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theologies and cultures Vol. III, No. 2, December 2006

Impact of Globalization

Editor M. P. Joseph

Associate Editors Yatang CHUANG

Po Ho HUANG

Augustine MUSOPOLE

Fuya WU

Consulting Editors Tissa BALASURIYA, Sri Lanka

Mark BURROWS, USA

Enrique DUSSEL, Mexico

Virginia FABELLA, Philippines

Dwight N. HOPKINS, USA

Abraham, K.C, India

Yong-Bock KIM, Korea

Jessi MUGAMBI, Kenya

Michael NORTHCOTT, Britain

Teresa OKURE, Nigeria

Choan-Seng SONG, Taiwan/USA

Elsa TAMEZ, Costa Rica

Lieve TROCH, Netherlands

WONG Wai Ching Angela, Hong Kong

THEOLOGIES AND CULTURES is an academic journal dedicated

to inter-disciplinary research and scholarly exploration in the

field of theology and its interplay with the social, economic,

political and cultural dimensions of people. The journal is

committed to promoting engaged dialogue of different faith

traditions and theological formulations in view of creating

communities of justice and mutual understanding.

Views expressed in this journal are those of the authors, and do

not necessarily reflect, those held by the editorial board of

THEOLOGIES AND CULTURES or of FCCRC or its sponsors.

Copy right @ Chang Jung Christian University & Tainan Theological

College and Seminary

All rights reserved. Reproduction of articles is allowed with an

acknowledgement of the source.

ISSN no. 1813-7024

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books for review should be send to THEOLOGIES AND CULTURES, Shoki

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mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Contents Editorial 5 Myth of Globalization: Rule of Capital to Global Apartheid of Resources M. P. Joseph 9

Embodying Climate Change: Biogeochemical Limits to

Trade and the Contradictions of Liberalism 29

Michael Northcott

Ecumenical Spirituality Overcoming Violence: Globalization, Violence, Cosmopolitanism 54 And Transmodernity Lawrence A. Whitney, LC+

Globalization and Communication Preparedness: Risk Assessment of SARS 89 Chou Kuei-Tien

Impact of Globalization on Labour: Migrant Workers in Taiwan 127 Sr. Wei Wei Depeasantization: Impact of Globalization on Farmers in India 136 Mammen Varkey

http://ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~ktchou/english.HTM

theologies and cultures,Vol.3, No.2

December 2006, pp. 5-8

Editorial

lobalization, without doubt, is the dominant reality

at the present time. This process is one of the most

comprehensive phenomena that influenced almost all walks of

life. The self understanding of a person is now shaped by the

values and norms of globalization. The ability to control public

‘mind’ made it possible for the forces of globalization to elevate

itself as the normative. To achieve this objective globalization

controls the prevailing discourse. In reality globalization creates

the governing consciousness of the people around the world.

With the aim of developing a critical understanding of

the reality of globalization, and to evaluate the ramifications of

this process on people and nature, Formosa Christianity and

Culture Research Centre organized an international seminar.

This seminar dealt with three areas of life that has been affected

by the process of globalization. These three issues are pertinent

to the life and struggle of the people of Taiwan.

1.Agriculture. Though the agricultural statistics shows

remarkable increase in food production, poverty related death

continues unabated. This calls for a rethinking. Several issues

need to be discussed in relation to the growing crisis. Some of

them are: the shift in the pattern of crop selection, changes in

land ownership, alienation of farmers from the process of

production, and the pricing policy or control.

G

6 theologies and cultures

2. Ecology/environment. The ideological foundation for

globalization namely, modernization and growth has promoted

wanton exploitation of nature and the warnings from the

environmental groups are alarming. All life sustaining systems

of the nature including water and air are highly contaminated,

and the ability of earth to sustain life is under threat.

3. Migrant labor. Although migration is as old as human

history, forced migration of labor in search of life has grown in

unprecedented magnitude in recent past. The impact of such

migration is enormous, both in the sending communities and the

receiving communities. Impact of migration in Taiwan society is

yet to be evaluated fully. A better understanding of the

economic and social factors behind migration is imperative for

creating a just and peaceful society.

Some of the papers appear in this issue of THEOLOGIES

AND CULTURES are presented at this international seminar. Few

others however, are research articles corresponding to the theme

of the seminar.

The discussion in this volume reiterates that

globalization is not just a prescription for a new economic

model, but is a way of organizing collective life. It has assumed

the role of a religion with well-articulated theologies, dogmas,

rituals, priesthood, missionaries, cathedrals, and of course with

its own concept of the divine. It has a concept of hell as

well. The heathens and sinners who dare to question the

revealed truth of the market divine are condemned to life in

eternal hell.

The core of the doctrine of globalization has three basic

pillars, viz., a) Market as the social principle; b) Growth and

modernity as the normative culture; and c) dictatorship of

money as politics.

The neo-liberal ideology that governs the present stage

of globalization has made the market as the foundation for social

and community formation. The market assumes the exclusive

right for mediation between individuals, communities, and

nations - meaning that the market has become the functioning

Editorial 7

ecclesia of the present time with ability to interiorize the outside

into its logic and control. This new system, however, has

replaced the values and systems that govern life and history of

people and the earth. Such a rule invariably resulted in the

‘mammonization of values and morals’ where people and nature

were subjected to the logics and demands of money and

accumulation. Under this new logic the objective of agriculture

is not the production of food, but the thrust to increase the

monetary value of those who control the productive forces.

Labour is deprived of its ability to contribute to the sustenance

of life when the sole objective was geared towards making

money. Mamonization of values reveal the total alienation of

people from their inner beings, the sublime urge to be a social

and spiritual being by becoming a person for the “other”.

Another objective of this issue of THEOLOGIES AND

CULTURES is to encourage the search for alternatives which are

sustainable and humanizing. The total control of Capital over

the forces of life at present furnishes no space for people

initiatives to leave any aspect of human life from seeking such

alternatives. However, creation of an alternate economic logic

and its practice is fundamental in people’s politics.

What is basic in this search is to find a new culture for

production and consumption where both production and

consumption become a humanizing act. Production is an act of

overflowing one’s own being, or an extension of the being of a

person in time and space. Agricultural production on the other

hand is an expression of one’s on spirituality, a participation in

the life creating and life sustaining mission of the Divine.

However, for this action to be humanizing, the producer should

have control over the goals and conditions of production. It

should neither be an obligation or be enforced by factors which

are not satisfying to the producer or dictated from elsewhere or

by factors generated elsewhere.

Consumption too should be humanizing and for that a

total freedom from the logic of consumer market will be an

imperative. Consumption is essence, is an expression of


sociality, an act of communitarian bonding and celebration.

Table fellowship in Jesus community epitomizes the

communitarian character of consumption. Traditional festivals

of the communities too reify that spirit of community bonding

through consumption. However, in the rule of capital, under

market, consumption has become an act to ensure a position or a

status in a hierarchical society. By consuming an expensive

automobile, one acquires a status relatively higher than those

who consume a vehicle with relatively lesser value.

Reordering of production and consumption is to make

human more human. And that is possible only by creating the

need for the other in oneself. Possibility for actualizing freedom

of a person lies in the ability to become totally for the other.

Without the other there is no self (me) exist.



Myth of Globalization:

Rule of Capital to

Global Apartheid of Resources

M. P. Joseph

yths shape social consciousness more than reason

does. History acknowledges that. As a symbolic

representation of ever changing events, myths evoke a passion

for the unreal and conceal reality from public consciousness.

Myths appeal to and inhabit in the unconscious and regulate

human action. In the political domain, myths release psychic

energies for change and control, whereas events in political

history reiterate that the construction of myths was placed above

other strategies for effective governance. Examples in history

such as the claims of divine authority by King Solomon and the

assertion of superiority of the Nordic race by Nazism

manipulated the explosive power of myths to enslave the

collective being of a people by taming their consciousness in the

service of power. Being aware of the creative power of myths,

M


Hitler observed ―The driving force which has brought about the

tremendous revolutions on this earth has never been a body of

scientific teaching which has gained power over the masses, but

always a devotion that has inspired them, and often a hysteria

which has urged them to action.‖1 Existence of power cohabits

with an industry to fabricate myths.

End of Geography?

Using the term ―globalization‖ to delineate the dominant

economic and political process of the past two decades is one of

the dominant myths produced in service of global capital. The

term suggests that the concept of ―One world‖ [oikoumene] is

finally realized. The imaginative courage of the global

community dismantled the walls of separation, [reified in the

case of Berlin wall], enabling them to experience the warmth of

brotherly and sisterly relations. Transcendence of barriers was

the reality of the time, and according to this myth, the collapse

of boundaries marks the highest notion of freedom. This claim

assumes theological importance, not only for being associated

with the ultimate will of God in history, the oikoumene but of

the place of wall in the metaphoric description of the Bible. In

the book of Isaiah, walls epitomize the darkness of God.2 Walls

are constructed to darken the sight of God in history.

Dismantling of walls facilitates the light of God to shine on all, a

possibility where God people nexus moved to the world of real.

This is however, a myth.

Describing this shift as ―end of geography‖ this view

holds that two types of rapid changes are visible.

1. Geographic distance is becoming a factor of

diminishing interest in creating and maintaining economic,

political and socio-cultural relations. Along with the defeat of

1 Quoted by Noel Sullivan, Fascism (London: Dent and Sons, 1983), 92

2 See Abraham Joshua Heschel Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity;

essays edited by Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

1996, p. 294)

Myth of Globalization 11

distance, a decoupling of time and space occurs; time and space

are not bound together, but function separately. Boundaries

between domestic and global matters increasingly becoming

blurred; global events started to touch and shape our

consciousness and our orientation of life. A growing sense of

world-wide connectedness becomes a reality. This feeling has

been assisted by the growth of information technologies.

2. End of geography goaded radical transformation of

all structures and systems that occupy the social space

[including family, community, educational institutions and

political organizations]. When the priorities of life changes, as a

sequence, social relations will undergo radical changes. These

changes, among others, includes the changes in habits,

objectives of life, tastes [in food, cloth, transport, recreation..]

and aesthetics in general.

These myths are far from the truth. But they succeeded

in creating an illusion that market helps to make ―world

flat‖[reifying the prophecy of John the Baptist]. The term

globalization was a carefully constructed to fanaticize the world

with this illusion of togetherness. At the end of Gulf War in

1991, US administration echoed that history is in the threshold

of the advent of a ―New World Order‖.3 The ―New World

Order‖ theory was to gather momentum to the emergence of a

mono-polar world order at the [so-called] end of the fictitious

cold war. End of cold war also marked the witness of loosing

teeth for all other power-blocks including the non-aligned

movement in the international arena. End of counter-power

offers the mono-polar power a free space for a uninterrupted free

ride over the world. Further, the Gulf War of 1991 demonstrated

the cutting edge of the indomitable gun power that the dominant

power could unleash at any potential challengers. Nevertheless,

the term ―New World Order‖ failed to invoke imagination

among the people around the world. Because of its rather insipid

3 For a detailed discussion refer Adrian Salbuchi ―The World's Mastermind:

The Hidden Face of Globalization: A view from Argentina‖ Global

Research, December 2, 2006

http://www.globalresearch.ca/



nature, the term ―New World Order‖ was withdrawn from

public consumption and a dynamic, seemingly neutral and

morally sounding term ―globalization‖ was replaced. This new

term is armed with the power to create an illusion of a global

village, with a discourse on the defeat of distance as the

character of the emerging new world order.

However, history of recent times has proved that the

opposite is true. Instead of creating mutual understanding based

on peace and justice, war and violence have become the rule of

the time. There is nothing to be surprised about this

development since its inherent logic is meant to create unequal

distribution of power and resources. People are increasingly

becoming alienated from one another. The ―other‖ has become a

problem. And as a result the language and practice of war has

become normative.

To strength the myth of globalization, the myth industry

further suggests that globalization is a historical [natural]

process, achieved through the innovative growth of science and

technology.‖ [IMF web-page]. Besides, this myth claims that the

recent surge of technology, especially information technology is

the contribution of globalization.4 Globalization thus is a moral

process, an expression of the collective will of people to achieve

moral good of all. Critique of globalization is not received with

sympathetic listening, because such critique according the

prevailing view is a challenge to the moral imperatives of a

society that seeks freedom from ignorance through the

development of science and technology. The so-called ―success

stories‖ of few countries including China and India and the

carefully constructed ―economic predictions‖ such as ―if the

policies towards the integration of the economies of China and

4 Technological development is only an expression of the creativity of

people. The development of civilization from Stone Age to the present state

of science and technology demonstrate this fact. However, the change now is

that technology has brought under the premise of capital. Such control has

stifled the growth of technology in areas related to human life and redirected

it as an instrument for capital to grow.


India remain uninterrupted, within 25 years the combined GDP

would exceed the group of seven wealthy nations‖5 reinforce

this myth. Fabrication of this conscious lie helped to create the

rationale for the invasion of market in the collective and private

life of the people around the world. Technology is not a reason

but a means of legitimation for the dominance of globalization.

Dictatorship of Capital

A closer look at the economic process however provides

a different view of the present process. In a book published long

before the advent of the present phase of globalization Paul

Sweezy and Paul Baran observed that there are two dangers in

the emerging world economic structure: (a) development of

giant corporations with virtual control of global production,

replacing small and medium size producers; (b) emergence of

transnational finance capital which frees itself from any social

responsibility and function within the logic of its expansion6.

The early years of the twentieth century witnessed the growth of

giant corporations consolidating the economic forces in the

former colonial nations, otherwise euphemistically termed as the

developed nations. The robbery and transfer of enormous

resources from the former colonies by colonial powers during

the long period of colonial rule abetted the growth of these

corporations. The uneven distribution of the loot within the

colonial economies helped the concentration of surplus in few

hands and eventually metamorphosed into a handful of

corporations controlling a vast array of production relations.

This constituted, in the former colonial nations, a radical

departure from the economic system of the nineteenth century,

5 James D. Wolfensohn [former President of World Bank] ―West must

prepare for Chinese, Indian dominance‖ 2006 Wallace Wurth Memorial

Lecture at the University of New South Wales, Sidney, The Hindu,

November 25, 2006 6 Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American

Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966)


in which the economy had been mostly made up of small,

family-based firms. Monopoly over production and markets

enjoyed by these giant corporations, what Sweezy and Baran

called as oligopolies, helped them to thwart any threat of

competition in the market space [in pricing or product selection]

and whereby concentrated on the surplus growth through cost

reduction and different sales techniques. When production was

made as a mega activity, the objective of production was

reconstructed from consumption to market. Needs of

consumption has no role in deciding the nature and volume of

production. Production freed itself from the social bondage of

need of consumption.

Corporate control over production cohabited with the

growth of a market for securities, shares and currencies. The

text book economics suggests that the role of stocks and shares

is to pool the savings for more productive investments.

However, very seldom is it a reality. Capital circulated in the

financial market has very little to do with production or trade.

―The development of a massive and sophisticated system of

finance associated with corporate finance and banking, centered

on the stock market was a product of the desire of investors to

limit their risk associated with investment within production by

the holding of ―paper‖ claims to wealth. Such paper claims were

liquid and easily transferable, and thus separate from the ―real‖

assets that resided with the corporation.‖7

Hardly two percent of transferable liquid capital

exchanged in the global financial market accounts to production,

distribution, and services.8 Capital in speculative form travels

from one place to another in a matter of seconds to gather the

already created surplus in respective countries. It has the

function of a big broom, a big dirty broom, not gathering dirt,

but sucking blood of the innocent producers around the world.

7 John Bellamy Foster ―Monopoly-Finance Capital‖ Monthly Review, Vol.

58, No. 7, December 2006 8 Kavaljit Singh Globalization of Finance (Delhi: Madhyam Books, 1998)


It avoids people and products yet takes away the surplus that

people generate through hard labour in a matter of seconds.

Growth of information technology is accelerated by the

ever expanding need of the speculative capital. Speed of the

Information technology remains perpetually unsatisfied since

the volatile nature of the speculative capital is so explosive. A

simple mistake within a fraction of seconds could cost a fortune

for those who create wealth from this global casino of

speculative capital market. Information technology thus is in the

search for renewing and modernizing itself to satisfy the

interminable urge of the speculative finance capital to expand.

Technology is at the service of capital, but used as a means to

gain legitimation to the rule of finance capital.9

Wealth is now created in the speculative market alone.

And massive volume of wealth is formed within a short span of

time in the fluid space of speculative market alone. Those who

failed to participate in the speculative capital remain

marginalized from the world of wealth. The reality of the matter

is that the huge majority of the people have no participation in

the speculative market and their non-participation in the

value/wealth creating speculative domain keeps them in the state

of poverty.

The market of speculative capital has defeated all the

given economic theories. It was traditionally considered that,

value was created through a complex interaction between varied

forms of raw material, capital and labour. Since raw material

and capital is fixed, the role of labour in the creation of value

was hailed as cardinal. Invalidating this traditional view,

transnational capital creates value from nothing, from the void

[considered as the exclusive domain of God]. Living labour lost

its capacity to create value, only money does. Thus living

labour became redundant, expendable. Living labour is seen as

9 It is important to note that technological development in the last few years

are restricted only in few areas tied up with the growth of capital. In the

areas that affect the life of the majority, technology remains stagnant.


a problem. While capital is an asset, or a cause for celebration,

labour is viewed as a curse, a source for distress.

Capital [or mammon] is deified and living labor [the true

image of the divine] is demonized.

The deified capital entrusted with the ability for absolute

domination over the prevailing social modes of production, in

reality, leads to a total subsumption of all realities of life. The

mechanism of globalization assists ‗C‘apital to extend the

subsumption to include nature and people in every corner of the

globe to its logic and interest. And this process coincides with

the interiorization of the outside. Unlike the old colonial

expansion where empire went to the out side, now the outside is

interiorized in the empire.

On the ethical level there are two ramifications for the

total subsumption of the logic of life to the logic of capital. (a)

Through the total subsumption, capital has become an

ontological expression of the imminent materialism in human

consciousness. As part of this scenario a mathematical science

and rationality has taken hold as the only logical explanation of

truth. Truth and value are forced to seek empirical explanation.

Meaning that to be counted as valuable it should be within the

realm of quantifiable things, and should be assessed within the

rubrics of measurable standards.

That means, what is rational is those realities which have

an objective existence. Anything outside the nature of object or

matter is not rational. The changes in the concept of and the

worship to the Divine accounts this imperative suggested by the

logic of capital. Countable variables alone are used to iterate the

power and relevance of the Divine.

(b) Secondly, total subsumption has made the law of

capital a universal principle. Interest of Capital becomes

synonymous with general interest, epitomizing the interest of the

state and the interest of individuals. All forms of interest find

their ultimate justification in the interest of capital. State and

other social formations, which certainly include the academy

and the church, are transformed themselves as an executive or


cultural agency of capital and assist it to reaffirm its logic as the

only and absolute universal truth.

Ramifications of these changes are many. One may

argue that, everything that touches human life, from spirituality

to sexuality is controlled and changed by the logic of capital.

Organization of social and political life certainly needs more

systematic enquiry. However, we attempt to locate the

ramification of the subsumption of capital in three areas of life,

namely, agriculture, environment and migrant labour.

Agriculture

When agriculture was subsumed under the rule of

capital, agriculture, like wealth, was removed from its social

responsibility to contribute towards the reproduction of life.

Wealth and resources are detached from the need to sustain life.

Wealth freed itself from the having to be committed to a purpose

outside of its own urge to grow. Life is not a reason for

production.

Capital in accordance with support of patriarchal social

relations has created a hierarchy in which production of

commodities assumes a higher status than the reproduction of

life, with the support of patriarchal social relations. Production

that sustains life is not valuable, at times, considered as an

obligation or a responsibility, while the industrial productions

for market infer value. In the market mediated hierarchy, value

is reduced to countable terms, and thus production for money

only qualifies for being considered as valuable. While child

birth in a normal family relationship invites disdain, [a burden

for the economy and environment] in the ―value‖ driven market

relations, ―rent-a-womb‖ is celebrated as a major breakthrough

in production relations.

Agricultural production lost its spiritual strength in the

creation of a hierarchy. All engagements orientated towards the

sustenance of life are ―devalued.‖ Child birth and mothering

unfortunately assume no quantifiable value in the market


dynamics, though the ―living labor‖ is contributed to the

production line through this supposedly value-less ―obligation‖

of women. Agricultural production is not different. Food

production for the sustenance of life usurps no value, while

productions of cash crop for market, or food crop by agri-

business companies for global market command value. In other

words, production for life invokes derision, production for

market, where capital exchange is promoted earns respect.

Dominance of a few agri-business corporations,

including the tobacco giant Phillips Morris, Monsanto and

others has turned the food needs of people into gamble for

profit. Thorough their control over seeds, fertilizer, production

and market, small farmers have been eliminated from the ability

to produce. As a result we are left with what Vandana Shiva

called as genocide of farmers, the suicide of 150,000 farmers in

a decade.10

The dominance of corporation on agriculture has

functioned as a countervailing force against the interest of

farmers and rural population in developing food security. Nation

states are not an exception in this respect. They are deprived of

their right to ensure food security to their own population. Under

the rubrics of the international regulations signed at the interest

of the corporations, nation states has converted itself to a

policing agency to provide protection to the transnational capital

and the production facilities of the transnational corporations.

Concepts such as self-determination, democracy, sovereignty

have become meaningless myths. Decisions regarding the life of

the people, what to eat, how to eat, how to produce, and other

fundamental issues of life are made by profit hungry corporate

heads of the global corporations.

People and nations are devoid of the right to self-

determination by having them to believe that corporations are

the real saviors of the world providing necessary jobs, bringing

10

Interview with Amy Goodman, ―Micro-credit: Solution to Poverty or False

'Compassionate Capitalism?‖ Democracy now, December 13, 2006.


capital and technology, beside the assumed responsibility to feed

the world population. Our Economic reality however informs us

that when profit alone functions as the reason for production,

maintenance of life will be excluded from being an objective.

The poor are not the only victims of this process. The

promotion of genetically modified food, cloned meat and milk

which scientists have warned to have potential harm to the

health of the people, points to the fact that life in general is in

the shadow of calamity.

The poor and the marginalized of course bear the major

neglect. Since the corporations function with the sole objective

of increasing their profit margin, their production is only aimed

at those who have the ability to purchase, and in goods that

bring the highest margin of profit. The poor and their needs

never became a reason for production. Albeit the fact that

markets in every corner of the world is flooded with all types of

food, poverty death are increasing unabated due to this

dynamics of profit.

Further, being devoid of the ability to be self-sufficient,

farmers are pushed out of their domain of agriculture and left in

the mercy of seeking means for life as daily wage laborers. As a

result, poverty has increased. Alienation of peasants from the

process of production prods us to the painful stories of poverty

related deaths in the midst of abundance.

Along with these changes the recent innovations in

genetic manipulation of food have aggravated the problem of the

alienation of peasants from agriculture. It has changed the basic

character of agriculture and procured the entire process in the

hand of corporations. However, it also reiterates the fact that

life is no longer the primary concern for production.

Environment

The World Wildlife Fund [WWF] conservation group

has recently warned that humans are stripping nature at an

unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural


resources every year by 2050 on current trends.

‖Populations of many species, from fish to mammals, had

fallen by about a third from 1970 to 2003 largely because of

human threats such as pollution, clearing of forests and over-

fishing. For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's

ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable

and we cannot afford to continue down this path. If everyone

around the world lived as those in America, we would need

five planets to support us."11

Although the attempt of stripping nature of its life and

converting it to be a means for human satisfaction has a long

history, under the rules of capital, the process of destruction

becomes exacerbated. The ideology of modernity that the logic

of capital used for legitimation suggests that ―growth‖ is the

foundation of development and prosperity. Growth is the

soteriological principle of modernity. As a one-for-all cure to all

the problems in society, from malnutrition to illiteracy to female

infanticide, to poor infrastructural facilities, growth is promoted

as the only way towards redemption. Unending growth, except

in the category of population is seen as normative. This is the

creation of an economic logic that had tried to define ‗under-

development‘ as the source of all malice in society. The only

panacea for a better, healthy society lies in its ability to counter

under-development. The attempt to turn the tide of under-

development led to the logic of growth. Further, ‗growth‘

received moral support when Rostow‘s theory of modernity

identified a high consumption society as the pinnacle for

modernity. It implies that communities that consume less and

lead a simple life are relatively primitive while communities and

people who maintain an unending thirst for consumption is

11 Ben Blanchard ―Humans Living Far Beyond Planet's Means‖ Reuters, 25

October, 2006


qualified to be respected as modern. This perverted morality of

modernity allows the devouring of the planets own children.12

The logic of capital has also placed social subjectivity to

commodities. People gain subjectivity only by consuming

commodities which assume social status [homo consumptors]. It

is therefore a rat race for people to consume, and consume in

order to gain subjectivity. Consumption is heaven.

Further it assumed that satisfaction of life is attained by

ones proximity to commodities and money. Things and money

alone has the ability to bring happiness and meaning in life.

Therefore the very foundation of the being is attached to the

proximity to commodity and money.

This erroneous theory jeopardizes the carrying capacity

of the earth. This also goes with our theories of redemption. the

Enlightenment tradition holds the assumption that we have a

mandate to save the world. The Saving act is not possible

without destruction. A sacrificial destruction is imperative for

salvation. In recent terms, capital has developed new

terminologies such as collateral damage, the necessary

dislocation for growth and many others to justify sacrifice.

However the moral dilemma now is that the earth is destined to

be sacrificed for the growth of capital, without realizing that ‗we

are not owners of it but only borrowed the earth from our future

generations‘. The crisis is a deep spiritual crisis, because, as

Rasmussen reminds us, the environment is an expression of us.

―We are made of it; we eat, drink, and breathe it. And someday,

when dying day comes, we will each return the favor and begin

our role as a long slow meal for a million little critters. Earth is

bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.‖13

In the sublime view of religions, the nexus of people,

land and the divine was the pivot in which order is maintained.

12

Larry Rasmussen Earth Community Earth Ethics (New York: Orbis Books,

1996), 8 13

Ibid. p. xii


Disruption of this nexus was the disruption of the very meaning

of life.14

Disposable Labour

The third issue that invites critical attention is the life

and struggles of the migrant labour. There are two opposite

concerns regarding the role of migrant labour under

globalization. Without achieving total freedom of mobility for

labour, the market remains truncated. Commodities and capital

have achieved total freedom with the ability to enter and exit

anywhere as it wishes. But labour is under strict control. Walls,

not as a metaphor, but as a physical reality are constructed to

prevent labour movement. With the lack of freedom in mobility

of labour, free market is a myth.

