii See C. Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour, Harvard University Press, 1999 ccxxxix Formalised religion, military tradition and display, ethnic celebrations and the trappings of nationalism, supported by monumental architecture, symbolic artefacts and ceremonies, are necessarily employed to effect bonding among larger groups. ccxl When empires fragmented and nation-states were born in Europe and Latin America in the 19th century, the new national elites developed new combinations of these elements, to manage the new societies. So did states in Asia and Africa after their emergence from colonialism after WW II. Not all succeeded in making these political systems resilient. ccxli Richerson, Boyd and Henrich, Cultural Evolution of Human Cooperation, op. cit. pp. 373-378 ccxlii Klotz, op. cit. (1995), p24-24, discusses three transmission mechanisms linking norms and policy choice: community and identity; reputation and communication; and discourse and institutions, but these are potential, not inevitable, paths, only discernible ex post. ccxliii Jeffrey T. Checkel, International Norms and Domestic Politics: Bridging the Rationalist-Constructivist Divide, European Journal of International Relations 3 (December 1997) ccxliv International bureaucrats, diplomatists, international lawyers, active supporters of the agendas of leading non-governmental organisations might be examples. ccxlv In his review paper on the constructivist schools, Checkel (op. cit., 1996) notes: “Although Finnemore is not explicit … one can infer from her empirical chapters that normative effects are limited to state bureaucrats
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(Finnemore, chaps. 2, 4). In the Katzenstein volume, some authors find norms held broadly within a polity (Berger on postwar Germany and Japan), while others see their effects confined to political and academic elites (Herman on the USSR) or to state decision makers (Risse-Kappen on NATO; Katzenstein, chaps. 9, 8, 10). Klotz's cross-national design uncovers evidence of normative effects at the level of political elites in one instance (the U.S.); in her British case, however, such influences are partly blocked by deeper, historically constructed national discourses (Klotz, chaps. 6, 7). ccxlvi One of the founding texts is: Melville J. Herskovits, Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology, Alfred A. Knopf, 1960. ccxlvii See, by way of introduction, Marshall H. Segall, Pierre R. Dasen, John W. Berry and Ype H. Poortinga, Human Behaviour in Global Perspective: An Introduction to Cross-cultural Psychology, Pergamon, 1990. ccxlviii Child (1954) describes socialization as ”the whole process by which an individual, born with behavioural potentialities of enormously wide range, is led to develop actual behaviour which is confined within a much narrower range – the range of what is customary and acceptable for him according to the standards of his group.” (p.655) cited in Segall et al. (1990) p. 23 ccxlix Herskowits (1960) used the word for the first time: “This is in essence a process of conscious or unconscious conditioning, exercised within the limits sanctioned by a given body of custom.” (p.40) ccl This is substantiated by the researches of Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg cited above: See Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg, Ancestry and Culture, Vox, June 30, 2015 http://www.voxeu.org/article/ancestry-and-culture#fn; and Enrico Spolaore and Romail Wacziarg, Ancestry, language and culture, forthcoming for the Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language, V Ginsburgh and S Weber (eds), CEPR Discussion Paper 10644. ccli Sedentary societal characteristics are correlated with high food accumulation, relatively high population density and technological development. Migratory characteristics are correlated with low food accumulation, low population density and less technological development. Without generalising about the direction of causality, one can observe that ecological factors influence food production and thus the ability to accumulate, which disposes either to sedentary or migratory characteristics. This affects population density, patterns of habitation, task specialisation, gender roles and kinship structures. See further Heskowits (1960) and Segall et al. (1990), p. 20 cclii Herskowits (1960), p. 637; see also Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – for now: The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future, Profile Books, 2010, pp 97-134 ccliii Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 1997 ccliv Today’s global economy has its tap root in Western history, but owes its accidents to the emergence and growth of multinational corporations since the 1960s; the progressive availability of information on global demographics and market conditions; the opening of markets in Eurasia and China after the collapse of the Soviet Union; the commercialisation of the information technologies and systems developed in the defence industries in the 1980s, which accelerated the confluence of communications, computing and entertainment; and the adoption of digital technologies by financial institutions in the 1990s to create integrated global markets. Since the end of the 20th century, its definitive characteristics have been the universal availability of information through the internet; the internationalisation of production in long supply chains, shifting the balance of power between corporations and all but the most powerful governments in favour of companies; the