But on the other hand, the number of migrant labourers

is increasing unabated. This contradictory reality exists due to a

perennial struggle for autonomy between capital and labour. To

maximize profit, autonomy of capital over all other economic

forces is considered to be an imperative in neo-liberal economic

theory of globalization. The two forces that demonstrate a threat

to the autonomy of capital are the national governments and the

unionized workers. IMF policies supervised effectively to limit,

or to eliminate state power to govern economic variables.

Adrian Salbuchi‘s definition of globalization reiterates this

point. He observed that ―globalization can be defined as the

ideology that identifies the Sovereign Nation-State as its key

enemy, basically because the State's main function is (or should

be) to prioritize the interests of the Many - i.e., "the People" -

over the interests of the Few. Accordingly, the forces of

globalization seek to weaken, dissolve and eventually destroy

the very foundations of the Nation-State as a basic social

institution, in order to replace it with new supra-national

worldwide social, political, economic, financial and military

14

Jeremiah 23:10


management structures. Such structures tie in with the political

objectives and economic interests of a small number of highly

concentrated and very powerful groups and organizations which

today drive and steer the globalization process in a very specific

direction.‖15

To debilitate the autonomy of labour, two approaches

appear to be employed; (i) creating international conditions to

ensure mobility of capital [and industries] to any corners of the

world. If labour claims autonomy over capital, industries keep

their rights and ability to move to another location, possibly in

another country. The freedom of mobility enjoyed by the owners

of capital is a threat to the very existence of labour. And (ii) by

promoting (non-unionizable) aliens to flock into the national

labour market. These two measures helped to weaken the power

of the unionized workers and granted total autonomy for capital

over the entire economic process. The stories of the defeat of the

labour struggle from Detroit to Seoul to Mumbai and Sao Paulo

reiterate this fact.

As a strategy, the flocking of migrant workers is

promoted; they are cheap, but more importantly, their status as

aliens or their lack of membership among the citizens of

respective countries where they are situated, deprives them of

any claims of autonomy and basic rights. Since citizenship is a

criterion for the right of certain privileges, the prevention of

native workers who enjoy citizenship rights from the work place

by promoting alien workers is a preemptive strategy of the

capital to maintain its autonomy over the workers. To maintain

this balance, migration is promoted with a political design to

keep the aliens as aliens and strangers for their entire life.16

From the history of slavery onwards, capital learned that

while vulnerability of labour increases, consequently the power

and autonomy of capital also increases. The logic of

15

Adrian Salbuchi ―The World's Mastermind: The Hidden Face of

Globalization: A view from Argentina‖ Global Research, December 2, 2006 16

Korans in Japan, for example, remain as aliens for generations without

proper rights offered to the citizens.



transporting labour to the colonies and to the newly invaded

countries when local labour was abundant in the new [invaded]

settlements and in the colonies lies in the urge for colonial

capital to establish autonomy. The uprooted labour abetted

colonial masters to maintain total control over production and

resources. At the present time, the lack of any legal framework

to protect the migrants helps the capitalist production

relationship to keep labour as a totally dependent and

subservient lot who assume that their lives are depended upon

the goodwill and generosity of their masters. The rule of the

game of survival dictates that they shall compete with each other

to express their total and unflinching loyalty to their capitalist

masters.

Under the present conditions of globalization, labour has

become disposable, like the disposable plastic cups, syringes

and ball point pens, subjected to the principle of ―use and throw

away‖. Migrant labour corresponds well to this status of ―use

and throw away‖ in its fuller sense. The disposable nature of

labour becomes more evident during the financial crisis of 1997-

98. Migrants were thrown out from those countries which

experienced the brunt of the financial crisis. However, use-value

returned to the ―disposable things‖ when the crisis started to

wane.

Though labour is only a part of the human activity, the

act of transforming labour as a disposable commodity equals the

disposable-commodification of human beings. Our theological

consciousness may suggest that it is God who is made

disposable under globalization, since in the face of the labourer

we find the face of God, and furthermore, through the faculty of

labour people becomes co-creators with the Divine. Borrowing

the phrase of Michael Moore, we live in a fictitious world. By

converting human beings - the very point of incarnation where

the Divine revealed herself/himself in history – to a disposable

commodity, the moral foundations of our world become

fictitious. We live a lie.


The Empire

The subsumption of the logic of life to the logic of

Capital however has far-reaching ramifications in society. It is

argued convincingly by critical economists that rule of capital is

incompatible with the notion of universality in any meaningful

sense of that word. Universality and globalization are two

different concepts, therefore reaching universality within the

globalization logic is simply a myth.

That is because the decisive nature of the rule of capital

is the vertical ordering of society and people. Whatever freedom

capital and market offers in relation to horizontal social

relations, [for example the claim that in the market place the

race or nationality of a person is not sought before supplying

commodities], will be negated by the dominant vertical ordering

of social relations.17

This is true on the global scale as well as in

the regional and local categories. Moreover, the expansion and

rule of capital has created enclaves of capital and many ghettos

of poverty, reminding us of the observation of Samir Amin, ―the

blocked capitalism of the periphery‖. There is no longer any

promise for the blocked capitalisms of the underdeveloped

world as a whole to ―take-off‖ and ―catch-up‖ economically

with the auto-centric and advanced capitalist countries. The

living conditions of the vast majority of people in the blocked

capitalisms are declining, and as a consequence suicide deaths

among the traditional communities are escalating in the past few

years.18

The Creation of ghettos of poverty along side the

enclaves of richness creates a ―jungle-like net work‖ of

contradictions ―that can only be more or less successfully

managed for some time but never definitively overcome‖19

Under the market dynamics, capital has shown its ―destructive

17

István Mészáros, Socialism or Barbarism: From the “American Century”

to the Crossroads, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002). 18

see P. Sainath ―Where Stomachaches are Terminal‖ in The Hindu, Sunday

April 29, 2001 19

István Mészáros, op. cited.


uncontrollability‖— its destruction of previous social relations

and its inability to put anything sustainable in their place.

The Emergence of an empire is to be identified in this

context. Within the logic of capital the contradictions could

never to be amicably resolved, and thus the need for managing

contradiction increases. The so called war on terror indeed

provided legitimacy for the empire to violently engage in the act

of managing the contradictions. Besides, the war offered the

Empire the right to expand its domain to all the corners of the

world.

The concept of war comes with an offer of redemption.

The promoters of war have never failed to remind us that the

war alone has the ability to redeem good people from the evil

ones. War is in service of peace and the language of war is the

language of peace. The absurdity sometime goes to the extent of

declaring that the massacre of people is to ensure the safety of

those being killed. Unashamingly these proponents argue that

―throughout human history, empires have promoted both peace

and prosperity. This is because their Pax has fostered the order

required for any social life to exist in an otherwise anarchical

international society of states. This Pax has also engendered

prosperity through what is today labeled "globalization," linking

areas of disparate resource endowments into a common

economic space. The collapse of empires has led both to the

destruction of prosperity and the breeding of disorder….For

world stability, order, and economic growth, US-Lead

globalization, [to read perpetual war against common people] is

the only viable course‖20

Apartheid of resources

Much political literacy is not needed to identify that the primary

objective of war is to loot the people of their resources. This was

20

Deepak Lal ―An Imperial Denial‖ Yale Global January 6, 2005


the objective of the war almost entirely throughout history

dating back from the ancient period.

The results are obvious from the Helsinki report

published on December 5, 2006. It observed that the logic of

capital helped 1% of the richest people in the world to own 40%

of the planet‘s wealth.21

However, an alternate report suggested

that if wealth in the speculative capital is also properly

accounted for, then the sum total of the wealth of 1% of the

global rich comes to 80% of the global wealth.22

Wealth at the

present time is an abstraction, an abstraction that remains as an

idea in the level of papers and bonds and securities. However,

the symbiosis between the financial [abstract] capital and the

transnational corporations provides a potential edge for the

owners of the capital to realize their capital as real resources; as

land, water sources, minerals and others. Even space is not a

limit for the investment hungry owners of finance capital. This

threat is fast becoming a treacherous reality and people are

being evicted from natural resources, from their access to water,

to land and to life giving systems of nature. The reality is the

growing apartheid of resources. Thus the struggle against

globalization is the struggle to reverse this practice of apartheid

and to re-establish an ‗earth based democracy‘ that ensures

equal participation of all in the bounties of nature.

The logic of capital has discarded all discourse on ethics

as a counter-productive process to growth and prosperity. To

avoid ethical considerations, the logic of capital argues that de-

embedding economic relations from societal and religious

values is necessary for creating prosperity. The independence of

the market from any moral and ethical critique will dictate its

level of freedom. Religion and faith, it was argued, needs to be

kept away from people‘s participation in economic activity. Or

21

―World's richest 1% own 40% of all wealth, UN report discovers‖

Guardian, December 6, 2006. 22

Vandana Shiva in an interview with Amy Goodman of ―Democracynow‖

on 13 December 2006.


simply reiterated, religion and faith need not have to interfere

how people participate in economic, political and cultural life.

The demand for the independence of economics from

faith also eradicates the concept of sociality of our being from

the public consciousness. The personal has replaced the public

and as a consequence the problem of the self has become the

most serious concern. In this process religion has reduced to a

private matter of the private individual to be perused in the

privacy of their self.

Exteriority of the Divine from the collective life is the

immediate result of the process of de-embedding that which

capital is promoting.

Re-embedding economic systems into societal values

and ethics is an immediate challenge that people face now. A

Jewish social critique Michael Learner advises that society

needs to embark a new politics, a politics of meaning; politics of

meaning where society attempts to strengthen the face of God in

the face of the people around us.23

The deformed faces around

us - deformed by poverty, structural violence, racial, gender or

class discrimination - reminds us of a deformed God. Politics of

meaning is to rediscover the divine in history, divine around us.

And that may be our greatest challenge yet.

23 Michael Lerner, The politics of Meaning (New York: Addison-Wesley

Publishing Company, 1996) p. 4



Embodying Climate Change:

Biogeochemical Limits to Trade and the

Contradictions of Liberalism

Michael S Northcott1

iberalism as summarised by John Rawls in his

Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism has one

defining characteristic which may be traced back through Adam

Smith, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and this is the division

of labour that Hobbes, Locke and Smith erected, and that Rawls

sustains, between the individual and the body politic. From

Hobbes to Rawls the individual is described as an autonomous

creature of her own making who is guided by desires and

projects which are the outcomes of her own self-construction.

The role of the body politic is not so much to create the

conditions for virtuous individuals to develop and flourish as to

impose minimal conditions of order, such that for example

1 Dr. Michael Northcott is a Reader in Christian Ethics at New College,

University of Edinburgh. Northcott is a leading authority in Environmental

Ethics and has written various books including Environmental and Christian

Ethics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), Urban Theology: A

Reader (London: Cassell, 1988), Life After Debt: Christianity and Global

Justice (London: SPCK, 1999), An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic

Religion and American Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004) and A Moral

Climate? The Ethics of Global Warming (forthcoming- 2007)

L


property rights are respected, on the differing desires and

sometimes competing projects that individuals construct. 2 In

effect liberalism conceives of desire in terms of a market

analogy. The function of the body politic is to sustain a realm of

relatively unconstrained interaction where minimal conditions

for civil peace and social order are maintained. The modern

condition of liberty is one in which individuals are not

constrained in their pursuit of their desires by the needs of others

who are less successful than they in pursuing and achieving their

desires and projects: the market will act to direct individual

desires towards a collective state in which all achieve greater

utility. The body politic is left with the task of siphoning off a

portion of market goods to enable the construction of public

institutions in which property rights are respected, and where

necessary defended, and the minimal conditions of bodily life

are granted to those who are less successful in pursuing their

own projects of self construction. This division of labour

between individual desiring agents and the body politic means

that for liberalism, provided the body politic functions

minimally to sustain the conditions for respect of individuals

and property, individuals do not themselves have to pursue

justice in their own projects; they can defer the moral

requirement of the pursuit of the common good to the invisible

hand of the market, and to the public institutions that, via

taxation, their activities fund and sustain.3

This division of labour between individuals and the body

politic in liberal political theory, and in the economic and

2 For a critique of Rawls along these lines see further L. Murphy, ‘Institutions and the

demands of justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs (Fall) 27 (4), pp. 251 – 291. 3 Jon Garthoff defends this Rawlsian division of labour in his essay ‘Zarathrustra’s

dilemma and the embodiment of morality’, Philosophical Studies 117, (2004) pp.

259 – 274: Garthoff’s thesis is that social institutions which, for example, address the

needs of the homeless, are the collective embodiment of morality such that individuals

are able to pursue their own goods without directly intervening on behalf of the

homeless. On this view morality conceived in terms of institutional embodiment

sustains the duality between the autonomous desiring individual – who is conceived

as essentially disembodied – and the collective pursuit of a minimal degree of justice

in the body politic.

Embodying Climate Change 31

political arrangements of the modern nation state and the market,

was first decisively criticised by Leo Strauss in the 1960s in

Chicago. For Strauss the problem with liberalism was the idea

that it was possible to construct a good society through

institutions and procedures while not requiring the individuals

within it to be good. Instead of this Strauss proposed a revised

Aristotelianism in which intelligent and wealthy individuals

need again to be instructed in the virtues so that they can act out

of their own superior accomplishments and largesse to better the

condition of the poor with the beneficial corollary that both

elites and masses might then be freed from the undue constraints,

and moral hazards of an over-weaning and interventionist nation

state.4

Strauss’s neo-Aristotelian critique has been highly

influential among Anglo-American politicians. There are clear

echoes of Strauss in the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism

first mobilised by Margaret Thatcher in Britain in the 1970s, and

again by George W. Bush since 2002.5 Both advanced tax-

reduction and avoidance strategies for the rich – reducing the

numbers of tax inspectors as well as cutting wealth taxes – while

reducing welfare for the poorest on the basis that compassionate

individuals and the charities and churches they support are

putatively better able to respond to the needs of their poor

neighbours than the bureaucrats or public servants of the nation

state. Added to this account of the compassion of the wealthy,

famously advanced by Margaret Thatcher in her exegesis of the

parable of the Good Samaritan in a speech to the General

Assembly of the Church of Scotland,6 is a critique of welfare

and the nation state whose largesse to the less fortunate is said to

be morally hazardous because it rewards laziness and other vices

among the poor while at the same time, because of the taxation

4 Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1995). 5 See further Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion

and American Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 80 – 84. 6 See further Michael Northcott, ‘The Parable of the Talents and the Economy of the

Gift’, Theology, 107 (2004), pp. 241 – 249.


required to sustain it, undermining the motivation of the wealthy

to create wealth.

The critique of the nation state as morally hazardous

when it tries to embody morality in institutions that promote

equity and justice has been taken up not just by political leaders

from the right but by economists and others who advocate

economic globalization. In this project the nation state is said to

take a back seat while economic actors under the new libertarian

conditions of international trade, guided by international

institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, become

principal drivers of increases in human welfare. Against the

consistent critique of the globalisation project from civil society

groups, feminists, philosophers and theologians, publicly

embodied in the form of the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign

around the G8 meeting in Scotland in June 2005, the WTO, the

European Commission, and the American Federal Government,

as well as economic corporations and most corporately owned

media, continue to press on wealthy and poor countries alike the

instrument of borderless international trade as the principal

means of achieving progress in prosperity and welfare for rich

and poor alike in the twenty-first century. In the globalization

project the division of labour between individual actors and the

body politic reaches a new extreme of alienation where the

principal function of the body politic is no longer to ameliorate

market failures so much as to promote the invasiveness of the

market even into those areas of human life where in the past

public institutions have been constructed to resolve market

failures. This is what the Private Finance Initiative, sometimes

called ‘Public Private Partnership’, represents in Britain. Its

international form is the larger project of privatisation and trade

in services under which the intention is that everything from

education and health care to energy and water utilities are

ultimately run on the market model of private provision and user

chargers.

Given the extreme libertarian outcomes of the Straussian

critique of liberalism it would appear that this critique was in


some respects crucially flawed even on its own elitist terms.

There is little evidence that the new more extreme conditions of

liberty for capital and property owners have actually produced a

social condition in which individual morality has clearly

advanced in terms of its impact in ameliorating social ills. On

the contrary both Britain and America, the two societies which

more than any other have embraced the Straussian critique of

liberal social contract approaches, have suffered dramatic

increases in crime and disorder in the last thirty years. Many

town and city centres in England in the present decade are

characterised by mass drunkenness and disorder at night, while

in the United States many inner city areas are no-go areas even

for the police at certain times of night. Far from liberating

individuals to behave more morally, the increasing pursuit of

market solutions to social ills, for example the unfettered growth

of alcoholic beverage and entertainment venues as means to

regenerate city centres in Britain,7 has produced a situation in

which millions are deprived of civil peace and social order on

their own streets. Though he cannot see it, what Tony Blair

identified at the General Election in Britain in 2005 as a crisis of

‘respect’ has deep roots in the libertarian project of freeing

individual actors – consumers and corporations – from social

constraints which his government, like Thatcher’s, has done so

much to advance.

In the midst of this ideological and political condition of

late liberal capitalism emerges the spectre of anthropogenic

climate change. Sea level rises of 20 centimetres are the most

visible sign of the effects of global warming but predicted sea

level rises from polar ice melt range from 1 to 7 metres.8 But

7 I am grateful to a conversation with Philip Blond for this insight on the social origins

of the culture of wanton excess that currently ails the British body politic. 8 The International Panel on Climate Change estimates a 1 metre sea level

rise by the end of the twenty-first century but they assume that Greenland and

the Antarctic ice shelf will remain largely intact; IPCC, Synthesis Report

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). New evidence reveals that

Greenland glaciers are moving, and melting, much faster than the IPCC


alongside sea level rises, changes in land and ocean

temperatures are producing dramatic effects in terms of the

movement of species, and the spread of deserts. In 2005 locusts

were for the first time in recorded history breeding in Southern

France, while temperatures in the heavily populated state of

Orissa in the Indian sub-continent now regularly exceed 40

degrees centigrade.9 Climate change challenges the foundations

of liberal political economy, and in particular the liberal division

of labour between the amoral desiring individual and social

institutions which embody and promote the common good,

because it suggests that under conditions where individual

consumers and corporations maximise their preferences with the

minimum of moral constraints the long-term health and stability

of the planet and all its inhabitants are threatened. It should not

surprise us then that Straussian influenced globalizers, including

American Senators and Presidents as well as Australian and

British politicians, have opposed government-led efforts to

conserve energy and have for many years denied or ignored the

scientific evidence for climate change: climate change more than

any other modern phenomenon represents a radical challenge to

political liberalism, and to its neo-liberal recasting in the guise

of the ‘free’ market, globalization, and the minimalist state.

The collective pursuit of the project of economic growth

through unfettered consumption has been advanced on the basis

of the release of seemingly limitless quantities of energy from

the earth’s crust, first in the form of coal to fuel the earliest

steam-driven machines of the industrial revolution, and latterly

oil to fuel internal combustion engines, electricity generators

and jet engines. These fossil fuels represent the prehistoric

warmth of the sun laid down as carboniferous biomass in the

earth’s crust as plants and sea creatures turned this energy into

oxygen and carbon in the course of geological time. Until the

discovery of anthropogenic climate change there appeared to be

predicts: Steve Connor, ‘Melting Greenland Glacier May Hasten Sea Level

Rise’, The Independent, July 25th

2005. 9 ‘Orissa Heat Wave: Death Toll to Rise’, Deccan Herald, June 19

th 2005.


no biophysical limits to the amount of stored energy that could

be released into the earth’s atmosphere and hence to the size of

the energy-driven human economy.10 But with a current net

annual output of 7 billion tons of carbon per annum into the

atmosphere, the modern human economy is seriously exceeding

the capacity of atmosphere, forests, oceans and soils to absorb

its energy emissions. The oceans are already replete with the

excess carbon output of the industrial era which they have taken

up in the last 100 years11 and as they are unable to absorb CO2

at the same rate, fossil fuel emissions now increasingly end up

in the upper atmosphere, enhancing the greenhouse effect and

driving up oceanic and air temperatures and thus fuelling more

extreme weather events and ice melts of a kind never before

experienced in the 15,000 year span of the present Holocene era.

Climate extremes were common before the Holocene era and it

was precisely the new stability of CO2 levels, and hence of

relatively stable land and ocean temperatures, which enabled the

development of human agriculture and cities, and the dramatic

expansion of human numbers, in the present geological era.12

Climate change shakes the foundations of liberalism

because it posits that the sum total of the effects of the

individual actions of consumers and corporations acting freely

in their own interests in the long term have deleterious effects on

the planet which the minimalist body politic, with its

unwillingness to regulate capital flows and market trades, is

unable to mitigate. In other words the division of labour between

self-interested individuals and corporations and the limited

10 On the discovery of global warming see Spencer R. Weart, ‘The discovery of

the risk of global warming’ Physics Today, 50 (1997), pp. 34 – 40. 11 CO2 persists for just over 100 years in the atmosphere and oceans and so excess

CO2 produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the onset of the industrial

revolution is no longer chemically present in the earth’s atmosphere, though some of

it will have been taken up by forests and soils in more bio-stable, and hence longer

lasting, forms. 12

See further Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores,

Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton NJ: Princeton University

Press, 2000).


moral constraints and collective ends of liberalism’s public

institutions, which individuals contract to sustain through their

taxes, is in conflict with the common good of all beings. The

alleged gains of liberty represented by the lifting of moral

constraints on avarice, greed, trade, and wealth accumulation are

more than offset by the harms that the exercise of these liberties

are visiting on those in the poorer sub-tropical and tropical

regions of Africa and South Asia who are already experiencing

the deleterious effects of climate change in terms of long term

drought, exceptional heat-waves, and reductions in crop

production.

Climate change represents a challenge not only to

energy-led consumerism and unfettered capitalism, and its latest

guise in the form of borderless global trade, but to the

epistemological and ontological foundations of modern

liberalism. At the heart of Rawlsian liberalism, and its neoliberal

offshoots, lies the assumption that individual actors are seats of

consciousness, desire and rational decision-making who are

intrinsically autonomous from other bodies and from the

biophysical environment. It is this assumption which explains

the liberal division of labour between individual agency and the

body politic; political institutions embody morality in the

relational world of public space but individuals are conceived as

essentially independent of this bodily domain, their actions

determined by their inner desires and rational choices rather than

by their biological relations to other agents and to the

environment.

Criticism of this essentially disembodied conception of

agency and consciousness, which is rooted in the Scottish and

German Enlightenments, has come from various quarters and

nowhere more powerfully than in the ground-breaking

phenomenological critique of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.13 A key

13 I say rediscovery because Aristotle’s moral and political philosophy, and its

medieval recovery by Thomas Aquinas, had a strong account of the interpenetration

of individual virtuous bodies and the body politic, and in its teleological account of

natural ends clearly connected human moral goods with the biophysical natures of


element in Merleau-Ponty’s ontological move is his attempt to

re-inscribe community and time upon the acts and gestures of

individual bodies:

What is alone true is that our open and personal

existence rests on a primary basis of acquired and

congealed existence. But it could not be otherwise if we

are temporality, since the dialectic of the acquired and of

the future is constitutive of time.14

In this account the perception and effect of every individual

action or gesture already involves an unconscious but real

projection of the self into relations with other bodies in the past

and the future in such a way that they are taken up into a larger

embodied pattern which Merleau-Ponty characterised as

‘existential rhythm’. 15 Also in the French philosophical

tradition, Marcell Mauss proposed in his essay ‘Techniques of

the Body’ that the body is the primary tool through which

humans give shape to the biophysical world, and that it is at the

same time from the body that the human world – or what I

above called public space – is also constituted, hence the very

term ‘body politic’. 16 Mauss and Merleau-Ponty directed

anthropologists and philosophers to a reconsideration of the

place of the body in human cultural and social construction as

well as in human consciousness and their insights have been

taken up in ecological thought, psychology and philosophy.

Thus quantum physicist David Bohm posited what he called an

bodies and the earth: Augustine’s City of God also represented a deeply embodied

moral and social philosophy and had enduring influence on Christian accounts of

agency, community and knowledge. 14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la Perception, pp. 493 – 4, trans. and

cited in Richard M. Zaner, The Problem of Embodiment : Some Contributions to a

Phenomenology of the Body (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 191. 15 Zaner, Problem of Embodiment, p. 191. 16 Marcel Mauss, ‘Les Techniques du Corps’ cited in Thomas J. Csordas,

‘Introduction : the body as representation and being-in-the-world’, in Csordas (ed.),

Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1 – 24.


‘implicate order’ in the substructure of atomic life which

connects individual acts and the biophysical structure of the

world, while Gregory Bateson constructed an ecological account

of consciousness, and John Gibson proposed an ecological

account of visual perception.17 For Bateson and Gibson human

consciousness and perception are constituted by their location in

the body and by relations with other bodies, human and

nonhuman; this recognition involves the rejection of reductionist

and atomistic accounts of rationality which have achieved

widespread currency under the influence of René Descartes and

Immanuel Kant. Advocates of a more embodied approach to

epistemology and perception argue that both philosophers failed

to take account of the multi-sensory and ecologically situated

character of human being.18

The recovery by phenomenologists, philosophers, and

more recently natural scientists,19 of the embodied character of

human identity and perception also finds echoes in the turn

among some modern moral philosophers and theologians to

narrative, story and tradition as key elements in human

development and rationality. 20 The life projects, desires and

decisions of individuals in a narrativist perspective cannot be

understand apart from knowledge of the life-story, and cultural

memes, that have shaped an individual in her development,

17 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, (London and Boston: Routledge

& Kegan Paul, 1980), Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected

Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (St Albans: Paladin,

1973) and J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA:

Houghton Mifflin, 1979). See also Ian Burkitt, Bodies of Thought: Embodiment,

Identity and Modernity (London: Sage, 1999). 18 Burkitt, Bodies of Thought, pp. 34 – 38. 19 On the growing role of embodiment in Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science

see A. Clark, Being There – Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again

(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997). 20 See further Stanley Hauerwas and David Burrell, ‘From system to story: an

alternative pattern for rationality in ethics’ pp.158-190 in Stanley Hauerwas and L.

Gregory Jones (eds.) Why Narrative: Readings in Narrative Theology (Grand Rapids,

MI: William B Eerdmans, 1989); see also Alastair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in

Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981).


including relations with significant others, and with particular

bioregions, communities, places, practices and traditions.21

In this perspective climate change is the exposure of this

deep biophysical and storied structure underlying individual

agency in the biogeochmistry of the earth and of the mutually

constitutive relations between animals, atmosphere, oceans,

plants and rocks first theorised by James Lovelock in his ‘gaia

hypothesis’.22 Interactions between organic life and planetary

biogeochemistry memorialise the record of past actions,

particularly in the industrial era, in present and future time. On

this perspective the narrative of climate change begins not with

the discovery at the Mona Loa observatory in Hawaii of raised

atmospheric levels of CO2 in the 1970s, nor even with Svante

Arhenius’ original proposal in 1896 that industrial carbon could

enhance the greenhouse effect, 23 but with the eighteenth

century invention of the steam engine by Thomas Newcomen,

used as it was to facilitate the mining of coal at the origins of the

English industrial revolution.24

Advocates of a phenomenological approach to human

being and knowing have for more than fifty years attempted to

unseat the regnant constructivist and rationalist assumptions in

Western political and philosophical thought which underlie the

project of liberalism. But they have been largely unsuccessful in

dethroning the cultural power of these assumptions given the

21 The significance of narrative is beginning to emerge as a key theme in cognitive

science as researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics attempt to

chart and describe, so that they may ultimately be able to replicate, all that makes

human mental and physical agency possible; see further Chrystopher L. Nehaniv and

Kerstin Dautenhahn, ‘Embodiment and Memories: Algebras of Time and History for

Autobiographic Agents’ at http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqkd/em6pp.ps. 22 James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). On the

nature and origins of the discipline of biogeochemistry see William H. Schlesinger,

‘Better living through Biogeochemistry’, Ecology, 85, (2004), pp. 2402 – 2407; also E.

Gorham, ‘Biogechemistry: its origins and development’ Biogeochemistry, 13 (1991),

pp. 199 – 239. 23 Svante Arhenius, ‘On the influence of carbonic acid in the air on the temperature on

the ground’, Philosophical Magazine 41 (1896), p. 237. 24 See further David S. Landes Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1969).

http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqkd/em6pp.ps


strength of the modern commitment to the ethereal economy of

unfettered desire and the ‘free’ market, and the relative

inattention to the biophysical economy of organic bodies in the

‘great economy’ of the earth.25 It may be that climate change

offers not only a decisive moment in the earth’s history, but a

radical challenge to the transformation of the earth that modern

industrialism has presaged where the rhythm of the earth and the

bodies, both individual and collective, of humans are brought

into a new alignment.

Attempts to mitigate climate change have so far however

failed to evince or manifest the kind of radical rethinking of the

liberal project that an embodied approach to climate change

would suggest. There are many reasons for this, not least the

continuing influence of the disembodied account of desire and

individual agency that modern Western philosophy has

sustained. Equally important is that climate change mitigation

depends upon collective action by a whole host of actors

including consumers, corporations, governments and

international agencies such as the WTO. For the behaviours of

such a diverse range of actors to be directed towards the shared

goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions, so stemming the future

consequences of climate change, requires a degree of

coordination and cooperation which is would at first hand seem

hard to achieve although the current neoliberal economic project

of global borderless trade in goods and services does represent

just such a form of global cooperation and coordination. But this

neoliberal project is in direct opposition to the goal of limiting

global carbon emissions. When Africans are encouraged by the

current regime of world trade to grow mangoes for export to

25 I refer to Wendell Berry’s account of the ‘great economy’ in his ....Jean-Pierre

Dupuy argues that the collective modern commitment to the ethereal economy of

market relations, despite its relative detachment from the real relations and welfare of

bodies in society, arises from an idealist strain at the heart of modern economics

which he exposes through an examination of inconsistencies between anarcho-

capitalist and morally conservative tendencies in the work of Ferdinand Hayek: Jean-

Pierre Dupuy, ‘Intersubjectivity and Embodiment’, Journal of Bioeconomics, 6 (2004),

pp. 275 – 294.


Northern Europe, while American and European farmers use

government subsidies to purchase energy-intensive fertilisers

and farm machinery so they can export wheat to Africa, then the

industrial food economy is given over to a model of carbon

consumption which is clearly a major progenitor of rising

carbon emissions.26 But far from abandoning the current world

trading regime, because of its inconsistency with the

biogeochemistry of the earth, the international Climate Change

Convention inaugurated in Bonn in 1998 replicates the

international global trading economy in goods and services with

respect to atmospheric emissions.

Under the negotiations at the Climate Change

Convention which led to the Kyoto Protocol representatives

from the United States, with backing from Britain, proposed the

creation of a new global market in carbon emissions and carbon

sinks as the principal means to address climate change

mitigation.27 This proposal was eventually adopted, with the

consequence that the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol are in the

process of creating a new global financial regime in carbon

credits which may be bought and sold on international markets

much like stocks or futures. In 2005 500 million pounds of

carbon credits were handed out gratis by the UK government to

energy utilities and oil companies. The idea is that these

companies will eventually be able to sell their carbon credits on

the international carbon credit market should they achieve

reductions in fossil fuel use, or else purchase more carbon

credits from other countries or companies who do not meet their

targets for carbon reductions under Kyoto. However the

construction of this new market in carbon credits simply defers

real reductions in carbon emissions which might otherwise be

26

See further Robyn Eckersley, ‘The big chill: the WTO and multilateral

environmental agreements’, Global Environmental Politics 4.2 (May 2004),

pp. 24 – 51. 27

See further Heidi Bachram, ‘Climate fraud and carbon colonialism: the

new trade in greenhouse gases’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 15. 4,

(December 2004), pp. 5- 20.


obtained through energy conservation measures and a shift

towards renewable energy sources.

The Kyoto Protocol inaugurates two schemes of carbon

trading. The first is called Joint Implementation and under this

mechanism carbon producers can trade permits to produce

carbon with carbon credits conferred on nations who produce

less carbon than their allowances under the CCC. Russia will

initially be the owner of the largest quantity of carbon credits

because of the shrinkage of the Russian economy since the

collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990; Russia’s reduced

economic activity on 1990 levels gives it approximately $10

billion of ‘avoided emissions’ under JI. Consequently Country A

which plans to exceed its CCC carbon allocation will be able to

purchase carbon credits from Russia and so fall short of its CO2

reduction target under Kyoto with the consequence that neither

Russia nor Country A will have physically to reduce its carbon

output by the amount of the trade. Under JI countries are given

headline carbon output figures and must decide for themselves

how to allocate carbon allowances within the country. The

British government, under the European Union Emissions

Trading Scheme, handed out for free 500 million Euros worth of

carbon credits to its most heavily polluting corporations, with

over half going to electricity and gas utilities and the rest to

offshore oil and gas companies, cement, ceramics, glass, metal

and paper producers. If these companies reduce their carbon

emissions they will be able to trade their carbon allowances with

companies which have not done so; at the time of writing a

tonne of carbon was worth around 8 Euros.28

The second form of the CCC carbon trading scheme, the

Clean Development Mechanism, allows companies to acquire

carbon permits by investing in energy reduction technologies

and new carbon sinks in developing countries. Thus a company

such as Royal Dutch Shell, among the top ten heaviest carbon

producers in Europe, could fund a new forest plantation of fast

28 Pratap Chatterjee, ‘The carbon brokers’, Guerilla News Network, 23 February 2005.


growing eucalyptus trees or a solar electricity production facility

in a tropical country such as Belize or Brazil and use this

investment to acquire permits for carbon pollution in Europe.

Eucalyptus are notorious for their negative effects on tropical

ecosystems since they dry out the soil and draw water from

undergrounds reservoirs and hence impact both on human and

other species water use. But protests by local people and NGOs

against one such forest in Brazil, funded by the World Bank,

which not only damaged local water sources but involved the

clearing of rainforest – which was before it was cleared a more

effective carbon sink than the monoculture eucalyptus forest –

did not prevent it being accredited by auditors as a valid project

under the Clean Development Mechanism. 29 Allowing a

company to trade its carbon emissions for an agroforestry

project, which will putatively absorb carbon, rests on highly

dubious assumptions about the role of agroforestry in carbon

biogeochemistry. When existing forests are cleared to make way

for fast growing eucalyptus and other monocrop varieties most

of the carbon contained in the existing forest is released when

the timber is burned in situ and decomposes, or is incinerated

after being used as plywood in the construction industry.

Similarly the new forest will only act as a carbon sink provided

the trees grow to maturity and are not then in turn harvested and

utilised in a similar way to its predecessor. Although the

emissions trading scheme cannot guarantee any of these

conditions it nonetheless treats new forest schemes as carbon

sinks with the capacity to absorb real carbon emissions. The

Kyoto Protocol envisages rich developed countries in the first

period of operation of the Treaty to 2012 purchasing an area of

land up to the size of a small country as set aside for forest

plantations against which they can offset carbon emissions. This

is leading to a new form of imperialism which Heidi Bachran

calls ‘carbon colonialism’ and which effectively commodifies

and privatises the earth’s atmosphere and forests by turning

29 Bachram, ‘Climate fraud and carbon colonialism’, p. 6.


them into carbon credits to be traded between wealthy

corporations. 30 And as if this were not bad enough,

governments, as in the case of the UK, are handing out shares in

this new privatised resource for free to the richest corporations

on the planet, an approach given the curious name of

‘grandfathering’ because permits to pollute originate in a

corporation already having polluted for many years previously.

Given the practice of grandfathering, the new market in

carbon has so far provided few incentives for heavy energy

users to physically reduce their carbon outputs. Dieter Helm

suggests that in the early days of carbon trading it should be

expected that the price of carbon remains low.31 However if

corporations reduce their emissions faster than the carbon credit

scheme allows they are actually penalised, and governments

have handed out so many carbon permits to corporations that

their market value is in any case too low to provoke serious

energy reductions. Estimates of real reductions from Kyoto are

as low as 0.1 per cent because so much offsetting is allowed

under permit trading that few countries or corporations will be

forced legally to reduce their physical emissions.32

If the intention of the Kyoto Protocol was to incentivise

individual firms and householders to reduce emissions through a

decentralised market driven approach this could have been

achieved far more equitably by giving carbon permits to poorer

developing nations who could then have sold them on to

corporations, or to the poorest citizens of industrialized nations

who with the proceeds of the sale of these permits could have

been required to insulate their homes or buy advance quantities

of energy from energy corporations to reduce their future bills.

The current scheme simply rewards the heaviest polluters with a

large injection of transferable wealth in permits to pollute

atmospheric carbon sinks even although they have already

30

Bachram, ‘Climate fraud and carbon colonialism’. 31 Dieter Helm, ‘The assessment: climate-change policy’, Oxford Review of Economic

Policy 19.3 (2003), pp. 349 – 361. 32 Bachram, ‘Climate fraud’, p. 6.


profited in many cases for decades from this same common

good without having paid for it.

It is instructive to discover something of the history of

carbon trading. It turns out that the early research on this

approach to climate change mitigation was funded by United

Nations research bodies with a strong bias towards market

approaches to climate change while alternative mitigation

schemes were never investigated.33 The bias of the UN towards

market solutions reflects extensive lobbying by the United

States and by Western corporations, even though many

mainstream economists consider that carbon trading is a far less

efficient device than carbon taxes. The reasons for preferring

market solutions to taxation are not in the end economic ones

but political, institutional and cultural. Powerful lobbies in the

energy, financial and industrial sectors strongly resist taxation of

any kind even as a way of mitigating human welfare problems

associated with advanced capitalism. It is hardly surprising then

that these same forces were at work in the negotiations which

led to the creation of the Kyoto Protocol.

Despite the urgency of the problem, and despite the fact

that alternatives to fossil fuels, and conservation measures,

could between them already deliver dramatic reductions in fossil

fuel dependence without excessive cuts in economic

development, the nations and corporations who negotiated and

lobbied around the Kyoto process preferred a business as usual

scenario which, if it continues until 2050 will see carbon levels

rise above 500 parts per million in the upper atmosphere, and

likely reaching 700 ppm at some point later in the century at

which point the most extreme of the IPCC’s climate change

scenarios are likely to be realised.

Given the epistemological and ecological inadequacies

of the liberal and neo-liberal narratives of (disembodied) private

rational choice and (embodied) public morality it is unsurprising

that institutional procedures influenced by this narrative have

33


produced an international climate change treaty which is

ineffective in promoting real carbon reductions in the short or

medium term. But the other principal root of the ineffectiveness

of the Kyoto Protocol is the idealistic character of the cost-

benefit calculations which economists apply to the problems of

either adapting to or mitigating climate change. Bjorn Lomborg

articulates a widespread bias amongst economists and

industrialists, also shared by the present Bush administration,

when he suggests that the costs of mitigating the future effects

of climate change are so great, and the nature of these effects so

uncertain, that it is more economically beneficial to plan to

adapt human behaviours and procedures to climate change when

it occurs than to regulate economic activity so as to reduce

present carbon emissions so that these potential future costs may

be reduced. 34 This argument is predicated on the economic

practice of social discounting which compares present and

future economic activity and, on the basis of the existence of

interest rates and hence the growth in value of money saved,

argues that future activities costs less than present ones.35 The

problem with such economistic dismissals of the need to

mitigate climate change in the present is not just that it

undervalues costs to future generations of climate change but

involves measurements of cost and benefit which are so

theoretical as to misrepresent the real world of biogeochemistry.

The reason is simple; cost benefit calculations are conducted on

the basis of theoretical economic rules of supply and demand,

and monetary accounts of profit and loss, both at corporate and

at national level. But these rules and accounts notoriously fail to

count as costs many of the environmental and social costs,

dubbed ‘externalities’ by economists, which economic activities

impose upon individual and collective bodies in the real world.

34 Bjorn Lomborg, ‘Global warming’ in Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 258 – 324. See also the

discussion of this issue in Stephen Gardiner’s useful survey article ‘Ethics and global

climate change’, Ethics, 114 (April 2004), pp. 555 – 600. 35 For a philosophical defense of the practice of social discounting see further John

Broome,


Climate change is of course the most dramatic and long-lasting

of all such ‘externalities’ but as yet neither corporate nor

national accounting systems include climate change effects in

monetary measures of economic activities. Again we are dealing

here with the problematic outcomes of the disembodied

character of modern Western accounts of rationality and rational

choice behaviours, and in particular their influence on the way

in which economists model, and accountants measure, the

behaviours of individuals, firms and governments.

There is a further feature to the problem of

disembodiment in the procedures by which liberal and

neoliberal economists and politicians respond to signals from

the biophysical environment, and in particular climate change,

and this concerns the thorny philosophical problem of time. A

fully time sensitive narrative of climate change would start not

at the invention of Newcomen’s steam engine but way back in

prehistory for it would involve the narration of the way in which

myriad creatures in the oceans and on terra firma absorbed the

prehistoric warmth of the sun through photosynthesis and

eventually drew down the resulting carbon biomass in the form

of fossil fuel deposits in the earth’s crust or under the ocean

floor. The extraordinary growth of the industrial economy in the

last 150 years effectively rests upon the sudden release of this

geological record of millions of years of solar warmth into the

planet’s present biogeochemistry in the form of carbon

emissions. In other words the great range of goods and services

that the modern consumer is encouraged and stimulated by a

vast advertising industry to enjoy and expend rests upon a

hidden history of organic life which is hundreds of millions of

years old. But this biophysical exchange of organic heritage for

present consumption takes place in a cultural context where

there is an increasingly attenuated sense of the connection

between past, present and future generations, practices, stories,

and traditions. Again the disembodied conception of the desiring

and choosing rational self is implicated here for, as Edmund

Burke argued, the desire and willingness to conserve a state of


affairs for future generations rests upon a consciousness of

connection between present and past which the revolutions that

inaugurated the modern age, explicitly rejected; as he wrote in

his reflections on the French Revolution, ‘people will not look

towards posterity when they fail to reflect on past

generations.’36

The strange timelessness which informs present cultural

consciousness may be said to originate in philosophical

problems with time in theology and philosophy which precede

the birth of the modern era. The origin of these problems was in

the Scholastic notion of occasionalism by which late medieval

theologians posited that an omnipotent God could act in the

world so as to disturb the laws of nature and thus that the

physical appearance of order in nature, as present humans

observe it, may be illusory. To put this another way medieval

theologians argued that there was an unfathomable gap between

the purposes of God in creating the world, and in continuing to

intervene in that world, and the physical appearances of things

and that therefore there is a capricious instability to physical

appearances, and cause-effect relations such that divine

purposes cannot be read off from the material creation. This

move in Christian metaphysics is often described as the

nominalist move and it is of relevance here because it represents

a real rupture in the relations between inner consciousness and

outward appearances, and between past, present and future in

Western ontology, and ultimately Western culture, that efforts to

retrieve embodiment and narrative in philosophy and theology

are only now beginning to address.

The narrative theologian addresses this problem by

arguing for continuity in the relations between past and present

such that the present possibility of Christian existence issues

from the prior calling of Abraham, Moses, and above all the

calling of Christ himself, upon which Christian identity,

practices and traditions ultimately rely. So for example when the

36

The Portable Edmund Burke, edited by Isaac Kramnick.


Apostle Paul claimed that Jesus Christ is the same ‘yesterday,

today and forever’, he was arguing for continuity in this new

religious tradition with prechristian and future time, and this

continuity in Christian history takes a number of institutional

forms: these include practices such as the Christian sacraments

of baptism and Eucharist which Christians believe were

inaugurated by Christ, the public reading of the scriptures in

which the stories of God’s ways with God’s people are recorded

and rehearsed, and the recording and remembering of the lives

of the saints. In a narrativist perspective what connects present

Christian actions with past inheritance are these shared practices

and stories, as well as a shared spiritual relation, expressed in

private prayer as well as public worship, to God. How though

might this sense of cultural and spiritual continuity be said to

relate to the problem of disconnection between past, present and

future in relation to energy consumption and climate change?

One approach is to argue for a new consciousness of the

moral claims of future people on presently existing people, a

claim which would involve a redefinition of the command of

Christ to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ in which the

category neighbour includes future persons who, though distant

from present persons in time, are nonetheless connected to them

by the planet’s biogeochemical memory which visits the effects

of present actions on future people.37 This idea of connection

between past, present and future actions and generations is also

encapsulated in the Christian conception of original sin, most

fully elaborated by Augustine in the fourth century, and with

antecedents in St Paul, and in Jewish reflection on the ‘sins of

the fathers’ which the Torah represents as being visited on ‘the

third and fourth generations’. The Christian claim to find in the

Christ events liberation from the inheritance of the ill effects of

the actions of previous generations is that Christ displayed in his

incarnation, dying and rising a new form of creaturely being – a

‘new creation’ – in which the body is at last liberated from its

37 See for example Rachel Muers, ....


captivity to sin and death which are represented by St Paul as

the inheritance of the actions of previous generations from

Adam and Eve until the birth of Christ. This liberation takes the

bodily and social form of new community, the ‘body of Christ’

in which individuals are joined in a common quest for peace and

reconciliation in which past sins are forgiven and just relations

between rich and poor, weak and strong, are pursued and

sustained. However there are many who argue that far from

advancing a conservationist ethic with respect to the earth, this

religion of liberty in fact eventuated in a desacralisation of the

biophysical world such that the mortal world became amenable

to its transformation by humans in their expression of their new

spiritual freedoms. Those who mined coal from the crust of the

earth had already overcome any fears they might have had that

such an act would be irreverent to the spirits of place that might

be said to reside in the earth and its particular bioregions. Does

not the Christian story of liberation from the law of sin and

death in fact mean that Christians attend less to the biophysical

consequences of their actions than those of other traditions –

such as animists or Hindus – who continue to believe in

something like earthly Karma or ‘what goes around comes

around’?

These arguments have been played out extensively in the

growth of ecological theologies in the last forty years, and

especially since the famous lecture given by Lynn White to the

American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1966.

What I am claiming here is that the problems I have identified

with respect to embodiment, the ethereal economy, and

emissions from energy consumption, require some rethinking of

our Western cultural traditions around what constitutes selfhood,

rationality, and public morality. In particular I am arguing that

the problem of climate change requires a renewed appreciation

of the narrative relations between past, present and future

generations, and between past, present and future ages of the

earth, of the kind sustained in the Christian tradition through

such practices as scripture reading and remembering the lives of


the saints. I am also suggesting that these narrative relations take

a distinctive political form in the idea of the ‘body of Christ’

which is a political metaphor for the relationships between rich

and poor, weak and strong, who belong to particular

communities of Christians in different parts of the world and

who are united in their communion by their common devotion to

the sovereignty of Christ as the ‘head of the body’. This idea of

the ‘body of Christ’ carries with it for St Paul a clear moral

implication that Christians in one part of the world have

obligations to Christians in other parts of the world who may be

suffering from famine or some other kind of need. As St Paul

suggests to the Christians at Corinth, their abundance finds its

correlate in the need of Christians in Judea who, after the Jewish

rebellion and its vicious putting down by the Romans, were

suffering from famine.

How though might this ancient and idealised picture of

the body of Christ interact with the modern problem of

international relations, and intergenerational relations, presented

by climate change? Clearly the implication is that the primary

generators of climate change – Western consumers and

corporations – have moral duties to the people who are already

experiencing the effects of climate change in other parts of the

world, and to future persons who will experience these effects in

ever larger numbers. But the energy economy, with its

electricity generators, connective grids and pipelines, petrol

pumps, and electric switches, distances energy users from the

effects of their energy consumption. And hence the title of this

paper; the urgent need is to recover ways in which households

and corporations can reconstitute their daily embodied rituals

with regard to energy use so as to reconnect them with their

source in the creation story from the beginning of time, and

hence with posterity.

The ancient Celts had a particular set of practices with

regard to energy use which contained something of what I am

getting at. When they went out to dig peat, and when they laid it

on the fire each morning to warm the household and cook its


food, they undertook these actions in the sacred name of the

Holy Trinity, accompanying these actions with prayer and

reverence to the creator God. They saw the fire, which they

would make from three pieces of peat, as in some sense holy, as

a physical analogy of the Sacred Trinity, and as a manifestation

of the fire of the Holy Spirit, who is the immanent presence of

the Trinity and who warmed their hearts in worship even as the

hearth warmed the household. Medieval architects had a similar

reverence for the light of the sun which they expressed in the

design of the great European cathedrals which were constructed

in such a way as to draw down the light of the sun onto the floor

of the chancel, nave and sanctuary through the great high

windows which the new gothic building techniques enabled

them to construct. Similarly William Blake in the nineteenth

century called the energy which all around him was being

released and mobilised in the industrial revolution ‘divine

energy’ and so reminded his readers that this energy was not

purely physical; it originated in the divine light which first

shone on a dark and formless universe to bring forth life from

the oceans. Embodying climate change means recovering

something of this sense of reverence and awe that Blake

experienced in the release of the primeval power which fuelled

and built the great cities and furnaces of the industrial revolution.

A new embodied reverence for the energy of the earth

requires not only a narrative sense for its origination in the

earth’s prehistory, but a sense of ecological connection between

a furnace, or an air conditioner, and the fossils which fuel them.

But the problem is that the machine age and the ethereal

economy encourage precisely those habits of forgetfulness and

waste which mean that modern consumers and corporations

listlessly consume without heed for the past or future life of the

creatures which composed, and will eventually have to deal with,

the energy so used. A narrative and embodied ethic requires not

only reverential rituals but a recovery of old virtues such as

those of prudence and temperance, justice and patience, such

that saving energy, consuming lower down the energy and food


chain, substituting human labour for the machine – for example

cycling or walking instead of driving – again appear hip and

wise rather than old-fashioned and irrational. The virtues, as

Aristotle first suggested, are those moral excellences which,

when they become habitual, help to train the individual in

relationships and roles which make for flourishing or what

Aristotle called eudaimonia. The central and ordering virtue

according to Christ and St Paul is love, love of God and love of

neighbour. For Saint Augustine love is central and gives order to

all other human desires, ends and virtues because when

individuals love the being who has given them life, they turn

their minds to the source of life. This source of life is the divine

light which as St John put it in the prologue to his Gospel

‘lightens everyone’ and this image of divine light and energy

provides the Christian account of the virtues with much of its

metaphorical force. For Christians the ability to express the

virtues arises not, as Aristotle has it from aristocratic upbringing

and prowess on the battlefield, but from closeness to the

ultimate source of goodness.

We rarely conceive of light from an electric bulb as the

physical product of the light of the sun on the prehistory of the

planet but this is precisely what it is. Embodying climate change

will require us to behave more virtuously with respect to our

individual and collective use of this divine light; it also requires

us to reconnect the machine-enabled rituals of our lives with the

ecology of our fragile and ancient earth home. Renarrating

energy as divine light, recovering the value of the traditional

virtues, rehearsing the past lives which make our present ones

possible, are practices which embody climate change and which

may enable those who engage in them to give more cognisance

to biogeochemical posterity.



Ecumenical Spirituality

Overcoming Violence: Globalization, Violence, Cosmopolitanism

And Transmodernity

Lawrence A. Whitney, LC+1

Introduction

lobalization is nothing new. This should not be a

surprising assertion for members of a 2000 year-old

globalizing movement. In fact, it might be possible to make the

assertion that globalizing tendencies are part of the human

condition. To some extent we are all aware of this. In the 1999

movie The Matrix, the computer program character Agent Smith

says to Morpheus while torturing him,

I'd like to share a revelation I had during my time here. It

came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized

that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this

planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the

1 Lawrence A. Whitney, LC+ is professed and ordained to the diaconate in

the Lindisfarne Community and an MDiv candidate at the Boston University

School of Theology. He is also a Chapel Associate at Marsh Chapel and the

facilitator of the International Mission and Ecumenism Committee of the

Boston Theological Institute.

G

Overcoming Violence 55

surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You

move to an area and you multiply until every natural

resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to

spread to another area. There is another organism on this

planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it

is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this

planet and we are the cure.2

Perhaps the most haunting part of this monologue is its ring of

truth.

And yet, when spoken of by pundits and “scholars” of

popular culture, globalization is often referenced as a late 20th

century, and now 21st century, phenomenon; the particular mark

of modern, or perhaps postmodern, life. While globalization

may not be new, it is true that there are certain factors in its

current expression that reflect the particular context of our

present historical moment. Strangely, it is not the economic

factors that give globalization its new cast but the cultural

confluences and the physics of the historical moment itself. All

of these factors, taken together, lead to violence.

This paper will unfold along a threefold path beginning

with a brief exploration of the globalization phenomenon and

why it can lead to violence. Second, the similarities between the

present global situation and the situation of nascent Christianity

in the Roman empire will be investigated. Finally, a proposal

will be made for an ecumenical spirituality to address the

complexities of life in a global and often violent world. This

last will be derived in conversation with theories of

cosmopolitanism and transmodernity.