scale and speed of global financial flows; and the rapid dissemination of Western perspectives and artefacts by global broadcasting, branding and advertising. The principles of market economics are its leitmotiv, though more atavistic tendencies have prevailed in trade. The commitment to free markets has exacted costs: Liberalisation of capital account transactions caused exceptional currency volatility after the Asian financial crisis in 1997/98, and after 9/11 in 2001, reaching an unprecedented peak in 2008 when largescale structural imbalances, misaligned incentives for risk-taking in the financial sector, and neglect of the need for regulatory controls to curb herd behaviour, combined in a perfect storm, converting a structural collapse of the U.S. sub-prime housing market into a global financial and economic crisis. Only unprecedented, globallycoordinated monetary easing and fiscal stimuli - at a cost of some $9 trillion - averted the implosion of the financial system – at the cost of converting a financial crisis into a sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone. cclv Two types of symmetry breaking are distinguished: Explicit symmetry breaking and spontaneous symmetry breaking, characterized by whether the equations of motion fail to be invariant or the ground state fails to be invariant. In explicit symmetry breaking, the equations of motion describing a system are not invariant under the broken symmetry. In spontaneous symmetry breaking, the underlying laws are invariant, but the system as a whole changes. It is a spontaneous process by which a system in a symmetrical state ends up in an
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asymmetrical state. It thus describes systems where the equations of motion or the Lagrangian obey certain symmetries, but the lowest-energy solutions do not exhibit that symmetry. cclvi See e.g. Johann Rockström et al, Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity in the Anthropocene (Nature, 461: 472 – 475, Sept 24 - 2009 cclvii The Gaia hypothesis proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet – http://ecolo.org/lovelock/lovebiofr.htm cclviii Adaptive change in the bio-geosphere impacting on human societies has been a source of uncertainty for millennia. Today, in the Anthropocene, aggregate human behaviour employing new and emerging technologies is the primary element destabilizing the bio-geosphere, destroying biodiversity, transforming the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, and negatively affecting the oceans and the atmosphere. Limiting this damage, and the risks attendant on it, is imperative. cclix The greatest risks arise when we engender connectivity between elements and systems whose interactions may be beneficial under certain assumptions, and highly dangerous under others. Elements of all the trends that we have discussed, have these characteristics: The interface between the policies required to sustain a global economic recovery, and current and potential future geopolitical tensions, produces systemic uncertainty that is more dangerous than the interactions within either the global economic system, or the geopolitical dynamics of any region, on their own. The same is true at the interface between population growth, urbanization, higher consumption and climate change. Each of these influences patterns of economic growth or disruption, and gives rise to circumstances promoting social harmony or tensions destructive of social capital. In conditions of normative uncertainty – in which the rules of the global game are poorly defined, and prudent collective action at the necessary transnational scales is difficult to achieve, such interfaces can be highly disruptive. Migration is a case in point. While the workforces of advanced economies in Europe and north America are aging, and benefit from selective immigration of young skilled workers from younger societies that cannot offer their citizens similarly attractive employment opportunities, floods of desperate migrants fleeing turmoil in parts of North or West Africa, are being drowned, turned away, or held in depressing circumstances in reception centres in southern Europe. Gulf societies like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar, dependent on foreign employees at almost all levels of the economy, from South Asian construction workers and Turkish welders, to U.S. asset managers, have been able to differentiate between economic opportunity – available to all – and citizenship, which is restricted to Emiratis and a tiny number of trusted persons who have provided decades of service. But this is not an option available to France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom or the United States, each of which suffers social tensions, political protests and policy paroxysms. cclx Academic specialization, disciplinary silos and institutional barriers between national ministries and international agencies, make it difficult for governments and international organizations to address integrated challenges comprehensively and collectively. Social, political and environmental impacts are experienced differently by different groups, frustrating the emergence of common perspectives, whose absence precludes agreement on what to prioritize, and what to proscribe. The impacts of these challenges on human society and the environment around it will ebb and flow, but their effects, if left unchecked, tend to mount until an inflection point is reached. The recent financial crisis illustrates this clearly.
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