Globalization and Violence

What is Globalization?

2 The Matrix. dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski, prod. Groucho II Film

Partnership, Silver Pictures, Villiage Roadshow Pictures. (Burbank, CA:

Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 31 March 1999).


All too often globalization is defined narrowly in

economic terms, probably in part due to an overly narrow

definition of economics. The problem with such a definition is

that it tends to focus the discussion on issues of finance,

presuming that the amount of tangible goods one possesses is

definitive for wealth even when the stance taken on

globalization as a process is primarily negative. I prefer a

definition of globalization that successfully theorizes the

phenomena being experienced in our 21st century world without

taking on itself the burden of a possessive economic metaphysic

even as it seeks to describe experience rooted in such.

Globalization could thus be described as “the unfolding

resolution of the contradiction between ever expanding capital

and its national political and social formations.”3 Put differently,

it is “the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the

world which has been brought about by the enormous reduction

of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking

down of artificial barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital,

knowledge, and (to a lesser extent) people across borders.”4 For

a definition completely devoid of economic jargon, we might

say that globalization is “the expanding scale, growing

magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of

transcontinental flows and patterns of social interaction.”5

Furthermore, this process of expansion and integration is

always contextualized by the happenstances of its historical

moment. Thomas Friedman, in his New York Times bestselling

book The World is Flat, delineates an historical typology for

3Stephen McBride and John Wisemen, eds. Globalization and its

Discontents. (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2000): 9. This definition

holds as long as capital is understood more broadly than financial and market

capital. 4Joseph E. Stiglitz. Globalization and Its Discontents. (New York, NY:

W.W. Norton and Company, 2002): 9. 5Neil J. Smelser. Uncertain Connections: Globalization, Localization,

Identities, and Violence. (Ohio State University, Oct. 3-4, 2003): 2.


globalization.6 “Globalization 1.0,” (1492-1800), describes this

process as carried militarily and politically by nation-states and

is more typically known as colonization. “Globalization 2.0,”

(1800-2000), is what many contemporary theorists of the

phenomena in question are seeking to describe and it describes

this process as now being carried out economically by

multinational, international, and eventually transnational

corporations. Finally, “Globalization 3.0,” (2000-?), indicates

that this process is now accessible to individuals collaborating

and competing as independent actors or as small, loosely

connected groups. While I will make the case momentarily that

globalization is a process much older than the age of discovery,7

the characteristics Friedman assigns to each era help to refine

our definition in terms of actors and how they relate to one

another.

Ultimately, the most helpful framework for

understanding globalization, for the purposes of this

presentation, is what Leslie Sklair denotes a “global culture

model,” which seeks to understand identity as it is being acted

upon by increasingly accessible and interactive

communications.8 Also helpful to the discussion is the view

added by globo-localist theorists that there is an important

reactionary heterogenizing counterforce rooted in local identity

to the homogenizing potential of expanding communications.9

Finally, the understanding that globalization predates modernity,

one side of the discussion in the global society model, will be

presented in the second section of this presentation. This last is

important because, as Sklair points out, “if we want to

understand our own lives and the lives of those around us, in our

6Thomas L. Friedman. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21

st Century.

(New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005): 9-10. 7For different perspectives on the history of globalization, see Leslie Sklair.

“Competing Conceptions of Globalization.” Journal of World-Systems

Research 2 (Summer 1999): 155. 8ibid: 151-4.

9ibid and Peter Geschiere and Birgit Meyer. “Globalization and Identity:

Dialectics of Flow and Closure.” Development and Change 29 (1998): 602.


families, communities, local regions, countries, supra-national

regions and, ultimately how we relate to the global, then it is

absolutely fundamental that we are clear about the extent to

which the many different structures within which we live are the

same in the most important respects as they have been or are

different.”10

The Context of Globalization

Globalization is commonly expressed in terms of the

loosing of the boundaries of the world so that the modern person

is living in unbounded space.11

This is the sentiment Friedman

seeks to express in his pithy statement that “the world is flat,”12

indicating that communications and technology have virtually

(pun intended) eliminated the relevance of political, cultural,

and societal boundaries. Neil Thurnbull expresses this

philosophically, in agreement with Nietzsche and Heidegger,

when he says, “For when the earth is seen from an astronautic

point of view, all traditional human concerns are

deterritorialized and strangely diminished to the extent that

interplanetary representations of the earth threaten to sever the

connection between humanity and its traditional ontological

supports.”13

This is continuous with the side of the discussion in

the global society model that seeks to identify globalization as a

distinctly modern phenomenon14

because both root the

psychological potential for conceiving the globe, let alone a

global order, in a post-Copernican Weltanschauung. This

conception is accurate insofar as it describes intra-planetary

10

Leslie Sklair. “Competing Conceptions of Globalization:” 155. 11

Peter Geschiere and Birgit Meyer. “Globalization and Identity: Dialectics

of Flow and Closure:” 603. 12

Thomas L. Friedman. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st

Century. 13

Neil Thurnbull. “The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus: Global

Being in the Planetary World.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.1 (2006): 126-

7. 14

Leslie Sklair. “Competing Conceptions of Globalization:” 155.


experience but becomes more problematic upon realizing that

the astronaut must eventually come back to earth.

Indeed, I wish to posit that the contemporary context of

globalization is precisely the opposite of this prevalent

conception. The process of globalization and the forces driving

it are effective only insofar as they are in fact geographically

bound to this planet. Despite visits to our satellite several

decades ago and relatively frequent mechanically piloted

expeditions to Mars, there is a greater resignation now that we

have one planet and we have to make it work. This planetary

boundedness intensifies the forces and process of globalization

because, as we were all taught in high school physics, density

increases as the amount of matter in a constant volume increases

and acceleration increases as the amount of force exerted upon a

constant object increases. Furthermore, the forces and processes

of globalization increase exponentially because they mutually

reinforce each other. This means that as goods, services, capital,

knowledge, and people expand, they burst their societal and

national boundaries, Friedman’s “Globalization 1.0,” and so

multinational, international, and transnational organizations and

corporations become the locus of control. Friedman posits that

now even these boundaries are being overcome, as malleable,

porous, and indefinable as they are, as the process and forces of

globalization grant increasing autonomy to the individual. The

question then becomes, if even these “soft” boundaries have

been set aside, what will happen when the forces of

globalization become entirely unchecked, if indeed they do as

this new paradigm seems to suppose?

Leaving this wider question aside for scholars better

versed in the field than myself, I return to the global culture

model to ask the more narrow question how is identity15

formed

in the tension between the intensifying homogenizing forces of

15

Note that the issue of identity is synonymous with the notion of the “local”

in much of the literature. See Neil J. Smelser. Uncertain Connections:

Globalization, Localization, Identities, and Violence: 14.


globalization and heterogenizing reactionary counterforces?16

In such a situation, identities must be “polyvalent.” On the one

hand, they bear the characteristics of “plasticity” and “poly-

interpretability” such that single labels effectively stretch across

groups of distinct persons and change can be successfully

integrated, giving a sense of openness and progress. On the

other hand, these same characteristics create an existential drive

for “clarification” and “fixing” toward a sense of veritable

commonality and locality in meaning and purpose.17

As I have argued elsewhere, when these two responses to

polyvalence are pushed to their extremes, they reach the

paradigm of inclusion and exclusion, respectively, and both are

highly problematic. Healthy identity formation balances the two

such that these extremes are never met.18

This becomes an

especially tall order when the forces to be balanced are

increasing exponentially in intensity. Thus it should not be too

surprising that all too often this balance ends up tilting and then

sliding in one direction or the other. When the identity moves

toward an absolute inclusivism, the accompanying loss of self-

sense and definition creates an existential reactionary need for a

more adequate balance. Moving toward an absolute exclusivism,

on the other hand, leads to a sense of increasing solidarity, at

least until it reaches its ultimate expression whence even its

proponents find themselves excluded to the outer reaches of

their own construction.

Whence to Violence

Inclusive identities are prone to violent interactions

externally when they seek to include despite a contrary will on

16

Note that I do not identify identity with the heterogenizing reactionary

forces as do Peter Geschiere and Birgit Meyer in “Globalization and Identity:

Dialectics of Flow and Closure.” 17

ibid: 10. 18

Lawrence A. Whitney, LC. “Ecclesiology and Identity.” unpublished

manuscript. (Fall 2004): 6.


the part of the other and internally when exclusive subsets

develop and are interpreted as a threat. Thus, for inclusive

identity the particularity of localism is the problematic force that

results in violence. For exclusive identities, on the other hand,

their very solidarity provides a groundwork for violent

interaction, not in and of themselves but as they are challenged

and brought into contact with competing identities through the

exponentially increasing forces and processes of globalization.

Interestingly enough, both types of identity begin their

movement toward violence when their sense of stability and

balance within their particular worldview is shaken, more often

than not by interaction with the other type of identity.

For exclusivists, stability and balance require a carefully

controlled and regulated environment in order to survive, and

the ability to control and regulate becomes threatened when,

“global tendencies and events subtract from the ability of

[regulators] to meet demands from local and particularistic

constituencies, and this neglect heightens the political activity of

these constituencies.”19

This is particularly problematic when

western regulators (both states and corporations) have moved to

policies of pluralism and multiculturalism, making a

commitment to particularity and distinction and thus

engendering the hope in each identity that the environment will

be regulated with themselves in mind.20

Each identity thus

becomes an “us” in distinction to “them” who also reside in the

same environment with the same regulators.21

The “us” group

then legitimizes political (or other) activity in response to

environmental conditions that threaten their stability and

solidarity by rooting the identity in an ideology including

“references to the glory and dignity of the group itself, threats to

it, including its past and present mistreatment or victimization,

19

Neil J. Smelser. Uncertain Connections: Globalization, Localization,

Identities, and Violence: 10. 20

ibid: 12-13. 21

ibid: 14.


grievances, and a vision of a better world.”22

The potential for

violence is activated when activities are perceived to have been

ineffective for achieving the goal of enacting, protecting, or

recovering the potential for the ideology and the identity it roots

to flourish. This potential violence then becomes actualized

when the opportunity and access to means of violence present

themselves.23

Externally directed inclusivism is perhaps better defined

as imperialism. “Imperialism is a policy of extending control or

authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or

maintenance of empires. This is either through direct territorial

conquest or settlement, or through indirect methods of exerting

control on the politics and/or economy of these other entities.”24

This movement toward empire extends from the inclusive desire

for bringing others into the fold and can therefore be

promulgated as having the best interests of the entities being

assimilated at heart. “Generally, an empire is defined as a state

that extends dominion over areas and populations that are

culturally and ethnically distinct from the culture at the center of

power.”25

While the necessity of a state actor may be called into

question, this definition of empire successfully accounts for the

inclusive instinct to enfold the other. The inclusive identity can

become violent when this instinct toward the “global” (inclusive)

is resisted by the “local” (exclusive)26

and so force must be

exerted in order to effect the desired outcome. Internally

directed inclusivism is thus oppression of developing and

22

ibid: 16. 23

ibid: 20-22. 24

“Imperialism,” Wikipedia. 18 Aug 2006. [online]. available from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism. accessed 18 Aug 2006. 25

“Empire,” Wikipedia. 18 Aug 2006. [online]. available from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire. accessed 18 Aug 2006. 26

“The 'local' is not only regional as the term literally implies, but it subsumes

groups that are ethnic, racial, indigenous,ethnonationalistic, religious,

linguistic, cultural or style of life—often some mix of these.” Neil J. Smelser.

Uncertain Connections: Globalization, Localization, Identities, and Violence:

4.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire


“included” particularities that threaten the desire for inclusion,

either of themselves or of others.

What, then, is violence? An appropriate definition will

be quite broad, analogous to the breadth of the definition of

globalization employed above, so as to adequately account for

the actions of both inclusive and exclusive actors in a

globalizing environment. Johan Galtung provides such a

definition when he says, “violence is present when human

beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and

mental realizations are below their potential realizations …

Violence is here defined as the cause of the difference between

the potential and the actual.”27

Galtung goes on to make six

distinctions that serve to clarify the breadth of the definition:

between physical and psychological violence, between negative

and positive influence, whether or not there is an object that is

hurt, whether or not there is a subject who acts, between

intended and unintended violence, and between manifest and

latent violence.28

Galtung is credited with thus having expanded

the notion of violence to include structural or indirect violence

as well as personal or direct violence.29

This distinction is an

important one for this discussion because of the accessibility of

various forms of violence to various actors and because it

expands the discussion of violence beyond the narrow concern

of terrorism.

The question remains as to the participation of religious

actors in such acts of violence. R. Scott Appleby explains this

beginning with Rudolph Otto's definition of “the holy” as “the

sine qua non of religion ... the mysterium tremendum et

27

Johan Galtung. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace

Research 6.3 (1969): 168. 28

ibid: 169-72. 29

“Structural Violence.” Wikipedia. 5 February 2007. [online]. available

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence. accessed 17 February

2007. Structural violence is often referred to as “institutional violence,”

although with somewhat different emphases. See Deane Curtin & Robert

Litke. Institutional Violence. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence


facinans.”30

He goes on to define religion as encompassing all

of the potential responses to this first order experience because

the holy is ambiguous by definition, being “of more than one

interpretation or explanation ... of double meaning or of several

possible meanings.”31

Thus, the human response to this

ambiguity is ambivalence, “the coexistence in one person of

contradictory emotions or attitudes (as love and hatred) towards

a person or thing.”32

This means that it is entirely consistent for

different religious actors to interpret their experience of the holy

in sometimes contradictory ways, even though one or the other

must be wrong from the perspective of the will of God, which is

not subject to the same ambiguity as the experience by which it

is mediated.33

Legitimately religious actors may choose

inclusivism or exclusivism, violence or non-violence.

The Socio-Political Situation of Nascent Christianity

The claim that globalization is not merely a modern

phenomenon can be seen in the socio-political situation of first

century Judaism, Jesus' immediate context to which he was

responding. Since their return from exile in 539 BCE the Jews

had been under almost constant political control by foreigners

beginning with the Persians until 330 BCE and then under

various Greek dynasties until 141 BCE followed by a brief

period of independence under the Maccabees/Hasmoneans until

63 BCE when the Roman Empire reconquered the region. This

forced a radical reconception of what it meant to be Jewish

which included moving from a tribal to a non-tribal

30

R. Scott Appleby. The Ambivalence of the Sacred. (Lanham: Rowman &

Littlefield, 2000): 28. 31

Ibid: 29. quoting The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1994): 386. Note that I am not making the same distinction

between first and second order religious experience but group all religious

experience as first order to which the response is a second order

interpretation. 32

Ibid: 387. 33

R. Scott Appleby. The Ambivalence of the Sacred: 29-30.


understanding of affiliation, from the temple to the synagogue as

the center of religious life, from authority resting with the kings

and priests to increased scribal power, and from a prophetic to

an apocalyptic theodicy. In addition, this period saw the rise of

somewhat divergent “schools” of Judaism including the

Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, each with their own

nuanced theology, spirituality, and attitude toward the political

situation.34

The apocalyptic worldview is especially important

because it provides the framework in which these globalizing

forces were interpreted. A prophetic theodicy says that sinful

people suffer due to punishment by God in order that they might

repent, turning away from their sin and back toward God.

Apocalypticism shifts the cause of suffering to evil cosmic

forces in the world opposing God and God's people, which can

only be overcome by divine intervention, so that the people are

required only to remain faithful to God and wait for the

intervention to happen. A strong sense of the immanence of

God and divine action toward the vindication of God's people is

prevalent and characterized both by a strong sense of pessimism

regarding the potential outcome of the present world order and a

dualistic temporal understanding. In this temporal dualism, the

present age is an old age where evil is dominant and the

righteous suffer whereas a new age of the realm of God will be

inaugurated by divine intervention as a new heaven and new

earth characterized by a reversal of fortune for both present

sufferers and evil dominant forces.35

The Apostle Paul shifts

this temporal dualism slightly to account for his Christology

such that the old and new ages overlap with the new age

inaugurated by the cross and resurrection but not yet fulfilled

until the παρουσια (second coming). The old age is already

34

James C. Walters. “Historical Context I & II.” New Testament

Introduction. Lectures given 19 & 24 Jan 2006. 35

James C. Walters. “Apocalyptic Setting.” New Testament Introduction.

Lecture given 26 Jan 2006. See also Richard A. Horsley. Jesus and the

Spiral of Violence. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1987): 32-3.


overcome but the new age is not yet fulfilled.36

It is important

to remember that this dualism is temporal, not cosmological as

has sometimes been asserted, and so sees the terrestrial situation

as continuous with the cosmic situation such that divine

intervention was expected within the historical moment.37

These changes in religious practice and theology were

brought about in response to globalizing forces exerted on Israel

by their Hellenistic rulers, especially in terms of culture,

knowledge base, economy, and polity. Training in the gymnasia

of Hellenistic philosophy became a mark of cultured life in

Jewish as well as gentile societies. The social structure itself

was adjusted, especially in terms of elite classes, as priestly

families (Oniads) and Judean elites (Tobiads) were replaced

with the Roman invested Herodian dynasty and Jewish religious

elites were replaced with Roman bureaucratic functionaries.

Building projects, maintenance of the military, and tribute to

ensure the passivity of Rome caused regional governments to

impose heavy tax burdens on the burgeoning social non-elites.38

These are all types of structural or institutional violence,

existing “when resources and powers are unevenly distributed,

concentrated in the hands of a few who do not use them to

achieve the possible self-realization of all members, but use

parts of them for self-satisfaction for the elite or for purposes of

dominance, oppression, and control of other societies or of the

underprivileged of that same society.”39

Richard A. Horsley employs a fourfold typology entitled

“The Spiral of Violence” to understand how this

structural/institutional violence develops into more overt forms

36

James C. Walters. “Paul of Tarsus.” New Testament Introduction. Lecture

given 2 Feb 2006. 37

Richard A. Horsley. Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: 138-9. 38

James C. Walters. “Historical Context I & II.” New Testament

Introduction. For a more extensive account see Richard A. Horsley. Jesus

and the Spiral of Violence: 29-33. 39

Report of the Consultation on “Violence, Nonviolence and the Struggle for

Social Justice.” (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1972): 6.


of violence.40

After the first stage, the structural violence itself,

comes a second stage of protest and resistance by the oppressed

people, often as not nonviolent but sometimes violent.41

The

“established order” responds with the third stage, repression,

which could be anywhere from mild to brutal but was carried

out with special ruthlessness by he Roman army in the case of

first century Palestine.42

When the cycle of resistance and

repression becomes unbearable for a large number of people, the

fourth stage comes about: either violent or nonviolent revolt.43

Apocalypticism played three roles in the response of oppressed

Jewish people to structural violence and repression:

remembrance of God’s promise of blessing and liberation,

creative envisioning of potential life without these forms of

violence, and critical demystifying of the interpretations of the

violence imposed by the established order.44

A Cosmopolitan Theoretic

The theoretical approach to globalization and violence

undertaken to this point should be understood as expansive

regarding both categories. The discussion of globalization seeks

to expand the category from descriptions that are too often too

narrowly construed only in terms of economics to take in the

mutually influencing causal forces and dynamics that account

for the ways in which influence is exerted on identity. Violence

is expanded to include structural violence in order to account for

the effects globalization is having on both inclusive and

exclusive identity types in order to avoid a narrow discussion of

violence as terrorism. Both expansions are for the sake of

comprehensive accuracy and honesty. If these are to be the

norms of categorical definition then a theoretical construct of

40

Richard A. Horsley. Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: 20-28. 41

ibid: 24-25, 33-43. 42

ibid: 25, 43-9. 43

ibid: 26, 49-54. 44

ibid: 144.


cosmopolitanism must take an opposite approach, namely of

constricting the category, because “we are not exactly certain

what it is, and figuring out why this is so and what

cosmopolitanism may be raises difficult conceptual issues.”45

Nevertheless, “cosmopolitanism, in its wide and wavering nets,

catches something of our need to ground our sense of mutuality

in conditions of mutability, and to learn to live tenaciously in

terrains of historic and cultural transition.”46

While

cosmopolitanism is still a useful category, it needs to be

constrained due to lack of definition, in contrast to globalization

and violence that needed to be expanded due to overly narrow

definitions.

Actually, the notion that cosmopolitanism lacks

definition is imprecise because the real problem is not that there

is no definition but that there are too many contradictory

definitions that serve to deny cosmopolitanism any kind of

cultural or intellectual currency. The aspects of

cosmopolitanism to be developed here will seek to avoid the

pitfalls of many of these contradictory definitions and elucidate

a coherent and consistent cosmopolitan theory in response to the

contemporary experience of globalizing violence. The pitfalls to

be avoided include association “with ‘the revolt of the elites’,

the inability of upper and middle class groups to sustain a sense

of responsibility towards the growing numbers of the excluded

around the world”47

and the danger that cosmopolitansim “can

be seen as just an extension of the Enlightenment’s Eurocentric

humanism, retaining much of its sense of self-importance and

universalistic authority.”48

Avoiding these will mean

specifically taking up the very responsibility that

45

Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh

Chakrabarty. “Cosmopolitanisms.” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 577. 46

ibid, 580. 47

Mike Featherstone. “Cosmopolis: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture &

Society 19.1–2 (2002): 1. 48

Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh

Chakrabarty. “Cosmopolitanisms:” 3.


cosmopolitanism is sometimes charged with reneging and

transcending modern western self-righteousness.

Cosmopolitan Virtue and Contextualized Detachment

One of the side effects of the hopefully more

comprehensively accurate and honest exposition of globalization

articulated here is that it also manages to highlight both the

problems and possibilities entailed in the phenomenon observed.

Bryan Turner draws upon the possibilities inherent in

globalization in articulating a theory of cosmopolitan virtue:

“As globalization brings about cultural hybridization,

globalism multiplies and brings into question the

‘plausibility structures’ that are competing for authority and

legitimacy. The speed and interactive capacity of

electronic communication imposes an endless reflecivity

about religious phenomena and subjectively undermines

the plausibility of an authoritative, compelling, or final

vocabulary of divinity … Globalization opens up the

possibility of an ethical concern (cosmopolitan virtue) for

the authenticity and survival of other cultures, and that

recognition of our common frailty and precariousness can

provide a foundational ontology to underpin a shared

community.”49

Of course, this leaves the question unanswered as to whether

concern for the “survival of other cultures” would be necessary

without globalization. Nevertheless, Turner points out, similarly

to the position taken here, that globalization is nothing new, at

least not for religion, if not inherent to the human condition.50

While Immanuel Kant is responsible for introducing the

concept “cosmopolitan” in its modern form, it was originally

developed by Greek Stoics philosophers and is etymologically

49

Bryan S. Turner. “Globalization and the Future Study of Religion.” in

Slavica Jakelic and Lori Pearson eds. The Future of the Study of Religion.

(Leiden: Brill, 2004): 106. 50

ibid: 120.


derived from the Greek words κοσμος (“the order of nature or

the universe”) and πολις (“the order of human society”),51

or

“being a citizen of two worlds.”52

It is easy to understand why,

in the face of such a massive appropriation of responsibility,

cosmopolitans often do not measure up to their own aspirations.

In order to avoid such reneging, Turner takes a surprising turn in

his articulation of cosmopolitan virtue by putting Socratic irony

at the center of his project. “The principal component of

cosmopolitan virtue is thus irony, because the understanding of

other cultures is assisted by some emotional distance from our

local culture.”53

He describes the ironic stance in terms of two

pairs of properties: hot/cool identity or loyalty and thick/thin

community or solidarity. Cosmopolitan virtue forms thin

communities characterized by anonymity, mobility, and

disconnection and cool solidarities characterized by

unidimensionality and high definition.54

For Turner, those who

adopt such a stance will “always hold their views about the

social world in doubt, because such views are always subject to

revision and reformulation.”55

The comprehensive components

of cosmopolitan virtue are as follows:

1. Irony, both as a cultural method and as a contemporary

mentality in order to achieve some emotional distance

from our own local history and culture.

2. Reflexivity with respect to other cultural values and a

recognition that all perspectives are culturally and

historically conditioned and contingent.

3. Scepticism towards the grand narratives of modern

ideologies.

4. Care for other cultures, especially Aboriginal cultures,

arising from awareness of their precarious condition

and hence acceptance of cultural hybridization.

51

Mike Featherstone. “Cosmopolis: An Introduction:” 2. 52

Ulrich Beck. “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies.” Theory,

Culture & Society 19.1–2 (2002): 18. 53

Bryan S. Turner. “Globalization and the Future Study of Religion:” 127. 54

ibid: 128-9. 55

ibid: 129.


5. An ecumenical commitment to dialogue with other

cultures, especially religious cultures.

6. Nomadism, in the sense of never being fully at home

in cultural categories or geo-political boundaries, and

constant awareness of difference and otherness that

these categories and boundaries exclude.56

Socratic irony only half solves the problem though. To

complete the turn, Turner adds the concept of vulnerability as

motivating factor for positive cross-cultural interaction.

“Because as human beings we are vulnerable, we are dependent

upon one another for support in satisfying our needs and

securing our lives. Our vulnerability is an important component

of our dependency and interconnectedness with other people.”57

All of these components conform nicely to the definition of

cosmopolitanism from Ulrich Beck: “the central defining

characteristic of a cosmopolitan perspective is the ‘dialogic

imagination.’ By this I mean the clash of cultures and

rationalities within one’s own life, the ‘internalized other.’”58

One of the central problems with the cosmopolitanism

espoused by Turner is that it is not ironic enough regarding its

own socio-political situatedness. This becomes clear when the

question is posed, from what does irony provide distance? One

answer is contained in the first component of cosmopolitan

virtue: “our own local history and culture.” This is clarified

when Turner says “irony may only be possible once one already

has an emotional commitment to a place. Patriotism, in this

sense, may be not only compatible with irony, but its

precondition.”59

Turner is already revealing the continued

centrality of the nation-state in his frame of reference or

Weltenschauung that has not been challenged by the irony he

56

Bryan S. Turner and Chris Rojek. Society and Culture: Principles of

Scarcity and Solidarity. (London: SAGE, 2001): 223. 57


Ulrich Beck. “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies:” 18. 59

Bryan S. Turner. “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism.”

Theory, Culture & Society 19.1–2 (2002): 55.


promotes when saying “ironists are homeless people who are in

some sense dislodged from their traditional worlds and find

themselves in new situation where old answers no longer work.

They are inclined toward reflexivity, because they get the point

of hermeneutic anthropology. In this anthropologically

reflexive context, the world is a site of contested loyalties and

interpretations.”60

While he is clearly inclined toward

reflexivity, his loyalty to the nation-state is not contested. He

clearly wants to avoid the pitfall of Eurocentrism: “My proposal

for cosmopolitan virtue is addressed to precisely those powers

responsible for genocide in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo and

Rwanda, and equally for global warming, the global narcotics

industry and the global sales of small arms. These virtues are

elitist in the sense that they are initially addressed to those in

power to exercise a set of obligations.”61

But would it be

possible for Turner to maintain his patriotism if the irony he

wants to bring to bear upon it traced the causal chain back to the

powers at least partly responsible for those genocides and it

turned out that his homeland was to be found at the source?

What would happen when the result of exercising irony

demonstrated that the very establishments of the states he lists

are due to the imperialist practices of his homeland? What will

be the object of ironic reflection when the rug of the nation-state

is pulled out from under?

Turner finally shows himself incapable of fully

theorizing a response to globalization when he says “classical

cosmopolitanism was a necessary product of Roman

imperialism, but contemporary globalization cannot be easily or

effectively dominated or orchestrated by a single political

power.”62

Turner admits that he focuses on cultural

globalization as opposed to the more comprehensive approach to

the term taken here. Nevertheless, his claim can only be true in

either respect of globalization if the nation-state is understood to

60


Bryan S. Turner. “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism:” 61. 62

Bryan S. Turner. “Globalization and the Future Study of Religion:” 128.


be the sole means of exercising political power. Friedman’s

“Globalization 2.0,” which began over 200 years ago,

demonstrates that political power can be and is being carried out

by multinational, international, and transnational organizations,

especially through economic means.63

This is not to say that the

nation-state is entirely irrelevant; the tension exerted between

these organizations and nation-states is part of what generates

the driving forces of globalization. Furthermore, the tension is

creative in the sense that actors operating under a single τελος

are manipulating it. There is not a single organizational

structure, but many organizational structures are unified in terms

of will by being oriented toward the same goals and by

exercising the same imperialistic means of achieving them.

There is, in fact, a single political power at work. Failing to

recognize this should not be surprising given an inadequate

theoretic of globalization coupled with a response that has not

been followed through to completion.

Nevertheless, it is never a good idea to throw the baby

out with the bathwater, and so we turn to Amanda Anderson to

rescue the irony Turner tried to establish. Anderson, working

out of the fields of literary and cultural theory, requires making

a shift from the language of cosmopolitanism to the language of

detachment, with the added benefit of clarifying the link

between cosmopolitanism and irony. “I favor detachment as an

umbrella term which, in my usage, can refer not only to the

more strictly cultural and internationalist practices found under

the rubric of cosmopolitanism, but also to those systemic or

objectifying critique of power that characterize social science or

critical theory.”64

The link between cosmopolitanism and irony

63

Note that I am expanding Friendman’s claim slightly to include more than

corporations and more than economic power. 64

Amanda Anderson. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the

Cultivation of Detachment. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): 31.

Note also that on this page and the subsequent one Anderston offers a

critique of cosmopolitanism in a different language but with the same point

as my critique of Turner.


is seen here because she uses the term detachment to describe

the same phenomenon of irony that Turner seeks to capture but

links it directly to cosmopolitanism itself. Furthermore, her

conception of detachment is going to display more humility than

irony in Turner right from the start because her project is to

describe “a prevalent Victorian preoccupation with distinctly

modern practices of detachment, a preoccupation characterized

by ambivalence and uncertainty about what the significance and

consequences of such practices might be.”65

Already, Anderson

is advocating a double reflexivity: first upon the object and then

upon the practice of reflexion itself. This approach might be

better termed a praxiological approach in that it includes a

reflection upon practice.

While recognizing the many critiques of detachment,

especially by postmodern critics, Anderson sets them aside as

having an inadequately narrow conception of the category,

instead asserting that different types of detachment have become

prevalent. “The emphases are simply reversed, as irony and

radical disaffiliation are elevated over the now disparaged ideals

of disinterestedness, objectivity, and reason.”66

It is not that

detachment has been abandoned; it is simply that some types of

detachment have been found to be inadequate to the

circumstances and so other types have been taken up. For

example, “Queer theory strongly valorizes certain forms of

detachment in its radical anti-essentialism, in its paradoxical

conception of communities of disidentification, and in its

political investment in parody and other subversive practices of

denaturalization.”67

Furthermore, she finds in the debates

between Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer that

“critical reflection or postconventional critique can take a

plurality of forms, including reflective return to tradition or

65

ibid: 3. see also ibid: 180. 66

ibid: 27. Note the inclusion of irony as a type within the category of

detachment. This is a more narrow use of irony than Turner whose usage is

equivalent to Anderson’s detachment. 67

ibid: 26.


primary affiliations, a committed devotion to systemic analysis

and wholesale social transformation, or a persistent attitude of

rebellion or irony.”68

Ironically, it is precisely such an irony for

which Turner is unable to account in his exposition of the term.

Anderson ultimately rescues the relevance of detachment

in a tour de force explication including motivation by “various

aspirations and ambivalences”69

and also:

The cultivation of detachment involves an attempt to

transcend partiality, interests, and context: it is an

aspiration toward universality and objectivity. The norms

through which that aspiration finds expression may be

situated, the aspiration may always be articulated through

historically available forms, but as an aspiration it cannot

be reduced to a simple form of illusion, or a mere

psychological mechanism. There are practitioners of

detachment who are as certain of their achievement as Fish

is of his argument, but there are also practitioners of

detachment who are ambivalent, hesitant, uneasy, and

sometimes quite thoughtfully engaged in a complex process

of self-interrogation and social critique.70

Embedded in this explication is an important clue to the success

of her theory, especially as it answers the question, to where

does the subject detaching from the (as yet still undefined)

object detach? Whence does the detached observer project their

gaze? Many of the criticisms of detachment are really attacking

the notion of a “view from nowhere,”71

which “is always

actually a view from somewhere, a somewhere determined not

only by the social and cultural identity of the author but also by

historical and cultural horizons more broadly construed. Yet to

call a practice of detachment situated is not quite the same thing

as adopting a prevailing attitude of suspicion or dismissal

68

ibid: 29-30. 69

ibid: 177. 70

ibid: 33. 71

ibid: 5. Quoting Thomas Nagel. The View from Nowhere. (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1986).


toward it.”72

She admits that there is no such thing as a “view

from nowhere,” and so provides for a somewhere whence to take

the view. It is this somewhere as opposed to “nowhere” that

makes this theory a contextualized detachment.

The validity of the critique of “the view from nowhere”

without providing a somewhere is what makes Turner incapable

of articulating a relevant notion of irony. He is forced to cast his

ironic gaze only from within and so is never able to take the

truly critical stance that Anderson finds quite possible: “In

extreme instances, cultural conditions might even require the

social critic to become an exile, to radically separate him- or

herself from the reified customs and practices of a corrupt

society. In this conception, then, some form of disidentification

(as a radicalization of postconventionality) structures social

criticism itself and may lead in rare instances to actual or virtual

separation from a particular society.”73

Contrary to critics of

detachment who are “unable to imagine critical distance as a

temporary vantage, unstable achievement, or regulative idea: it’s

all or nothing,”74

Anderson carves out short-lived spaces whence

to engage the object of the detached gaze. This leaves three

questions as yet unanswered: what are these short-lived spaces?

how can one move into them? and what is the object of the

detached gaze?

Anderson does not answer the first question directly, but

it is hard to believe that she envisions the short-lived spaces as

purely fictive imaginings as they would be hardly more relevant

than “the view from nowhere.” Even though the literary works

she engages are fictional, they are meant to have meaning for

real people and so the relevance question is still valid. Instead,

it is more likely that she would encourage the critic to

imaginatively cross over into the life and context of a concrete

other. This is where Turner’s notions of dependency and

72


Cultivation of Detachment: 5. 73

ibid: 27. 74

ibid: 32.


interconnectedness come into play by providing a relevant

motive for (value in) engaging the short-lived spaces of concrete

otherness: we are finally dependent upon the other to satisfy our

own needs and secure our own lives. The short-lived spaces are

people, places, things and ideas that are significantly different

from where the subject presently stands and so other. This leads

to the second question of means for moving into these spaces

but with the caveat added by the notion of dependency that such

means should achieve alterity while preserving the otherness of

the other.

Miroslav Volf offers a profound answer to this second

question, successfully fulfilling the caveat, in his theology of

embrace. Volf describes four movements that constitute an

embrace. It must be noted that all four movements must be

present for a successful embrace to occur. The first movement,

opening the arms, is not only an indication of willingness to

engage the other but an invitation borne in desire to do so. The

second movement, waiting, recognizes that an embrace cannot

be a motion in one direction but must be reciprocated by the one

being embraced. The third movement, closing the arms, is the

goal of embrace indicated by reciprocity and a soft touch, which

preserves the otherness of the one being embraced by coming to

“the ability to not understand.” It also excludes those not held

within the arms; the view from somewhere is not a view from

everywhere. Last, in opening the arms in the fourth movement,

the other is allowed to remain other, as opposed being absorbed

into the subject, and difference may continue to be negotiated.75

The concept that makes embrace superior to inclusive or

exclusive identities is “the ability to not understand.” As posited

by Z.D. Gurevitch, this ability comes through a process of

dialogue that moves beyond the twofold movement from the

“inability to understand” to the “ability to understand.”

Gurevitch posits a fourfold movement that begins with the

previous two steps and then moves on to the “inability to not

75

Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of

Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996): 140-7.


understand” and finally, the “ability to not understand.” This

movement requires “a different type of ability and power – not

that of additive knowledge (more information and explanations),

but rather that of giving up information and explanation to make

the already familiarized strange again.”76

In other words, this

movement allows for the preservation of the otherness of the

other.

This leaves the third question that must be answered

anew after the inadequacy of the nation-state response exposed

in Turner: what is the object of the detached gaze? The situated

self. Such an answer requires some explication. First, it begs

the question, situated where? At this point in the process of

detachment, the self is situated in two places: in its source

context from which it detached and in its detached context to

which it detached. It is from the detached context that the self

considers itself as situated in the source context. However, the

condition is actually more complex due to the praxiological

approach Anderson takes with its double reflexivity to consider

the practice of detachment. This means that a second stage of

detachment to yet another somewhere is necessary in order to

have a context from which to consider the first detached context.

This process could seemingly go on ad infinitum! Indeed, such

a process seems to be the most gracious reading of what Turner

is trying to get at by advocating for thin communities and cool

solidarities. Of course, the secondary and following levels of

detachment are not directly relevant to the particular concern

that instigated the movement of detachment in the first place but

are indirectly relevant as they obliquely and transiently justify

and confirm the conclusions drawn from the vantage of the

primary detachment. Also, it would be entirely consistent with

the desire to justify and confirm, albeit obliquely and transiently,

76

Z.D. Gurevitch “The Power of Not Understanding: The Meeting of

Conflicting Identities.” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 25.2

(1989): 163. This paragraph and the previous are excerpted from my

“Ecclesiology and Identity.” unpublished manuscript. (Fall 2004): 4.


for one of the subsequent levels of detachment to move back to

the source context.77

The second area of necessary explication comes up in

reference to the notion of self. Robert Cummings Neville

recognizes the imperialistic fallacy of essentializing human

nature.78

Furthermore, some social constructivists would like to

claim that the search for the self is like peeling an onion only to

discover, after peeling away all of the layers, that there is no

core, that the layers themselves constitute the onion. Both of

these are correct. Claiming an essence to human nature is an

inclusivistic move that then seeks to conform the natures of

every human being to it imperialistically. Also, the self is only a

self in relation to the other like God is only god in relation to

those others for whom God is god.79

Nevertheless, Neville

admits that there is “something very like” a self, namely that

which is in relationship. “The essence of a person is how that

person moves through intentionality structures uniquely his or

her own and in significant measure the person’s own responsible

creation.”80

Notice that essence here is not understood

universally but particularly and so every person has a particular

essence, is a self, who cannot be a priori prescribed.

77

This can perhaps be best understood in terms of “orientational pluralism”

as developed in S. Mark Heim. Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion.

pgs. 129-44. Heim is not quite willing to give up the normativity of the

source context, at least for the source self, whereas I am more willing to do so

while still privileging the source context in the sense of a “first among

equals.” 78

Robert Cummings Neville. “Is There an Essence of Human Nature?” in Is

There a Human Nature? ed. Leroy S. Rouner. (Notre Dame, IN: University

of Notre Dame Press, 1997): 92-109. 79

This notion of God as god in relation is in continuity with what I

understand Robert Cummings Neville to be doing in Symbols of Jesus: A

Christology of Symbolic Engagement. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press, 2001): 32-44, esp. 36. For a more thorough explication, see

his God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God. (Albany,

NY: SUNY Press, 1992). 80

Robert Cummings Neville. Symbols of Jesus: 219.


One of the primary things that a self does is to act

subjectively by taking others as objects. This is the notion of

“movement through” in Neville’s definition of the essence of a

person above: the implication is that a self applies the

intentionality structures, or at least peers through them as

through a lens, in order to grasp the world around. Furthermore,

one of the objects the self seeks to grasp subjectively is in fact

the self; hence the need for detachment or irony. Rudolf

Bultmann claims that this is impossible: “The relying self is my

existential self; the other self on which I rely, taking it as

something objective, is a phantom without existential reality.”81

To the contrary, if the self cannot take itself as object, then the

only possible means of orientation through intentionality

structures is by grasping and manipulating the external objects

of experience: imperialism.82

Instead, the self subjectively takes

itself as object in order to properly orient itself amidst all of the

other objects of experience. This act is the responsible and

ongoing creation and adaptation of intentionality structures

through which the self interacts with the rest of the world. Both

must be real or else the self is not really properly oriented

(although it still may not be) because there must be both

something oriented and something that orients. In this case, the

self is simultaneously both, albeit acting in different roles and so

differentiated. Turner ended up having the self become

differentiated or detach within itself and the types of detachment

subject to critique seek to differentiate or detach to nowhere.

Instead, the self detaches to the other objects to experience in

order to properly orient itself amongst them.

81

Rudolph Bultmann. “What Does it Mean to Speak of God?” in Faith and

Understanding. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969): 56. 82

Actually, Bultmann would probably claim that the self orienting itself is a

work. Instead, the orientation of the self comes about purely as a gift from

God. I am more willing to accept a bit of pelagianism and admit human

participation in the process of sanctification.


After such abstract considerations, it is important to

return to the more practical question: so what? How is this

helpful as a response to globalizing violence? I want to suggest

two possibilities. First, Turner is right to direct his

cosmopolitan virtue to those responsible for globalizing violence,

even though he is insufficiently critical in understanding the role

of the nation-state in exercising that violence. The imperialism

that brings about globalizing violence cannot simply reorient the

objects of experience around it, (that would simply be more

imperialism), but must instead reorient itself in relation to those

it is violating. The detachment required for such a project

cannot be undertaken to a “view from nowhere” but must

simultaneously be self-critical of the imperialistic tendency to

overcome the other in detaching to a view from the perspective

of the other. Of course, actually getting imperialists to adopt

such a practice is another matter entirely!

Second, Z.D. Gurevitch concludes her analysis of

dialogue between conflicting identities by noting the power of

moving from “the inability to not understand” to “the ability to

not understand.” She notes that “an impasse brings about a

mutual realization of defeat – the defeat of the dialogue itself,”

but then “what seems like a defeat becomes a triumph – yet this

is not the triumph of the self, but of the other as other for the

self.”83

This analysis strikes a strongly christological chord.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus engaged conflicting identities:

intra Jewish and Jewish-gentile, as well as the conflicting

identities of the people of God and God-self. This engagement,

which sought to move beyond the inability to not understand,

resulted in the crucifixion. On Good Friday, those who

recognized Jesus as the messiah, the Christ, experienced the

defeat of the mission of God, the defeat of the dialogue between

conflicting identities. And yet, what seemed like a defeat

became a triumph on Easter Sunday. The resurrection was not

83

Z.D. Gurevitch “The Power of Not Understanding: The Meeting of

Conflicting Identities:” 172.


the triumph of God for God but was the triumph of God become

human as humanity for God.84

The “ability to not understand” can be a resurrectional

experience for those for whom understanding is a central part of

the human project. Letting go of the impulse toward

understanding creates space for valuation of otherness and an

aesthetic response. Often enough, it means taking reality more

seriously in its otherness than an obsessive grasping for

knowledge. For example, when learning about Minjung

theology, we were told not to try to understand the concept of

Han. It is too particular to the cultural ethos of Korea and

cannot be understood even by many Koreans who participate in

it, let alone outsiders for whom it is not part of the intentionality

structure. Furthermore, “the ability to not understand,” as a

resurrectional experience, resists the imperialist inclusivist

impulse to make the other like the self by applying humility to

self-righteousness and so exposing its roots in (often unfounded)

existential fear and angst. Similarly, it resists the exclusivist

urge to violence by making the otherness of “them” not only

acceptable but also valuable and so exposes the roots of

exclusivism in the same (often unfounded) existential fear and

angst as the inclusivists.

The constrained cosmopolitanism presented here

attempts to avoid many of the pitfalls of other cosmopolitanisms.

It would be irresponsible not to point out a particular definition

that the explication here not only seeks to avoid but seeks to

redress. Anderson cites Tim Brennan who claims, “that

cosmopolitanism, particularly in present-day America, is fully

compatible with a neocolonial nationalism. Indeed, he argues

that America ideologically forwards its own culture as the global

culture, using a mystified cosmopolitanism to advance its own

84

Much of this paragraph to this point is excerpted from my “Ecclesiology

and Identity:” 4-5.


interests through global capitalism.”85

The cosmopolitanism

endorsed here seeks to counter this by insisting that the other is

not to be overcome or displaced in the process of embrace but is

to be valued as a willing partner in becoming a better self.

Transmodernity

Contrary to popular modernist opinion, most of the

violence occurring in the world today is not direct personal

violence as in the terrorism so central to media attention and

thus feared by the populace. In fact, most of the violence is

indirect structural violence being carried out especially through

economic means accompanying the processes of globalization

by modernist inclusivist imperialists against those who are other.

This is not a phenomenon that can best be explained

geographically or even ethnically because those same processes

of globalization have facilitated both a transmission of people to

non-native parts of the globe and facilitated the ideological

spread of modernist thinking virtually (again, pun intended) unto

all corners of the globe. As a result, some of the modernist

imperialists are from and continue to live in non-western

geographical societies, and in fact their imperialism is more

effective as a result. This is one of the ways cosmopolitanism

can be construed to favor imperialism. Furthermore, some of

those colonized and exploited by the imperialists live in western

and traditionally modern countries and societies.

Perhaps the best presentation of and relevant response to

this experience is the notion of transmodernity as articulated by

Enrique Dussel.86

Contrary to the opinion of most moderns,

85


Cultivation of Detachment: 65. paraphrasing Tim Brennan. At Home in the

World: Cosmopolitanism Now. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 86

I am primarily going to engage Dussel and his notion of transmodernity as

it is expressed in Enrique Dussel. “Transmodernidad e Interculturalidad:

Interpretación desde la Filosofía de la Liberación.” (México City, México:

UAM-Iz., 2005): [online]. available from http://www.afyl.org/articulos.html.

accessed 19 Feb 2007. All translations are my own.

http://www.afyl.org/articulos.html


Dussel argues that cultural identities that moderns assume were

destroyed by colonialism are in fact still extant by various

means and in various forms. “These cultures have been in part

colonized, … but in the majority structure of their values have

been more excluded, depreciated, negated, and ignored than

annihilated.”87

Because the cultures are not modern, and so can

neither be postmodern, they irrupt “as from nowhere” from the

perspective of modernity that is incapable of recognizing alterity,

and so are termed transmodern. The alternative perspective

offered by these seemingly invisible cultures are similarly

impossible to the modern mindset, being that they do not follow

modern methods and assumptions in developing solutions to the

problems modernity and postmodernity face.

The first step in the theory of transmodernity is affirming

the self-worth of the identities of the colonized cultures, and

“negating the negation”88

of those cultures, to begin the process

of decolonization. “This first step is a remembering of the past

from an identity which either had been before modernity or that

has evolved imperceptibly in inevitable and secret contact with

modernity.”89

This is followed by self-critique of the cultures

based on the assumptions of that culture. Furthermore, “the

intellectual critic should be someone located ‘between’ (in

betweeness) the two cultures (their own and modernity). This is

the idea of ‘border’ between two cultures as a place of ‘critical

thought.’”90

This is followed by a period of maturation, taking

time for “study, reflection, return to the texts or the constitutive

symbols and myths of the home culture, before or at least at the

same time as the dominion of the texts of the modern hegemonic

culture.”91

The necessity of this part of the process results from

the need to resist not only “the elites of other cultures” but also

“the eurocentrism of the very elites of the periferal, colonial,

87

ibid: 17. 88

ibid: 19. 89

ibid: 20. 90

ibid: 22. 91

ibid.


fundamentalist culture itself.”92

Finally, there is a call for

“transmodern liberators” who come from the “exteriority” of

modernity and embody these principles.93

These liberators

“should not deny all of modernity from a substantive purist

identity of their own culture” but should instead seek to

establish a “pluriverse,” in contrast to an “undifferentiated or

empty globalized unity,” out of critical intercultural dialogue.94

There are three things to be profitably drawn out from

this theory. First, this is a cosmopolitan theory that is clearly

against imperialism but is cosmopolitan because it seeks to

cultivate a process of detachment as part of a response to

globalizing violence. Indeed, it is the very “biculturality”95

of

the transmodern liberators who straddle the border of their own

culture and modernity that makes this a critical as opposed to a

purely reactionary enterprise. It may at first seem odd that

transmodernity carries the category of critique (criticism, critical)

over into its enterprise, as it is one of the centerpieces of modern

philosophizing. However, this carry over makes more sense in

light of Dussel’s rescuing of philosophical practice by

redefining it. “If, on the other hand, by ‘love of wisdom’ you

mean the intent of organized, reflexive discourse that permits a

certain ethical-ontological comprehension of the totality of that

which one has experienced of reality, following

methodologically diverse organizational criteria according to a

rational order in the discourse, that can have its own

development in each culture, evidently the theories emanated

from Taoism, Buddhism, Brahmanic ontology or the ‘wisdom’

of the amautas or the tlamatinime are authentic “philo-

sophias.”96

In fact, this notion of philosophy and the carryover

of critique, especially in the form of the adapted cosmopolitan

virtue developed above, centering on a notion of critical

92

ibid: 23. 93

ibid: 24. 94

ibid: 25. 95

ibid: 24. 96

ibid: 25.


detachment critical detachment, would seem to be necessarily

central to the process of intercultural dialogue.

Second, the notion of “pluriversality” seems to

inherently adopt a necessarily “ability to not understand.” In

order for a true global plurality to emerge, there must be an

indelibly incorporated notion of otherness so that it does not

simply collapse into mere uniformity. This means that there

must be a limit to the pursuit of the intercultural dialogue

significantly before the risk of uniformity becomes apparent.

The limit is not so much temporally situated between plurality

and uniformity so that there is tipping point after which

uniformity is inevitable. Instead it is an inbreaking of the

transcendent made recognizable by the cultivation of value in

otherness that will insist that the process of embrace be repeated

continually and will resist the assumption of understanding and

thus either including or excluding the other. It is precisely such

a cultivation that the adapted theory of cosmopolitan virtue

above seeks to articulate.

Finally, there is an interesting analogy between the

explicit utopianism in the transmodernity theory and the

apocalyptic worldview of second temple Judaism. Horsley

pointed out three roles of the apocalyptic worldview in resisting

structural violence: remembrance of God’s promise of blessing

and liberation, creative envisioning of potential life without

these forms of violence, and critical demystifying of the

interpretations of the violence imposed by the established order.

These three roles find their analogies in transmodernity:

remembering cultures that are assumed to be extinct and so

appear ex nihilo, envisioning during the process of maturation

by reflection on the constituting texts, symbols, and myths of the

culture, and critical demystifying by using the both the

categories of the culture and of modernity itself against the

globalizing European-North American culture, “whose


pretension of universality must be deconstructed from the

optical multifocality of each culture.”97

There is a further analogy between the project of

transmodernity and the means by which the earliest recorded

Christ believers sought to resist the Roman Empire by recourse

to constituting texts, symbols and myths of their culture.

William E. Arnal elucidates this in his discussion of these Christ

believers who created Q1 which was later redacted into a Q

document before being incorporated into the Gospels according

to Matthew and Luke along with the Gospel according to Mark.

“The critique is simultaneously progressive and reactionary: it

harks back to a past that was no more genuinely beatific than the

authors’ present, but simultaneously it uses that past as a lever to

offer serous class-based criticisms of the present order.”98

Similarly, transmodernity harks back to cultures thought to be

extinct while recognizing that these cultures carry their own sets

of baggage but still uses those cultures to critique the present

order. “What is at issue here is not a rejection of native

traditions but an effort to revive those traditions, to apply a

brand of nativistic revival against the encroachments of

imperialism.”99

Conclusion: Ecumenical Spirituality

Globalization is nothing new. What is new is that the

parasitic cancer of this planet, humanity in the view of The

Matrix, has sucked dry the planetary resources and so has now

turned on itself. There will, indeed, be a cure: either humanity

will consume itself, and probably the rest of the planet with it, or

it will find an alternative essence, an alternative way of orienting

itself in relation to God, to the rest of creation, and to itself. The

Christian hope is in the latter vision and the hope has already

97

ibid: 24. 98

William E. Arnal. Jesus and the Villiage Scribes. (Minneapolis: Fortress

Press, 2001): 202. 99

ibid: 203.


begun to be realized in the person of Jesus Christ. The question

is, will that realization come to fruition in us?

Spirituality is not merely the work of the Holy Spirit in

the bodies, hearts, minds, and spirits of people, although it is

surely that. Spirituality is also the intentional seeking after the

Holy Spirit in body, heart, mind, and spirit by people. Life in

the Spirit must be attentively cultivated with great care and

perseverance. What I have attempted to elucidate here is a

framework for living such a life, an intentionality structure

through which the Holy Spirit might be discerned from amongst

all of the other spirits blowing about in the world.

I claim that this spirituality is ecumenical. What I do not

intend by that is to have constructed a house (ecumenical is

derived from the Greek word οικος meaning “house”) in which

everyone on the planet should or must live. Instead, I seek to

provide a set of tools to use in building a house together. This

house should be hospitable to all of our human sisters and

brothers as well as the extensive extended family we have been

graced with in creation who will bring their own unique tools to

the process of construction and who should be warmly

welcomes as partners in the task. In God’s house there are many

rooms, each decorated according to the way(s) of being of its

inhabitant(s), each of immeasurable value in its otherness.

Life is short and we do not have too much time to

gladden the hearts of those who walk the way with us: so be

swift to love and make haste to be kind.100

Go with God, and

may the peace of Christ go with you.

100

attributed to Marcus Borg.



Globalization and Communication

Preparedness: Risk Assessment of SARS

CChhoouu KKuueeii--TTiieenn11

his article reflects the emergency measures taken by

the Taiwanese government during the SARS outbreak,

particularly risk assessment and risk communication. Being

trapped in the traditional mode of medical emergency measures,

the government failed to consider the dialectical influences

among society, psychology, environment, and medicine. Due to

ignorance, risks spread throughout society. In addition, the

timing of information propaganda and communication was

unsatisfactory. Thus, fears arose among the public, particularly

those who were not clear about SARS infection routes. This

article specifically indicates that emergency measures models

1 Prof. Dr. Chou Kuei-Tien teaches at the Graduate Institute of National

Development, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

T



http://ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~ndintu/english_pages/eindex.htm

http://ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~ndintu/english_pages/eindex.htm

http://www.ntu.edu.tw/english/main.html


should cooperate with multi-dimensional risk assessment and

risk communication, as well as social and ethical concerns.

Therefore, a set of communicative mechanisms can be

constructively developed in response to globalizational risks.

Preface

The sustainable existence of modern countries and states

has been threatened by various risks. These risks, such as the

global financial crisis, the attack on the twin Tower on

September eleven, Taiwan’s earthquake in September 21, SARS,

floods, and nuclear accidents, result in serious uncertainties in

society, the economy, ecology, health, ethics and culture. Thus,

it is essential to face and recognize the essence of a modern

“risk society” (Beck, 1986; Chou, 1998) and to understand the

risks resulting from close interactions that occur in the

globalization process. Also, it is a great challenge for a modern

society to construct and combine local and national resources in

advance in order to form risk preventive mechanisms2.

For instance, globalizational risks caused by SARS are

categorized as the following: 1) unpredictable factors of disease

outbreak; 2) unmanageable strategies due to spreading viruses; 3)

transboundary spread of viruses. The SARS outbreak had

implication on the following aspects: medical care, sanitation,

tourism, air transportation, industry, investment, economy,

finance, unemployment, fears of social discrimination, social

trust, social ethics, politics, and national competitiveness. Hence,

a set of macroscopic preventive mechanisms should begin with

2 These characteristics of globalizational risks can be analyzed by the

‘globalization’ (Beck, 1999) and ‘dilemma of risk assessment’ theories

(Ravetz, 1999). Based on these two theories, the author argues that since risk

impacts come rapidly, globalization that is interpreted by knowledge theory

and high-tech development arguments has actually caused dilemmas due to

the uncertainties and uncontrollability of globalizational risks. In fact, such

contexts were mentioned in Bell’s 1995 book - the Coming of Post-Industrial

Society, which states that modern societies extensively apply knowledge

theory thus causing ‘indeterminacy’.

Globalizational Risk 91

overall risk assessment and then, a cautious process of

diversified and two-way risk communication should be carried

out. Based on this, the government needs to immediately focus

on constructing risk control mechanisms and integrating various

agents and resources in response to this globalizational risk.

Risk control and preventive mechanisms mainly focus on

how to rapidly and forethoughtfully reduce unlimitedly

expanding risk impacts by methods such as intervening in

harmful impacts caused by globalizational risks, establishing

risk emergency centers, carrying out cross-field political risk

decision-making, prompting risk communication and

propaganda, and utilizing diverse strategic instruments. By

enabling preventive actions, these mechanisms equip society

with the ability to confront the various impacts already

mentioned, hence, building bottom-up social risk preventive

networks.

Moreover, it is essential to construct dynamic, dialectical

and periodic risk indexes and to carry out preventive

mechanisms. State intervention is rather important at this point.

The role of the state is to integrate the resources of the central

authorities and the grassroots, then to establish information

delivery systems, emergency reaction systems, social mutual aid

systems, and resource deployment systems.

Based on the above suggestions, the author analyzes the

impacts brought about by SARS, which are deemed

globalizational risks. This article also examines the experiences,

systems, and preventive mechanisms of the state. Furthermore, it

points out the institutional deficiencies resulting from the

incomplete integration of social action resources.

Globalizational and glocalizational risks

The Characteristics of Globalizational risks


Globalization is both a trend of civilization and a challenge

of grand social transformation. The complexity of dissension

and integration constituted by globalization involves more value

disputes. This is because it makes society depart from traditional

paradigms and systems of resolving risks. As globalization

involves more and more variables and uncertainties, time limits

for making judgments and decisions become shorter (and some

may even need immediate resolution). Society shoulders also

more risks and challenges. Such that, people cannot be sheltered

by old models of operation and control.

From the 1990s, continuous breakthroughs in interactive

and high-tech industries (IT, genetic technology, and

nanotechnology) have gradually changed global society, the

economy, the media, labor, communication, and social

identification. They have also brought unpredictable risks and

challenges in terms of ecology, ethics, medical care, and social

injustice.

Due to the spread of globalization, these risks permeate the

world and become transnational, even surpassing the problem

resolution ability of states. Accordingly, world politics,

economies, cultures, ecology, and social order encounter stricter

challenges because of globalization (Giddens, 2001). In other

words, the coming of globalizational risks declares that modern

affairs and institutional forms have entered a state of high

uncertainty, and thus inevitably, the world becomes a global

modern risk society3.

In addition, the characteristics of globalizational risks have

become unpredictable, fast, diffusive, uncontrollable,

unrecoverable, and able to unlimitedly expand and impact more

than a single area due to trans-areas and diverse affairs in close

interactions.

3 Beck emphasizes that globalization is a myth of liberalism in global

markets. Under the ideology of development and advancement, a ‘world risk

society’ is formed in terms of politics, the economy, technology, environment

and culture (identity and ethics) in world countries (Beck, 1999).


Globalizational risks are characterized by the following

(Chou, 2003):

1. Initially, globalizational risks emerge within the scope of

nation-states. Subsequently global effects expand from this one

single scope. In other words, the route through which risk

spreads expands from one single country or region to the global

stage.

2. Each risk problem is not only embedded in the framework of

political, economic, social and cultural contexts, but is rooted in

the power relationship, institutional contexts and political

culture of individual local societies. Relationships and contexts

embedded in global and local societies mutually influence each

other and this influence becomes a major factor resulting in risks.

For example, capital flow, industrial transformation, and

aggregation of local industries, which are brought about by the

competition of a global knowledge economy and high-tech

industry, all contribute to the difficulty of local financial control,

increasing unemployment, an enlargement of the poverty gap,

and the problem of emigration and immigration. These problems

impact on overall regional and global development. Global

tourism, commerce, and labor emigration and extensive

population flows make viruses spread even more rapidly. The

industrial era of tense global competition brings crises of

religious and ethical identification, and. this stimulates the rise

of local new religions, such as the Falun Gong. It even

challenges the stability of political control. With the

development of globalization, increasing risks in local societies

stimulate mutual dialectics between global and local arenas, thus

reproducing and duplicating globalizational risks in different

local societies.

3. In addition to globalizational and local dialectics, the spread

of risk should also value multilateral operations and network

nodes in different region4. Because of developments in different

4 The concept of ‘network nodes’ is from Castells’ 1996 book - The Rise of

the Network Society. The term is applied to explain that issues and activities

of globalization are fundamentally based on the foundation of global


local societies, mutual dynamic influences are generated. That is

to say, globalizational risks spread from a single nation or region

become global problems. In addition, through network nodes

around the globe, the dynamic spread effect is formed. That is,

globalizational and local risks are the result of mutual influences

within dense networks.

From the above viewpoint, the meaning of each

globalizational risk problem derived from different social and

cultural contexts should be valued. Moreover, every society has

its own distinct structures and operation logics, which are

embedded in its cultural or historical tradition. These structures

and logics form models of political and cultural conflicts, and

customs of public criticism. Hence, the process of prevalent

risks entering into local societies will inevitably encounter

political, institutional and cultural conflicts in local societies,

and further develop their own interpretation based on the

perspective of local societies. Accordingly, the author will

discuss the structural risk problems of Taiwanese society

regarding the SARS outbreak.

In the process of globalization, all operations of social risks

are linked with activities of network nodes. Network nodes refer

to organizations, institutes, or individuals around the world.

They represent all kinds of agents. Through the network, they

connect national and international activities and exert their

influence. The difference is that different nodes (such as

political parties, the media, social movement groups and

religious organizations) pose different degrees of influence in

society. In addition, influences that one single node may exert

can spread rapidly via the network according to the influence

level of risk issues, which may cause global-affected risk

problems.

information structures. Through different network nodes, globalizational

risks develop and spread rapidly. The author argues that these network nodes

are wide and they exist simultaneously. The effects they exert cannot be

limited within one single region or geographical boundary.


From the perspective of network nodes, the interactive

dialectics between local and globalizational risks can be more

clearly analyzed. That is, any risk outbreak in local societies can

be dynamically spread worldwide via network nodes, then

impact local societies and cause even more problems. Therefore,

under this principle, local risks cannot be concealed. Actually,

concealment and delayed reporting of local risks may cause

global impacts and local disasters5. At this time, major network

nodes should exert their influence by enhancing the

transparency of the media, information from the authorities and

administrative effectiveness in order to stimulate reformation.

We are so far unable to deal with globalizational risks

without open-minded insight and strategies. On the contrary,

problems under mutual dialectics within the open global

network should be foreseen. Issues of global finance, the

poverty gap, environmental and ecological damage, and

international human rights problems, to certain degree, are all

included in the structure of globalizational risk dialectics. More

importantly, we need to position ourselves with a more open

attitude in order to deal with the irreversible developments of

globalizational risks, including the high uncertainty, rapid

accumulation, and uncontrollability of transboundary risks, such

as those caused by SARS.

SARS as a globalizational risk

SARS can be viewed as a typical globalizational risk in line

with the European bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE]

crisis, the global greenhouse effect, and food safety uncertainty

5 Jänicke’s (1998) empirical studies point out that concealing and delaying

risk governance will stimulate the risk spread effect to other regions and may

cause more serious globalizational risks. One recent case in Asia occurred at

the end of 2002, when China concealed and delayed SARS risk governance

and emergency measures thus causing rapid risk spread through network

nodes, hence causing a global threat. In a very short time, impacts spread

from public health principles to other social and economic activities.


caused by biotech developments in GMOs, diminishing

biodiversity, and threat of elimination of the global by nuclear

weapons. In recent years, these risks have brought great

challenges to human health and our living environment.

The characteristics of SARS include: 1) Disease origins

unpredictable beforehand and inability to be traced after risk

outbreak (Lin, R-H, 2003); 2) Rapid virus spread after infection;

3) Difficult to control and immediately formulate corresponding

strategies in response to virus variation in different areas (Chang,

L-W, 2003; Chen, C-H, 2003). In addition, virus spread speed is

quick and rather transboundary. Besides causing great scientific

risks, related impacts rapidly spread across public health

principles through the agents of global network nodes6. They

continued to cause impacts in tourism, air transportation,

industry, investment, the economy, technology, finance and

unemployment. These impacts not only resulted in serious

economic loss and political tension, but also brought fear of

social discrimination. They shook social trust and ethics (Gu,

2003) and resulted in delays in national competitiveness.

The SARS outbreak caused immense cyclical influences.

Moreover, consequent effects were duplicated and reproduced

via the operation of global network nodes. From the perspective

of local society, as long as China and other Asian countries

failed to effectively control the disease, Taiwan would be

continuously affected by SARS, due to their close

interrelationship. Similar crises would then endlessly emerge,

thus causing great social and economic costs. Furthermore,

SARS mutated into local variants (e.g. in Taiwan and

6 Actions of network nodes refer to the following: a large number of media

reports, inappropriate handling due to government misconduct in public

health management mechanisms, large-scale intra-hospital infection due to

disease infection history concealment by patients and some hospitals, and

improper design of community quarantine. These facts caused social fears,

impact on the economy, and caused interpersonal relationship recession, and

isolation in trust. Different network nodes, including institutes, the media,

communities, or individual agents, were all able to develop cyclical

influences depending on the degree of seriousness of risk impact.


Singapore), which posed new threats to daily life in these

countries, consequently causing new risks that were unable to be

resolved in a short time. Before a vaccine is invented, risk

threats will exist. The SARS risk is a time-effective threat. At

the beginning of risk outbreak, the Taiwanese government

rushed to respond to the SARS risk by carrying out only limited

assessment of related health and economic effects. Thus, we

should reconsider performing multi-dimensional risk

assessments of society and ethics in order to enhance the

capacity of risk governance.

Globalizational risk contexts of SARS

SARS outbreak is a link in the chain of globalizational risk.

However, it cannot be observed from only a local perspective. In

particular, as globalizational risks erupt into local disasters and

political contexts, they often transform into distinct localized

risk problems, thus, the structure of local societies will influence

the process of how globalizational risks develop into local

threats.

In the late 1990s, Taiwan encountered various types of

disasters and risks, such as the 1996 Typhoon Herb, Typhoon

Tao-Chi in 1997, the 1997 global financial crisis, the 1999 921

Earthquake, Typhoons Na-Li and Hsiang-Shen in 2001, the

2002 Taipei drought crisis, and the 2003 SARS outbreak. Some

of them were natural calamities, and others were man-made

disasters. From an historical perspective, they are proof that

Taiwanese society has encountered highly intense and

continuous risk threats. On the one hand, these risks are global

in nature while on the other hand, they bring challenges to

Taiwanese society and turn it into a ‘risk society’. The question

is whether a local society develops a set of preventive

mechanisms and institutional culture in response to risk or not?

Based on the risk society theory, natural disasters or man-

made threats are not only simple environmental and ecological

problems. In fact, what is involved is the process of policy


decision-making and its institutional settings in a modern

society. For instance, these policies and institutions affect many

facets of modern life such as cement construction, dam control,

urban electricity, transportation, food security systems, and

medical systems. However, when a ‘simple’ natural disaster

happens in existing social structures, it can cause a more serious

institutional crisis, thus generating greater risk threats (Beck,

1986), that become political, social and institutional problems.

What the author intends to emphasize is that the essence of

globalizational risks is to be found in their rapid spread,

unpredictability, uncontrollability, and unlimited transboundary

impacts. Although scientific preventive mechanisms are set up,

it is also important to modify the viewpoints and strategies of

risk assessment and uncertainty communication in order to

develop a new paradigm of globalizational risk management.

And yet, what the author has observed is that, after a series

outbreak of serious local risks in Taiwan, there seemed to be no

reform either in the state or society in terms of concepts,

institution, and actions7. Society only undertook partial, limited

and temporary resolutions based on old paradigms and

imagination of risk management.

What is often seen is that technocrats carry out partial

emergency rescues based on old paradigms of scientific

positivistic assessment. Also, interactive civil networks do not

form long-term preventive integration. . These social contexts,

which are in need of modification, result in the ignoring,

delaying and deterioration of globalizational risks.

The half-modernized country and localized risks

7 Actually, many researchers have pointed out that the SARS outbreak is a

warning about global risks. If preventive systems cannot be established

globally and locally in advance, greater and more serious risks will emerge in

this century.


In addition to the above discussion of risk contexts in

local society, what also deserves discussion is the overall

structure of the risk society and what linkages exist between it

and the phenomena of globalization and modernization. Thus,

the author explores the institutional deficiencies of modern

Taiwanese society.

In May 2003, while Taiwan suffered because of the SARS

crisis and was reflecting on its emergency measures and crisis

management ability (Lin, S-L, 2003), the International Institute

for Management Development International declared that

Taiwan ranked sixth in the world in terms of national

competitiveness (Chen, Y-H, 2003). This situation was highly

ironic. On the one hand, Taiwan has high international

competitiveness; one the other hand, it is very institutionally

weak in risk problem resolution. Thus, what deserves

deliberation is: what kind of institutional deficiencies does

modern society have, and, does this result from different local

and global contexts?

Being trapped in the myth of national competitiveness,

Taiwan, as a modern country, is only a ‘half-modernized

society’ (Beck 1993), which worships economic drive,

technological competition, and the effectiveness of the free

market. The principle of these ideologies is basically modeled

on economic liberalism, which emphasizes market mechanisms

and effectiveness of private corporations. Also, the state trusts in

the effectiveness of technocrats and science experts. From the

1990s, with the dominion of international political and economic

powers, these principles developed into a globalizational

economy with close exchanges and interactions. On the contrary,

great political, economic, technological and ecological threats

emerged as well, such as political terrorism, global economic

financial crises, the Y2K computer virus, genetically modified

organisms, ozone holes, endangered species, and regional wars.

These systematic risks clearly imply that contemporary

globalizational societies have structural deficiencies, which in

turn jeopardize human beings themselves. According to Beck


(ibid.), such kinds of national and social contexts under global

competition can all be categorized as incomplete and self-

threatening to half-modernized countries.

Taiwan can possibly be considered a half-modernized

periphery state. This is because besides continuously imitating

the developmental logic of valuing economic development and

technological R&D, the state has systematically ignored

learning and reflecting on and constructing social, ecological

and cultural solutions to the problems. Thus, the state became a

production machine in the global system of labor division.

Under such contexts, institutional justice within a globalization

society has been seriously ignored and management has been

delayed 8

. With such a developmental background, examination

of the SARS outbreak exposes serious problems when we

examine national strategies. Taiwan comes out top in the world

ranking of national competitiveness (disregarding indexes of

public policy, Taiwan’s technological competitiveness ranks

third in the world, which is only behind Finland and the US).

However, the performance of the Taiwanese government was

inferior to that of Vietnam and Singapore, which made it seem

more like a Third World country trapped by disasters.

We are curious about what kinds of risk structures will be

developed under such developmental logic. Is the myth of the

free market truly embedded in local social systems? Or, does the

arbitrariness of technocracy dominate a state that values only

development (Yeh, 1997)? Do the above phenomena jointly

result in long-term unbalanced social development that

systematically ignores and therefore accumulates risks?

Consequently, on risk outbreak, technocrats still adopt unilateral

ideology and ignore overall risk assessments.

8 Structural problems of underdeveloped societies and institutional justice can

be demonstrated from various aspects. The author’s previous research

regarding gaps formed between technology and society can be referred to for

analyzing structural problems of the Taiwanese society, which is also a

‘double risk society’ (Chou, 2000 & 2002).


When Taiwanese society encountered the SARS outbreak,

fundamental structures of local risk society were revealed

through the media such as:

1) Scarce public health resources inputs and medical

systems marketization. Based on Chen’s research, of the 500

billion NT (estimated 15 billion USD) input into the medical

health budget, only 3% was used for public health prevention

(Chen, M-H, 2003).

2) Indulgence in the medical market (Huang, 2003) resulted

in ineffectiveness of the national medical dispatch system (Wei

and Lin, 2003).

3) Unilateral national risk assessment (which only focused

on emergency mobilization in public health and medical care)

ignored the features of globalizational risks such as rapid spread

and transboundary impacts.

4) The government neglected the importance of risk

communication. At the initial stage, society lacked quickly

integrated and reliable risk information. The media arbitrarily

duplicated and exaggerated the seriousness of the SARS risk,

thus generating public fear and impacting economic and social

activities (Chou, 2003).

5) The administration was limited in its ability to deal with

globalizational risks. It was the first time that the government

encountered this kind of risk, thus local health departments held

limited resources. Thus, the central authorities had the

responsibility to mobilize resources (Gu, 2003; Ho, 2003).

6) Citizens violated quarantine regulations. Besides

educating the public to abide by laws, it is important for citizens

to have interactive risk communication and information to

enable them to gain more knowledge in terms of legal rights and

obligations, and for SARS prevention.

7) Social autonomous action systems were not efficiently

integrated for the carrying out of risk preventive actions. From

the time of the SARS outbreak, many autonomous actions were

undertaken and information was released, which to a certain

degree established information transparency and social learning.


However, the government still lacked integrated action

mechanisms.

8) The government failed to establish integrated

precautionary risk control concepts and systems and lacked the

ability to integrate effective networks for combining national

and local resources (Chien, L-C, 2003; Lin, 2003; Ho, 2003).

As a matter of fact, the basic risk structures of local society

demonstrate the weaknesses and unbalance of risk governance.

Meanwhile, official unilateral risk assessment that only governs

medical emergencies ignore the integrating of social networks

and resources. It is observed that while encountering the SARS

risk, the government could only undertake partial rescue and

risk control. The state, which was in a state of panic and half-

paralyzed, was busy dealing with a medical mobilization system.

And, risk information was not spread to society. Society

suffered because of careless risk information and lacked

judgments and viewpoints about the overall economic and social

impacts. In other words, from the lessons of SARS risk handling,

we need to reflect on the various risk management experiences

in local society to build a set of preventive mechanisms.

Reconstructing risk preventive mechanisms:

Integrated risk assessment of globalizational risks: the

precautionary principle

A set of preventive paradigms should be established in

response to the uncertainty, uncontrollability, unpredictability

and ir-recoverability of globalizational risks. Actually, most

concepts of risk control in social science are still limitedly based

on the ideology of the nation-state, so they fail to provide

effective strategies in response to rapidly occurring risks. Hence,

a paradigm shift in theory and action is of great urgency.

Table 1: Comparisons between traditional risks and

globalizational risks


Traditional risks Globalizational risks

Risk source Easy to

predict/assess

Difficult to

predict/assess

Controllability

and recoverability

To a certain

degree

Serious damage;

difficult to recover

Impact results Assessable High uncertainty;

difficult to recover

Ways of risk

spreading

Direct spreading

to surroundings

Spreading through

global network nodes

Speed of risk

spreading

Controllable Uncontrollable

Areas being

affected

Regional From regional to

global

Fields being

affected

Single relative

area

Cross principle

impacts

State capability All-powerful state Weak state capability;

required transnational

cooperation

Social resources State-controlled

social resources

State-integrated social

resources

A new paradigm should not be situated within one single

discipline or unilateral way of thinking. In dealing with

globalizational risks that are transboundary and rapidly

spreading, a macro risk assessment should be undertaken. Such

a macro risk assessment is one that is able to govern

globalizational problems and can quickly control the structures

of local risks resulting from globalizational risks

Risk refers to the uncertainty of issue development.

Traditional risk assessment deems risk occurrence a matter of

probability. Accidents that have a high probability of breaking

out are basically able to be prevented, amended and are also

manageable. However, as social affairs (including political,

economic and technological affairs) are becoming more

complicated, new risk assessment deems risks are highly

uncertain, and so are the problems they cause. Unstable


conditions and structures of complicated risk factors are difficult

to predict and can only be partially prevented. More, if risk does

occur, the resulting disasters and problems involved can be

controlled and recovered in a short time. Hence, social order is

in need of reconstruction.

In addition, a macro risk assessment should be based on the

precautionary principle (Hajer, 1995), which combines the

concepts of risk assessment and risk prevention. The newly-

developed precautionary principle is gradually becoming valued

by world countries and is being carried out in the dimensions of

science, ecology, and health, particularly concepts and

regulatory measures concerning threats to biodiversity, ecology

and food security resulting from genetic engineering

development. The theory of the precautionary principle has

become an important way of thinking and a practical strategy,

while the world confronts increasing scientific uncertainties and

threats to global sustainable development. Thus, as we

undertake practice drills in risk control, unpredictable

consequences in various dimensions can be decreased to a

manageable degree9. That is, the precautionary principle has

become a principle to manage the uncertainty of globalizational

risks. As a result, it can be a basis for risk assessment and risk

governance.

Macro risk assessment includes six main elements: health risk

(life safety), economic risk, social risk (fear), ethical risk

(discrimination), unemployment, social security, and future risk

of vaccine application. These risk factors are closely interrelated

and can be mutually affected. Thus, as we face risk challenges,

9 The Executive Yuan regulated that people from epidemic areas should be in

quarantine for ten days. This was a preventive measure. However, economic

costs should be taken into consideration as well. The government helped to

relax the economic burdens of related industries to avoid enormous impacts

on industry and social security. People who were suspected of being

potentially infected with SARS should have been in quarantine either in

hospitals or in their homes. This preventive measure was to do with

legitimacy.


we should not only focus on one unilateral principle and ignore

the integrated effects caused by other risks.

Taking the SARS outbreak as an example of a newly-

developed globalizational risk, these health risks were the first

wave of threats that the Taiwanese people have encountered.

Second, social fears arose, which directly and indirectly

influenced the economy and industries such as tourism, airlines,

hotel businesses, transportation, education, and cultural

activities. These were considered the third wave risks. The

fourth wave risks were unemployment and social security

problems caused by economic risks. The fifth wave risks

involved ethical discrimination relating to social capital and

social trust (discrimination against medical faculties, infected

patients, their family members, colleagues and neighbors).

Finally, future SARS vaccines and new medicines will also

probably generate scientific uncertainty. These rapid,

transboundary and unlimited risk impacts should be controlled

and assessed with a macro vision risk assessment. More

importantly, these different types of risk may occur repeatedly.

That is, even though the SARS threat could be controlled, risk

impacts may still occur and cause great social costs10

.

Risk assessment and risk communication

Besides valuing macro risk assessment, risk communication

is often perceived as the essential process of how the public

accepts, perceives and responds to risk impacts. For example,

public dialectics on risk will consequently influence and

broaden social fears and be expanded to economic activities,

10

According to a newspaper report, from the perspective of risk assessment,

the epidemic prevention group led by Minister Lee should not come only

from medical and public health. Experts from various principles should be

recruited as well, such as those from legal, economic and social fields. Thus,

they can provide suggestions on risk features of the local society and carry

out more complicated and deliberate operations and risk control. For example,

the topics of human rights, patient rights, social customs of quarantine, social

discrimination and social safety should be re-examined.


ethical identity, human interaction, racial discrimination, and

political conflicts. SARS development in Taiwan is the best

example of this.

As risk communication becomes a basic procedure of risk

assessment, besides initial risk assessment concerning risk

source and primary impacts, risk communication turns into an

important and yet cautious constructive process. In addition, risk

is also a social construction process and result (Beck, 1996). In

the process of risk development, risk communication guides

public risk perception, understanding and action. Subsequently,

risk communication extensively derived into diverse degrees of

risk impacts. This is a cyclical process of dialectics (figure 1).

That is, risk communication and public risk perception are

viewed as having core roles in the active circle of risk

assessment, hazard identification, policy development, policy

implementation, and policy evaluation11

.

Risk communication itself is a rather complex process. In

the theory of risk communication, mechanisms include the

actions of the media, the public, policy decision-making, and

social and political institutions (social movement and political

groups) (Miller & Macintryre, 1999). Thus, risk communication

is not only a unilateral procedure of informing, listening, telling,

and influencing (Taig, 1999). Arkin (1989) also points out that

usually risk communication is limited by the nature of risk

science, and public risk perception. Scientific problems or

disasters with disputable and complicated risks such as the

SARS incident usually generate barriers to public understanding

of science. This is because, firstly, the uncertainty and

complexity of risk rarely brings definite answers to the public.

Secondly, knowledge and information gaps and the difficulty of

information access block the public’s social learning

opportunities. To explain further, risk information revealed by

the government, the media, and society influences subjective

perceptions and the public’s objective actions to some degree.

11

The cyclical process can also be viewed as a mechanism of risk governance

(Gerrard & Petts 1998: 6; Gerrard 1999:256).


Figure 1: Risk perception and risk communication (Gerrard

& Petts, 1998)

Some researchers (Renn, 1991; Slovic, 2000a) indicate that

the effects of ‘social amplification of risk’ should be valued.

This refers to the phenomenon that different risk information

(from the state, the media, interest groups, and social network

agents) is disseminated to various groups (including the public,

influential players, and members of related groups) and they in

RISK

PERCEPTION

AND

COMMUNICATION

POLICY

IMPLEMENTATION

POLICY

DEVELOPMENT

RISK

ASSESSMENT

EVALUATION

HAZARD

IDENTIFICATION


turn influence others, further causing social disputes and social

fears12

.

From this perspective, Arkin (1989) emphasizes that when

performing risk assessment and risk communication, a state

should release information to certain groups of people with a

plan, select information release channels, test the effects of

information, and construct the connotation of risk information in

order to develop, educate, and guide public risk perception and

actions.

To speak neutrally, sources, channels, and credibility of

risk information are all significant. The public forms influential

decisions based on them. Frewer (1997) states that the public

distinguishes between received information from trusted sources

(such as consumer groups and doctors) and distrusted sources

(such as government and enterprises). Therefore, establishing

appropriate information release channels are imperative. This is

because trust in risk information source influences how the

public comprehends and forms judgments about complicated

technologies. It is important to establish a highly trusted

information release channel. For example, at the initial stage of

the SARS outbreak, professional medical personnel explained

the scientific factors of SARS. Socialists and psychologists

discussed social impacts, related social order, and mutual

support. Most importantly, public perception of risk is a

subjectively developed learning process. . Thus, a society should

value the establishment of a complete and trusted information

platform (release and conversation) for stimulating risk

communication. This is because once risk information is

released, public perception is hard to change (Miller and

Macintyre, 1999).

Trust in risk information source relates to public trust in

their original perception of complicated technologies. This kind

of trust establishment is essential and will continuously

influence the public’s value judgment and degree of acceptance

12

For example, the United Kingdom aroused public fears while dealing with

the mad cow disease.


of new technologies. When distrustful opinions emerge, the

government and scientists are not willing to see this kind of

development (Frewer, 1997; Slovic, 2000b). Taig (1999)

proposes that the characteristics of trust problems include: 1)

The public sometimes overreacts to new risk information. 2) It is

difficult to refuse invalid and expensive risk resolution methods.

3) When debating risk control methods such as how to

effectively control and decrease risks, the focus usually changes

to other topics. 4) It is difficult to persuade the public that

technology brings more benefits than risks.

In terms of the technological dimension, Slovic (2000c:

320; 2000d: 409) proposes a similar argument. He points out

that it is easy to destroy public trust in technological risks.

Distrust develops faster than trust does. He called this process

‘the asymmetry principle’. This argument reminds us of the

importance of risk communication. In particular, for risk

communication practices, fragility of public risk perception

cannot be ignored13

.

The above two viewpoints are basically technologically

orientated. They neglect the fact that the uncertainty of public

judgment and risk disputes may evolve into problems such as

distrust in experts, unilateralization of power and discourses,

and the argument that technology brings more benefits than risks

(Beck, 1993). Taylor (1999) presents a clear and definite

blueprint to the opposing arguments above. In his analysis of

public risk perception and risk communication concerning

GMOs in the UK, he points out that risk assessment is not only

an ‘information problem’ and a ‘communication problem’, but

13

The research of Slovic (2000 a: 184-85) and Arkin (1989:128-129) points

out that public risk perception is seldom accurate. Some risk information may

frighten the public in the beginning. Also, the public prefers a simple and

absolute answer when facing a risk, which is unable to be substantiated and

this makes it easier for them to have feel in control. Priority has existed in the

public’s mind against some values. Hence, a new message delivered to the

public is individualized, whereas the public does not totally understand

science. The noticeable part is that the opinions of the public are easy to

control, and the beliefs formed are difficult to modify.


also a ‘structural and cultural problem’. These problems are

what we (people in different societies) have to confront and

recognize. Slovic (2000a) also proposes a structural question.

He points out that besides the fragility of public risk perception;

it is also interesting to discuss how the ‘system destroys trust’.

That is, how social, political, scientific, and communication

systems gradually destroy public trust in technological risks.

From the perspective of risk analysis, this is a problem of

institutional construction.

By observing this institutional system, we can see how they

continuously and constructively derive public risk perception

and public trust. To explain further, to systematically establish

public trust in technological risk, the state should first set up

appropriate and professional information platforms and enhance

information transparency. Most importantly, public participation

in risk communication and risk assessment procedures and an

interactive network are needed in order to integrate social

resources and preserve procedural justice, which then

strengthens public trust in information sources and enhances

information transparency and continuously establishes public

trust (Frewer, 1997; Miller and Macintyre, 1999; Taig, 1999;

Kasperson & Palmlund, 1989; Slovic, 2000a).

People should consider the social, political, scientific and

communication systems to be the key constructions of

institutions. By including public participation in the

technological policy-making process, the monopoly of

technocrats and science experts is broken. For individuals, the

public has opportunities to participate in and influence policy

and to learn about and comprehend complicated scientific risks.

For institutional development, risk communication mechanisms

which value conversation and equal rights are developed and

transformed into motives for public participation, which are

active not passive. In terms of trust establishment, risk

communication of complicated technological risks transforms

into a process of how the public learns to converse and make


value judgments. This makes technological policy-making

become the process and result of public trust establishment14

.

Institutional construction and empirical criticisms of SARS, as a

localized risk

The spreading, impacts, and risk governance of SARS in

Taiwan can be divided into three phases. First, on 17 March

2003, Taiwanese business people, the Chins, who were infected

with SARS, came back to Taiwan from China. Next, on the 24th

of April, a potential intra-hospital case broke out in Ho-Ping

Hospital. The blockade of the hospital caused prevalent social

fears. Third, at the beginning of May 2003 after Ho-Ping

Hospital and Ren Ji Hospital were blockaded, there was the

possibility that large-scale community infection could have

broken out. This is what requires most prevention and may

cause great lethality.

Taiwan’s effective performance at the first stage of the

SARS outbreak was recognized. However, this only referred to

the intra-hospital quarantine measures, and did not include

resolving the problems of risk spread. In other words, such an

arrogant ‘Three Zero Record’ attitude (zero casualties, zero

community transmission, and zero departures of infected cases)

only considered problems from the viewpoint of unilateral

medical rationality, and disregarded the impact degree and

features of SARS as a globalizational risk.

On the one hand, the government undertook unilateral

SARS prevention by utilizing old risk governance paradigms.

Based on this, by valuing public health principles, the central

authority of the Department of Health (DOH) and the local

government (Taipei City) argued over whether they should

declare SARS a legal communicable disease15

. On the other hand,

14

The author suggests that not every technological policy-making decision

required public participation. In fact, such democratic principles are usually

applied to big and disputable technological affairs. 15

This is a typical problem of uncertainty about medical risks. The opinions

of medical experts of the DOH diverged from those of the Department of


due to disregarding the characteristics of SARS as a

globalizational risk (such as rapid spread, network development,

transboundary, and unlimited impacts), the government failed to

launch risk control and preventive principles, and construct an

overall risk assessment. Thus, the government attributed SARS

risk resolution to be a task of the government. This phenomenon

continued until the “SARS Coordination Center” was

established at the beginning of May 2003.

In fact, stagnating in the public health principle of risk

handling, the central authorities of the DOH and local

government revealed themselves to be rather incapable in terms

of preventive mechanisms and assessment of SARS as a

globalizational risk. They disregarded the difficulties of scarce

national public health resources, deployment of sickbeds, and

medical personnel mobilization. During the SARS outbreak, due

to problems with control of related medical resources (such as

respirators and respirator series), this chaos caused serious

infections. It seemed that the government wasted precious time

in launching preventive mechanisms at the initial stage.

What is also worthy of discussion is that due to a lack of

integrated risk assessment and preventive mechanisms, risk

communication and public risk perception are not considered

important elements in risk governance and policy

implementation. One blind spot lies in the ideologies of

advocating old risk control models (medical control) and

unilateral propaganda (from the government). One concrete

example is that on the 24th

of April, two days before the SARS

epidemic turned into a serious issue, the media reported that

President Chen Shui-Bian was confident in the medical handling

of the SARS risk).

Health of Taipei City Government. The former presumed this was a

controllable situation based on epidemiology. However, the latter emphasized

that SARS should be declared a legal communicable disease according to the

degree of its spread and related mechanisms should be mobilized. These two

statements were reasoned based on the single perspective of public health

principles and failed to include a macro risk assessment.


Under these contexts, policy ideologies of diverse and two-

way risk communication and public risk perception were not

formed. In addition, the importance of public risk information

access, risk communication, and trust building were not taken

into consideration once risk outbreak occurred. These will cause

cyclical impacts on the next stage of medical treatment, public

health, economic and social activities, and then result in greater

losses. Actually, the lack of overall risk assessment is a

structural problem. Preventive risk policy is not included in risk

communication and public risk perception.

The second stage of risk outbreak started from the 24th

of

April with the high-speed blockade of Hoping Hospital and the

Hua-Chang community transmission and quarantine in the

beginning of May. This caused a great shock in public health

and medical circles, and society. Most discussions focused on

how to rapidly block the hospital, implement quarantine

measures, rescue SARS patients and medical personnel who

were in the dangerous situation of being infected, prevention

and settlement strategies and emergency measures against large-

scale community transmission16

. Only a few people analyzed

and assessed how the SARS epidemic would quickly spread

from public health and medical circles to psychological impacts

of public risk perception, which will result in high uncertainty

and influence social and economic activities. Thus,

precautionary measures should be undertaken. As the media

continued to exaggerate and advertise such phenomena as the

hospital blockade (which led to protests by Hoping Hospital

medical personnel in an internet petition), SARS spray infection,

and the probability of community transmission, and this resulted

in serious public fear.

In terms of reflection about SARS prevention experiences,

the government did not start a formal and institutional risk

coordination center in order to carry out preventive actions in

16

Undeniably, at this stage, all measures concerning public health were

critical and deserved approval. However, there was still a lack of integrated

epidemic prevention strategies (Tsai, 2003).


response to real emergencies and future impacts in various

dimensions. Also, risk coordination bodies were still limited

under the authority of medical and public health departments.

The central authorities of the DOH and the local government

argued over who had responsibility for emergency action and

disregarded the fact that globalizational risks spread rapidly and

may cause unlimited impacts.

High distrust17

is formed because of the cyclical

construction of public fears. Integrated risk assessment and

policy mobilization are not carried out completely. Carrying out

only medical emergency settlement makes public risk perception

a divided social reality. Free media broadcasts and exaggeration

of the SARS risk overthrew the weak essence of scientific

uncertainty and resulted in high social distrust. The public’s

psychological state was seriously impacted, and society was in

disorder. For example, the people of Yunlin County protested

that medical waste from Hoping Hospital should not be sent to

their local incinerator. The mayor of Hsin-Chu City led some

councilors in opposition to some SARS patients being sent to

local hospitals18

. People in Kaohsiung protested the

establishment of SARS examination hospitals. In Taipei, one

could see the unusual sight of every person on the street wearing

respirators. A shopping rush for N95 respirators continued

despite appeals from front line personnel, who were suffering

from medical resource shortages and they urged the public to

buy normal masks instead of respirators specifically intended for

medical use. Many government officers were also negative role

models by their wearing of masks on public occasions19

.

17

Take Singapore as an example Refer to Liang, (2003); Ting, Sun, Zou,

Peng and Chou (2003). Long-term environmental protest in Taiwan has

caused a culture of distrust, which also becomes a kind of risk culture.

Especially in the process of environmental impact assessment, the problem of

trust becomes serious. 18

Chen, Chu and Chiu (2003). 19

Due to immediate embarkation of risk communication, seldom citizens in

Singapore wore masks on streets. Besides the impacts posed by critical news,

the citizens of Singapore did not reduce social and economic activities. On


At this stage, the SARS risk spread was supposed to be

under control. However, the government had still failed to

establish integrated risk assessment and risk communication

policies. The national administration mechanism was in chaos

due to the fact that they had ignored the implications of such a

globalizational risk. In terms of experience reflection,

technocrats underestimated SARS risk impacts. After SARS

caused large-scale impacts on the 24th

of April, the government

should have immediately initiated a risk coordination center.

Risk communication policies and information source should

have been established. Assessment professionals from various

related disciplines should have been recruited. In addition, a

transparent risk communication process to educate, inform, and

guide the public should have been built in order to integrate

rescue resources. Thus, public perception and risk governance

procedures of SARS prevention could have gradually been

constructed.

The learning processes of risk governance and contingency

management are new and difficult experiences. Restricted by

their lack of a model concept and actions to assess and govern

globalizational risks, technocrats failed to recognize the

importance of risk communication and information transmission.

The third phase started from the beginning of May 2003,

one week after the SARS outbreak, which was also too late to

initiate risk contingency management mechanisms. Generally

speaking, it was also too late to establish a risk coordination

center. Still, the authorities that dominated policy mobilization

were restricted to medical and public health principles. The

government not only failed to establish risk communication and

information transmission systems, but also failed to integrate

autonomous social information and communication networks.

One week after the SARS outbreak, the situation was out of

control and inclined to spread. In addition to mass misconduct in

the contrary, for Taiwan, the minister of the Executive Yuan and the major of

Taipei City demonstrated a negative model of wearing respirators in public

occasions. Particularly, they often wore the N95 respirators.


the medical prevention network, such as intra-hospital

transmission, even social and economic activities were being

seriously affected. With this background, SARS, as a

globalizational risk, escalated to a national crisis, which is

worthy of discussion. In terms of legal dimensions, the

Legislative Yuan passed the ‘Provisional Regulations Governing

the Prevention and Relief of SARS’ on 3rd

May. However, a

national and cross-field SARS risk coordination center had not

yet established at that time20

.

Due to a lack of experience in establishing integrated risk

assessment and risk governance mechanisms, the state and

technocrats hoped only to successfully control the transmission

of and infection speed of SARS, and to alleviate risk impacts.

Nevertheless, as intra-hospital transmission became even more

serious, their hopes were shattered. Even though such unilateral

risk control can fortunately reduce impacts in various

dimensions (particularly threats to public lives), time is still a

factor in problem resolution. In addition, it is still important to

value risk control, risk communication and risk information

transmission. These factors have a greater influence than the

SARS epidemic itself. That is, racing against time is the greatest

challenge to risk contingency management and public

perception formation. At this stage, a comprehensive assessment

of diverse risk sources and their spread effects should have been

assessed thoroughly in order to formulate contingency policies

and continue to modify risk control mechanisms. Mechanisms

that are limited to only medical and public health principles are

obviously insufficient. However, it is observed that consequent

developments are restricted in this unilateral ideology.

Since community transmission and intra-hospital infection

continued, on the 6th

of May, President Chen authorized former

DOH minister (Dr. Lee)21

to become the chief director of a

20

(United Daily, 2003). 21

The President designated the Premier Yu Shyi-Kun of the Executive Yuan

and the President Li Yuan-Tseh of Academia Sinica as the main conveners of

the “Everyone against SARS Committee” and the preceding minister of the


SARS prevention action committee. On the 7th

of May, the

Executive Yuan set up the ‘Everyone against SARS Committee’.

Then, the next day (May 8), the presidents of various Taiwan

universities advocated the establishment of a ‘SARS Fighting

Center’, which later on became the ‘SARS Prevention and

Relief Committee’. At this time, the SARS risk coordination

center was not even built and it was already two weeks after the

Hoping Hospital blockade and one week after the launch of the

National Security Committee (on 1st May). All the above shows

that the government lacked macro risk assessment concepts,

policymaking mechanisms, risk governance mechanisms, and

action experiences, thus losing valuable time for risk

resolution22

. Also, at this time, members in the risk contingency

management center were still medical and public health

professionals. Although the National Security Bureau and the

Ministry of Economic Affairs had calculated the related impacts

on economic activities and economic growth rates for the next

season, there was still no clear explanation on risk assessment

and risk communication from experts of other disciplines (such

as legal, crisis management and media broadcasting experts,

sociologists, and psychologists). Thus, the government failed to

quickly form reactive strategies.

Effective risk governance is constructed based on the

following elements: 1) risk assessment including integrated risk

assessment and disaster emergency policies; 2) valuing

assessments of risk impact; 3) formulating definite risk

governance procedures; 4) establishing reliable risk control

mechanisms; 5) carrying out assessment and explanation of risk

communication and risk impacts on social and economic

activities. However, in actual fact, risk communication by the

government was quite delayed and did not occur until the first

national leaflet, ‘Special Issue of SARS Prevention’ was

Department of Health, Lee Ming-Liang, to be the vice convener and the chief

director, which was inappropriate in the aspects of system and policy (United

Daily, 2003) 22

(China Times, 2003; Lin, C-C, 2003; Lee, 2003).


published on the 6th

of May (Executive Yuan, 2003). The 8th

of

May was the first time that the former DOH minister (Mr. Lee),

the incumbent minister (Mr. Tu), and the vice minister of the

DOH propagandized risk communication procedures on TV.

Though their actions were late, they are still worthy of

recognition. Moreover, the three-times-a-day risk promulgation

of SARS was very constructive for the public to access to timely

risk information. From another perspective, the public

demanded this kind of reliable information source as a basis for

making judgments. As well, these actions from the government

balanced the exaggerated news reports form the media. At the

initial stage of risk outbreak, if these risk communication

mechanisms can be promptly carried out in order to explain

SARS scientific uncertainty and its infection probability,

uncertainty about risks can be decreased. Also, normal social

activities will not be affected and situations such as panic

buying of respirators and wearing masks on the streets need not

occur. Moreover, the public will have the chance to learn self-

governance and tolerance and thus, social exclusion and

discrimination can be avoided

In other words, immediate risk communication,

construction of reliable and definite public risk perception, and

lowering the impacts of risk uncertainty are essential procedures

and strategies to integrate risk assessment and reaction policies.

Risk communication and public risk perception are links in

the implementation of macro risk assessment policy. In addition

to government actions, the autonomous risk information

transmission system of the society should be examined as well.

From the above analysis, we can see that because the

government was limited to the paradigm of public health

principles they delayed launching macro risk governance

mechanisms. Furthermore, the government ignored the

construction of preventive procedures of risk communication

and public risk perception. It was not until the third stage of risk

outbreak that risk information promulgation started. The public

was exposed to a state of high information isolation and


uncertainty, thus everyone was in a dangerous position after risk

outbreak. That is, the risk information vacuum and arbitrary

media broadcasts ensured that the public was in a natural state of

‘unawareness’, so they decoded, perceived, and delivered

wrong risk information. From the perspective of risk

communication, risk fears resulting from ‘unawareness’

intensified social capital of risk uncertainty, and easily destroyed

weak public trust (the asymmetric principle). A phenomenon of

high disorder hence appeared in society.

The principles of preventive risk communication lie in

rapid, just, diverse, and constant propagation and

announcements of precise information, followed by the

construction of two-way, accurate, and controllable risk

perception (such as the successful risk communication model of

Singapore). Hence, besides state orientation, the key to

legitimate risk information sources and their interaction is to

integrate autonomous risk information and the action systems of

society. Thus, grassroots viewpoints can be added to make the

public trust more in the sources and contexts of risk information.

When the SARS crisis occurred, the government failed to

construct risk communication and information release channels

immediately. On the contrary, the public established numerous

information transmission channels and websites via the Internet

and by individual agents. Professor Pan Huai-Ming and Tseng

Hui-Chung set up the ‘SARS Information Network’ for SARS

analysis, and the website ‘SARS Q&A’ was established by

medical students in Taiwan. In contrast, the relevant authorities

were dominated by technocrats using unilateral professional

statements to deal with such situations as the Tau-Da

Community case (in Hong Kong), and forgot to conduct risk

communication. Without clear risk communication to the public,

public perception and prevention preparation could not be

established.

In this storm of uncertainty, both the central authorities and

local government ignored the importance of the outbreak failing

to activate a national risk promulgation system. To state in more


detail, as the SARS epidemic broke out, the best way would

have been for the state to grasp the moment and integrate all

related risk information and action systems and then create more

diversified and interactive risk communication mechanisms.

This would have made the public willing and able to carry out

autonomous risk handling actions and responsible social

learning, and subsequently enable them to form autonomous risk

governance. This is a mechanism that includes the spirit of

participatory democracy. While encountering the challenges of

globalizational risks, the government should rapidly establish

and integrate grassroots networks and resources. The public

should no longer be made frightened due to risk

individualization. Instead, they should be actors of risk

resolution23

.

Conclusion

The SARS crisis revealed a modern state’s problems in

terms of risk emergency reaction and risk governance

mechanisms. As a society that valued technology, effectiveness,

economic development, and national competitiveness, we

actually ignored the impacts of risk uncertainty and delayed in

carrying out crisis management while disaster broke out. These

phenomena evidence the unbalanced structure of Taiwanese

modem society.

The SARS incident is only one of the challenges that

Taiwanese society has faced in recent years. Increasing

globalizational risks rapidly spread out through networks and

become transboundary, then cause immeasurable impacts. In a

short time, they cause great losses in property and economic and

social activities. Hence, from a macro perspective of

23

At the time when the Hua-Chang community on Ta-Li Street was

blockaded, citizens living in the neighborhood seemed pretty relaxed. It was

because they were prepared for long-term SARS resistance and used such

measures as cooking herbal medicine every day. A close risk common body

was formed (Ku, 2003).


globalizational risk evolution, it is imperative for a modern

country and society to recognize that a complicated era full of

globalizational risks has arrived. Thus, a set of preventive

actions and policy mechanisms should be established to prevent

risks from turning into greater crises.

In terms of the complexity of globalizational risks, risk

governance can be categorized into two parts: 1) preventive

macro risk assessment, predicting and formulating all kinds of

impacts and reaction measures of risk issues. 2) consideration of

threat development in terms of ecological, social, economic and

ethical orders that one single risk source may cause. In particular,

it is necessary to be always alert that there is a blind spot

regarding the incalculable measurement of the uncertainty of

globalizational risks. In addition, being restricted to unilateral

ideologies of risk control, preventive risk assessment should

include risk communication. Public risk perception is one link in

the chain of policy assessment.

Technocrats limited to the logic of medical and public

health were inclined to focus only on SARS risk control. In

addition, due to a lack of integration of local public health

preventive mechanisms, the government was unable to mobilize

and dispatch social resources immediately and effectively when

SARS initially broke out. Moreover, as the SARS epidemic

spread, the government lacked a rapid risk governance

mechanism and seriously neglected the fact that risk

communication and public risk perception are other important

factors of risk spread, which may also result in continuous

impacts.

In fact, the implementation of preventive risk assessment,

contingency management mechanisms, and risk communication

could be better implemented. For instance:

1) As the World Health Organization announced an alert

about SARS in March 2003, the government should have

recognized the risk features of SARS and quickly launched a

monitoring system preventing infected cases from entering

Taiwan.


2) Seeing other countries’ stories of intra-hospital

transmission, the state should have immediately carried out risk

control and standard operation procedures.

3) The state should have fully examined quarantine, rescue

and medical treatment mechanisms in response to possible

outbreak of community transmission.

4) Most importantly, besides unilateral preventive action,

the state should have carried out first-time settlements and

assessments of objects, activities and time points of risk impacts

in order to alleviate the degree of damage.

5) The state should have assessed and been prepared for

large-scale influences when risk broke out.

6) Last and most importantly, risk communication should

have begun from the first and then the construction of risk

concepts and information transparency should have occurred.

Also, the development of public risk perception was an essential

element influencing emergency reaction.

The second part of risk governance discussion focuses on

crisis management and prevention mechanisms. Traditionally, as

one risk breaks out, crisis management should be undertaken

with systematic construction, including establishing a cross-

department coordination center, establishing a national-wide

information communication system, setting detailed standard

procedures of operation, designing epidemic situation charts and

epidemic information networks, setting up on-the-spot directing

systems (such as operating groups, planning groups, back-up

support groups, and financial management groups), and quickly

reconstructing social order and the management of disaster

spots24

(Chao, 2003; Chiu, 2001). In fact, this set of crisis

management procedures has been proved effective in dealing

with disasters.

However, from a macro-scale point of view, the

settlements of risk incidents were still limited in the function of

emergency rescue. Although this set of crisis management

24

This is also a standard operation procedure of the Federal Emergency

Governance Agency of the United States (Chao, 2003; Chiu, 2001).


mechanisms were recognized to certain degree, its sufficiency in

terms of macro risk assessment in dealing with globalizational

risks should be considered as well. For example, when the US

911 terrorist attack occurred, even though immediate on-the-

spot rescue was important, preventive mobilization in other

areas such as national defense, economy, society, or culture

were essential as well. Regarding the SARS epidemic, as intra-

hospital and community transmission broke out, in addition to

the basic mobilization of preventive mechanisms, what was also

important was to quickly undertake assessment on possible risk

impacts, including modifying preparation and mobilization

mechanisms of the first and the second stage.

Furthermore, clear risk information and communication of

impact assessment formed based on unilateral public health

principles cannot replace the essential procedures of resolving

public unawareness and public fear. This is because risk issues

cannot be concealed. Covered issues usually cause more serious

spreading effects, which are disadvantageous to integrated risk

prevention mechanisms.

Whether for on-the-spot crisis management, risk

assessment and mobilization of the first wave and second wave

of SARS issue development, and the construction of risk

information communication, if autonomous social actions and

information networks can be integrated these can be the key

drive for the state to confronting complicated globalizational

risks and to fight against all kinds of risk uncertainties.

Regarding lessons learned from the SARS incident, we

know that a set of standard and immediate risk governance

mechanisms should be established. Moreover, from a macro

perspective, concepts and policy tools of risk assessment and

risk communication not limited to technocrats’ ideologies

should be developed. Also, by integrating abundant social

resources and autonomous systems, society will be able to face

new globalizational risk challenges.

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December 2006, pp. 127-135

Impact of Globalization on Labour:

Migrant Workers in Taiwan

Sr. Wei Wei1

I. The Social Context of Migrant Workers

n the beginning of the 1990s, the Asian region

formed an interrelated economy that gradually

stratified under the influence of globalization. Within this

structure, Taiwan belongs to the economic level known as the

‘semi-core’, since it lacks human resources in traditional low

technology industries. Southeast Asian countries, conversely,

are at the economic ‘periphery’, since they are traditionally

agricultural and rely on low technology industries. This Asian

economic structure eventually collapsed and impelled their

workers to move to Taiwan. The globalization helps the capitals

and the labors to move freely and the markets are open to

competition. The Capitalists and factories earn the maximum

1 Sr. Stephana, Wei Wei, is Director of Rerum Novarum Center, Taiwan.

Rerum Novarum assists labour movements since 1971. We acknowledge the

assistance of Rev. Edmund Ryden, SJ for translating this article from Chinese.

I


profit and compete to reduce the cost that causes the move to the

countries or regions where have the cheep labors. The other

strategy is to reduce the working condition or to hire the cheep

migrant workers. Taiwan government officially permitted Thai

and Philippines workers since 1989 to fill the human resource in

the traditional industries. On the other hand, these migrant

workers provided financial support for their families outside of

Taiwan. The countries from which the migrant workers came,

received income from foreign exchange and taxes thanks to

these migrants. This helped to rebuild their collapsed economic

systems.

Taiwan's Migrant Workers are subject to the control by a

number of factors: numbers, country of origin and area of

occupation. The majority of the migrant workers are working in

manufactories (169,065). The number of caregivers is the

second place (150,326). At present the chief countries of origin

are Thailand (with the largest number), the Philippines (second

place), Indonesia, Vietnam, Mongolia. At the end of October

2006, there were 336,985 legal migrant workers in Taiwan. The

county with highest number of migrant workers is Taoyuan (70,

870 or around 21.03% of the total migrant workers) followed by

Taipei County (44,603 or 13.24%) and Taipei City 35, 425 or

10.51%). Among these workers, males account for 38.23%, and

females make up 61.77% (October, 2006). However, most

domestic helpers and caregivers are women. Of these there were

a total of 152,726: 70,809 Indonesians, 49,298 Vietnamese,

30,166 Filipinos, 2,436 Thais, and 17 Mongolians. It is obvious

that there is a feminized trend of the migrant workers in Taiwan

from the statistics.

The current poor economic climate in Taiwan, along

with the desire to protect local labor has led to a decline in the

number of migrant workers in construction and industry. On the

other hand, an increase in the elderly population has led to a

demand for more caregivers. (The number of the caregivers

were about 306, while domestic helpers numbered 363 in 1992.

These numbers increased to 26,233 caregivers and 12,879

Migrant Workers 129

domestic helpers in 1994. There were 113,755 caregivers, and

6,956 domestic helpers in 2002. At the end of October, there are

152,726 caregivers and domestic helpers in Taiwan).

Many caregivers are already married and bravely go

abroad to earn more money for their homes and the education of

their children. They know very little about Taiwan and whatever

information they can glean regarding their future work is often

very different from the reality of the situation. Many female

migrant workers hide the grief of their difficult adjustment and

separation from their children. Often they are only able to

express this grief by weeping alone at night. What keeps them

going is the dream of a brighter future for their children, a new

house or a small business they might run upon their return home.

Yet many workers, after several years away, are faced with an

unfaithful husband, profligate children or the sudden illness or

even death of their spouse. In a foreign land they can only cry

out to Allah, to God.

Many employers fear that if their workers are allowed to

meet other workers, they will start to compare pay and working

conditions and then demand higher wages or better conditions.

Thus, they deliberately arrange for them to work on holidays,

assigning extra duties in their homes. Some forbid their workers

from speaking to compatriots, prevent them from taking part in

activities for migrant workers, and even lock them in the house

during the day. The purpose of such behavior is to prevent

migrants from meeting people from their own land or practicing

their own religion. This turns migrant workers into virtual

prisoners, with no personal freedom, freedom of assembly, or

freedom of religion (eg. to attend services at a mosque, church

or temple). One Philippine domestic worker told me that during

her five years in Saudi Arabia she was always allowed a day off

on Sunday, even though the normal rest day there is on Friday.

In Taiwan, however, her rest day is Friday and so she is not able

to meet any Filipinos or go to Church.

II. Violation of the Human Rights


Despite the advocacy of NGOs and some modifications to

regulations, many migrant workers still fail to attain even

minimal protection of their rights, as we illustrate below:

(1) With regard to working conditions, many employers do not

permit their workers to take time off, forcing them to work 12

hours a day under threat of being sent home for failing to

comply. In addition, employers lay down many “No’s”; only

“work” is permitted.

(2) With regard to personal freedom of the workers, they are

often viewed by their employers as commodities or tools of

production. Even outside work hours they are subject to

surveillance, not allowed out of the house, not allowed to listen

to music, and especially not permitted to participate in religious

activities. This is a grave denial of their freedom of religion.

Employers also forcibly deduct a commission when their

employee is sent to work for someone else for a few hours of

extra pay. Sometimes employers offer to keep accumulated pay

in a safe place for the workers. However, some employers do

not return this sum of money before the worker returns to their

country of origin. Many employers lock up their workers'

passport and residence certificate.

(3) Work contracts are drawn up on unequal terms. If workers

do not obey the contract they are liable to be sent home.

However, workers are not permitted to change their employers

should they not get along with them.

(4) When female workers are subject to sexual abuse or violence,

they are often unable (for linguistic reasons and because they are

not able to leave the house) to seek redress and produce proof.

Moreover, since most of these offences occur in private there are

often no witnesses and they come to light only when the workers

are able to escape to a place of refuge. Such escapes only

happen about in about one out of every seven cases and even

then, the truth often only emerges during interviews.

Migrant Workers 131

(5) Migrant workers in the social service sector have no right to

form associations or unions to help them claim their rights.

(6) As for the infamous brokers' fee, the CLA does not permit

brokers to charge a brokerage fee in Taiwan but it does allow

brokers to charge a service fee of NT$1,800 per month in the

first year, NT$1,700 per month in the second year and

NT$1,500 in the third year. In total this amounts to NT$60,000

which is very similar to the brokerage fee that was allowed in

the past. Moreover, in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam

brokerage agents still charge an excessive fee so that that many

migrant workers have to pay over NT$150,000 just to come to

Taiwan. This sum is described as a loan so as to avoid the

censure of government regulations. Pressure engendered by this

fee means that the worker is caught in an ever-rushing current,

with the only prospect being to go ahead and not turn back. Thus

they accept whatever suffering comes and bury their troubles.

Indeed many female migrant workers suffer from stress-related

syndromes or mental disorders.

(7) Forbid the migrant workers to change the jobs and the

employers. The labor contract of the migrant worker is bonded

to the defined employer. Both parts are not allowed to change

the employer/ worker. However, the employers dominant the

situation that the migrant workers become the slaves by the

employers and the brokers’ companies. The migrant workers are

not allowed to choose the better employers either the better

brokers companies in a free market. This structure cannot screen

the incapable employers either the brokers’ companies.

III. Sketches of the Social Interaction of Migrant Workers

Come rain or shine, at around five in the morning

migrant workers are already out pushing elderly persons in

wheelchairs, slowly round the local park. These old persons are

not able to stretch their legs or exercise, but they are kept busy

looking at the various dances, acrobatics and other physical

exercises being undertaken and this in itself is enough to make


them feel full of energy, as if they were exercising themselves.

The foreign workers push the wheelchairs along the paths round

the park or turn left and right through the alleys of the area, and

thus consume several hours’ time. In some parks, of an

afternoon, the migrant workers take the old people to a

particular spot, while they then meet together and happily chat

about news of their homeland, or the foibles and quirks of their

charges or simply vent off about the pressures of worker and the

nagging of their masters.

Most days one is hard put to spot the migrant workers on

the street, but if you wait for the dustman’s cart to come, then at

each alley and street entrance you will see them in groups of

twos or threes clutching different kinds of plastic bags. This

moment is truly a special international moment on the streets of

Taipei. Many migrant workers long for this moment. It is a

chance to get out and have a change of air or even make a secret

phone call (many employers forbid their workers from using

mobile phones or the home phone). It is also a chance to meet

one’s fellow migrants and exchange a few words and let off the

tension brought on by the employer’s iron grip. Yet there are

also employers who forbid their workers to come out; no matter

how busy they are, they come out themselves with their rubbish

and stand in the front line. Furthermore, there are employers

who calculate the time required to the exact second and thus

check on whether the worker has made an unauthorized phone-

call or stopped to chat to someone and, if the time required for

dropping the rubbish is exceeded, the worker will be punished.

Dropping the rubbish is an important ‘social activity’ for the

migrant workers and so many neighbours take this chance to

enquire after them. Solicitous persons choose this short spell of

time to note the migrants’ needs, ask after their troubles and

difficulties and so seek to provide them help. It is largely during

rubbish dropping that the volunteers from our own Centre have

been able to get the local people to help in providing

information or making legal norms known.

Migrant Workers 133

Those who look after the elderly or long-term sick in

hospitals, both large and small, or in old people’s homes form

yet another ‘migrant worker community’. In this community the

migrants tend to form into ‘small clusters’ according to their

place of origin. Whilst such carers are usually kept busy all the

time clearing away phlegm, turning the person over every two

hours, giving massage every hour, helping nurses with their

work (many old people only trust their migrant worker), indeed

providing 24-hour a day care, yet in the hospital they have a

moment of freedom. There they can chat with their fellow

workers, or with other sick people, relatives of the sick, or share

ideas with the health personnel. In this special society there are

often moving and helpful tales to be told. Relatives of sick

people on the same ward, seeing the migrants’ devotion, often

seek to help them obtain the social services they need, or

medical personnel help workers whom they can see to have been

abused.

Some migrant workers look after the long-term

sick or elderly as if they were there own grandparents. The

elderly people in turn, whose children are busy elsewhere, even

far away, come more and more to rely on the migrants. Indeed

each depends on the other. There have been cases in which

elderly people were given up as vegetables where the migrants

have brought them back to almost normal and the carer finds a

sense of success and consolation in seeing the person thus revive.

In some cases the sick person sees the caregiver as if she were

their own child or grandchild. One old man on his deathbed

gave all the money he had to her Vietnamese caregiver. There

have also been old people who were bedridden and without any

energy, who when they realised that their own death would

mean the worker’s contract would be ended and she would have

to go back home, have redoubled their strength and

determination to live, such that miracles have happened.

IV. The Identity of the ethnicity and culture forms a

‘Filipino Migrant Worker Community’


Although migrant workers work behind the stage of city

life yet they are normally hidden in obscure corners. The

Filipinos are different. They actively congregate in the churches

and form an ‘Alternative Sunday Community’. Many churches

or church organisations provide religious services, legal advice,

social work service, psychological counseling, Bible sharing,

volunteer groups, and leadership training. It is only in these

places that the migrants leave the backstage and step forth,

developing their own interests and talents, showing their own

personality and needs. Among themselves, the migrants develop

bonding, leadership, cooperation, assistance and help other

migrants face the problems of work and life. Shared ethnicity

and culture help them overcome the barriers of space and the

opportunity to meet on Sundays enables them to form small

groups which are intimately bound together.

V. The Desire of the Migrant Workers

Before they come to Taiwan many migrant workers have

already undergone the lack of freedom involved in supposed

‘practice’ sessions where they do slave labor for their broker.

They are then forced to sign contracts for loans and if their luck

runs out they end up in a difficult situation in Taiwan as well.

What is it that makes them do this? For many, whether Catholic

or Protestant, Buddhist or Muslim, their faith gains in strength

once they come to Taiwan because religion becomes their one

and only support. They believe firmly that their devotion will

incline the Divine to have mercy on their predicament. Faced

with unjust employers whom they cannot resist, their sole hope

is that the God of justice will give them justice, reward good and

punish evil. They also need God’s care and blessing for their

family and to fill the gap they have left at home. Hence when

they are able to persuade their employers to give them half a day

off, they willingly spend all that time in church, mosque or

temple, freely pouring out their most personal desires, pains and

Migrant Workers 135

thoughts to God in fervent prayer. Yet there are still employers

who forbid them going out even to worship. How cruel a rule

that is!

Besides imploring supernatural help, migrant workers

have a further source of support that makes them keep going:

they remember their hopes and aspirations for their own children,

that they may study at a good school, enter university

successfully and find a good job in the future. Or they may hope

to save some money to open a small business with their husband.

Vietnamese workers mainly hope to rebuild their houses and

help their parents and family. In the case of an unmarried young

lady, she will hope to help her parents and provide enough to see

her siblings through school. It is with thoughts such as these that

they are able to struggle on, accept hardship and sacrifices, put

up with humiliation. Their desires make us realise that migrant

workers from south-east Asia have intimate links with their

families, even placing the happiness of their family before their

own. This kind of self sacrifice for the good of the family is very

different from the modern Western model of individualism.

Although migrant workers make a significant

contribution to Taiwan’s economy and social welfare, even so

much as to be the backstage hands of social life, yet state policy

and law are not adequate to protect their interests. Public social

life lacks a place or voice for them. Migrant workers long for

respect and appreciation, long for equal treatment. For this to

happen local people and NGOs need to make more effort to

work and improve the treatment of migrant workers.


December 2006, pp. 136-148

Depeasantization:

Impact of Globalization on Farmers

in India

Mammen Varkey

1

ndia, despite its impressive industrial growth and

remarkable expansion in the service-sector, still

remains to be an agricultural country. According to the

Economic Survey (2004 – 05) agriculture supports 57% of the

population of India. In such a country, one would be shocked to

hear that, between 2001 and 2006, as per even official statistics,

8,900 farmers committed suicide in the four states of Andhra

Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra alone.

Farmers’ Suicides

In Punjab, the state which led the green revolution in

India and which may be rightly called the granary of India, the

Department of Agriculture of the state government in a note

1 Prof. Mamen Varkey, former Principal of Bishop Moore College

Mavelikara, Kerala, India, is the founder Director of Vichara, a Research

Institute.

I

Depeasantization 137

published in 2004, says that there are 2116 cases of reported

suicides of farmers since mid 1980s and that “these figures were

only of reported acts and many more must have gone

unrecorded”. The note also states that more than seventy percent

of those who committed suicide were small marginal farmers

and landless labourers. For most of them their only source of

livelihood was agriculture. 65% of them were engaged in wheat

and paddy cultivation and 20% in cotton cultivation. They were

all men, most of them young persons. Revealingly the year after

liberalization saw alarming increase in suicides. The study

conducted by the Institute of Development and Communication

IDC states that in 1992-93 the suicides rate increased by

51.97% while the rate for the whole country was only 5.11%. In

1994-95 the rate of increase was 57%. The report points out that

there would have been many unreported cases of suicides.

In Maharashtra the number of farmers’ suicides

increased from 1,083 in 1995 to 4,147 in 2004. “In Maharashtra,

the age – adjusted SMR (SMR – Suicide Mortality Rate –

suicide deaths per 1,00,000 persons) for males increased from

17.4 in 1995 to 20.3 in 2004 and that for females decreased from

13.6 in 1995 to 10.8 in 2004.”

Andhra Pradesh is a state which, during the days of Chief

Ministership of Chandra Babu Naidu, vehemently pursued the

paths of liberalization. Between May and July 2004, more than

400 peasants committed suicides. It is true, earlier also peasants

have taken away their lives themselves. But the number is

staggering. And suicides were reported from every part, except

Hyderabad area, of the state.

The case of Kerala is different. The state of Kerala ranks

very high in human development and political mobilization. It

was thought that Kerala would only benefit from the

liberalization policies of the Central Government. Because,

“about 25% of the net states’ domestic products comes from the

remittances of her children abroad, agriculture-dependent

population comprising of both cultivators and agricultural

labourers constitutes only 23% of the total work force, (The


national average is 57%); contribution of the agricultural sector

to the state domestic product is just 15% (For India it is 22%)

and export oriented or exportable cash crops accounts for only

30% of the gross cropped area in the state. But the fact is that

Kerala had to witness an unprecedented tragic spate in the

farmers’ suicides. In Kerala, according to a reply in the State

Assembly on 20.2 ‘06 , between June 2001 and July 2006, 234

farmers committed suicides.

Alarmingly Increasing Distress

Obviously, these suicides are a tragic manifestation of

the alarmingly distressing state of the Indian farmers. Declining

comparable income of farmers and decelerating growth of

agriculture points to the aggravating conditions of the farming

community in India.

1. Farmer’s Income According to the National Sample Survey

Organization’s ‘Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers’,

conducted in 2003, half of the Indian farmers are deeply

indebted; the inequality in the income between the rural and

urban households has been increasing, the gap in the income

between the cultivators and non-cultivators has been widening.

Strikingly the monthly percapita consumer expenditure of farm

households was Rs.503/- (US$12,approximately). it is only

about Rs 75/- above the rural poverty line. Since it is only an

average, it is clear that vast segments of people will be below

poverty line. Isn’t it shocking? Interestingly, it was for the first

time that the NSSO conducted such a survey.

2. State of Agriculture ‘The growth rate of agriculture has been

decelerating for the last fifteen years. The contribution of

agriculture to GDP has been reducing. While there has been no

employment growth in the agriculture sector, the number of

marginal and small holding has been rising and the number of

people dependent on agriculture has been increasing’.

3. Abandoning Agriculture Most disturbingly, India has reached

a situation in which 48% of the farmers are indebted and 61% of


them in the rural area are prepared to abandon their vocation, as

per the Situation Assessmnt Survey of the National Sample

Survey Organization (Ref: Deshpande and Prabhu 2005.)

4. Acuteness of Problem It may be argued that agrarian distress

has occurred in the past too. There have been droughts, floods,

pests and pestilence. In the past also, crops have failed and

prices have crashed but the problems faced by the farmers now

are drastically different. The severity and acuteness of the

problems are well-manifest by the unabated suicides committed

by farmers, and reported from different parts of India.

5. Worsening Situation The states from which most of the

farmers’ suicides have been reported are Punjab, Maharashtra,

Tamilnadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. A crucially

significant fact is that these are the states in which agriculture is

relatively developed. The irony is that even though agriculture is

well-developed not only that the farmers’ condition has not

comparatively improved but also that the farmers have been

pushed to the extent they could find solace and escape only by

committing suicide.

‘Development’ Causes Distress

The striking fact that more farmers’ suicide deaths were

reported from relatively agriculturally developed states points to

the nature of the present agrarian distress. In a way, the

‘development’ itself has caused the distress.One would naturally

expect that the condition of farmers would improve with the

development of agriculture in these states. And that the

development would facilitate their effective participation in the

competitive market in the globalized world. One would think

that benefits would, naturally, flow in from the global trade. But

what was witnessed in the post-liberalization period was the

farmers’ helpless fall into inextricable traps of debts and pits of

death.


Evolution of the Agricultural Sector in Post – Independent

India

Before we proceed to an analysis of the reasons for this

unprecedented agrarian distress, we will have a quick look at the

evolution of the agrarian scene in India. It will help us to

understand the present phase better. K.C. Suri writes that the

history of agriculture in India, since independence, can be

divided into three phases.

First phase - The 50s and 60s, the first two decades immediately

after the independence, constitute the first phase. What is seen

during this phase is a massive reconstruction of the agrarian

sector. The slogan raised and demands made during the

independence struggle provided the ideological inspiration for

this phase. Mahatma Gandhi’s famous statement ‘India lives in

her villages’ influenced the policy makers. Massive projects for

irrigation were launched; land ceiling acts were passed, land

revenues were reduced, agricultural extension services were

started. It was a time of ‘reform and consolidation’.

Significantly peasants were held in esteem. Farmers’ role in

nation building and their contribution in building up a strong,

self-reliant India were respectfully acknowledged. They ‘fed’

India and enabled India, in those critical days, to save scarce

foreign exchange for its industrial development and other needs.

The cultivator’s right to own the land was recognized. Providing

all facilitates for improving agricultural production was accepted

as government’s responsibility and policy. Most importantly the

farmers gained a certain share in the political power.

Second Phase - In spite of all these there was an acute shortage

of food in India during the 60’s. There was famine. The Govt.

felt compelled to boost the food production. And a massive plan

was initiated to influence the farmers to shift to high-yielding

variety of seeds and to intensive form of cultivation using large

amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Farm machinery

was widely employed. The farmers who needed money had to

hunt for credits as there was very high demand for credit.


Thanks to those initiatives, food production leaped resulting in

the much talked about Green Revolution. This second phase of

the evolution of the agricultural sector in India, during the 70’s

and 80’s, is usually described as the ‘glorious’ period of green

revolution. But as a result of this, “agriculture became a cash

based, individual enterprise requiring high investment in modern

inputs and wage labour”.

The third is the post-reform phase. In 1991, the

economic reforms were brought in. The economy was opened

up. Liberalization was adopted as a policy in almost all sectors.

The implications of this for the agriculture sector were mainly

two:

The state support to agriculture was substantially curtailed.

Import restrictions were lifted and import tariffs were

either taken away or substantially reduced resulting in massive

imports of farm products. The seed and pesticide markets were

opened to the MNCs.

VI. Period of Liberalization

1. Post-Reform Declaration The reforms under the

policies of globalization and free trade based on the principle of

market competition wrought havoc to the farming community.

“The agricultural output in the post-reform period decelerated to

2.4 percent per annum during the 1990s against 3.5 percent

during the 1980s. It has slumped further during the last few

years, reaching an abysmal low level of 1.5 percent in 2004-’05.

The share of agriculture in GDP has been declining. Public

investment in agriculture has gone down. Imports have been

increasing as the tariffs are lowered. Between 1996-97 and

2003-04 imports have increased 270 percent by volume and 300

percent in value terms. Farmers of India are squeezed from both

sides - by the cost of seeds and pesticides of the foreign

campaigns and cheap imports from the heavily subsidized

western nations on the one hand and the indifference of the state

governments and the withdrawal of its support on the other. It is


an irony that the experts and social activists had to demand that

farmers, once regarded as food providers, should be given free

ration so that they would not be starved to death?” (K.C. Suri)

2. Asymmetrical Development The slowing down of

agricultural growth is not in itself a problem for a nation, if it is

matched by a buoyant growth of the manufacturing and service

sectors. It has happened in many a developed country. What

happened in India was that the agriculture sector declined

without a matching growth in the manufacturing or export sector.

India’s share in the global export is only 0.75% (Economic

Survey,2004-’05). Even now in India, about two-thirds of the

people depend on agriculture for their livelihood and live in

rural areas. But their share of the national income is only 25

percent. So the problem is with asymmetrical development. The

neo-liberal market policies resorted to since 1991 have

worsened the asymmetry in development.

3. Agricultural Product Market Opened With the

introduction of neo-liberal reforms, markets were opened up.

The agricultural product market was also ‘freed’ from Govt.

control. It was on the contention that the Indian agricultural

product market opened for global competition would fetch

higher dividends to Indian farmers. WTO led policy shifts also

paved way to this. To compete in the global market peasants

were coerced to switch over to cash crops. In many places,

massive shifts to cotton, pepper, rubber and such other cash

crops took place. But the opening up of the Indian agricultural

product to the global market resulted in dumping of vast

amounts of low-cost agricultural produce in India. The result

was that the prices of Indian agricultural produces crashed.

4. Govt. Withdraws Support Under the new policies, the

govt. effectively withdrew its support in making available seeds

and fertilizers at subsidized prices. The farmers were left to the

mercy of traders dealing with seeds and pesticides. Agriculture

became a high-investment necessary enterprise. The capital

starving peasants had to run for credits. In tune with the

globalization-regime, public financial institutions restricted their


soft-term loans for agriculture. The poor farmers were left at the

mercy of private moneylenders. These moneylenders were, in

fact, also traders, traders in seeds and pesticides.

As the Government succumbed to the globalization

process, privatization became the catchword in every sphere.

And as part of this, government sponsored, public funded

agricultural extension services were abandoned. The farmers

were pressurized or lured into unwise highly detrimental

practices. For example, the farmer in Vidarbha and Andhra

Pradesh started cultivating high-investment, ecologically

hazardous cotton. For cotton and other crops the farmers were

urged to use indiscriminately chemical fertilizers. Seeds not fit

for a particular environment were made to be sowed there;

availability of water was not adequately taken into consideration.

All these happened because, Governmental agricultural

extension services were withdrawn from key areas and there was

no scientific advice free from vested interests available to the

farmers who became prey to the high voltage advertisement and

publicity campaign of seed and fertilizer corporations.

From the ‘80s public investment in agriculture declined

hugely. Let us take the case of irrigation. “The rate of expansion

of irrigated area in India today has fallen to half the levels of the

early 1970s. Even more worrisome, nearly 75 percent of the

increase in irrigation over the last 20 years has come from tube

wells. Which rather than resolving the water crisis, appear to be

only aggravating it.” [Mihir Shah]

5. Private Agencies Take Over “Public agricultural

extension services have all but disappeared, leaving farmers to

the mercy of private dealers of seed and other inputs such as

fertilizes and pesticides, who function without adequate

regulations, creating problems of wrong crop choices,

excessively high input prices, spurious inputs and extortion.

Public crop marketing services have also declined in spread and

scope, and marketing margins imposed by private traders have

therefore increased.” [Ref. Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2004]


Vagaries of monsoon, many a time, led to failure of

crops in consecutive seasons. Even if there was a good crop, it

was not enough. There should be good prices also. Good crops

and good prices together seldom happened. The market is now

global. Earlier, if the local production were not good, price

would have gone up. Some balancing would have taken place.

Now, agricultural produces at lower prices were available in the

world market. And vast quantities of agricultural produces were

imported. Eg. Pepper in Kerala. Along with these the non-

availability of sufficient amounts on credit from public

institutions, and insurance support for the crops, sent the

helpless farmers to the usurious private moneylenders.

6. Health and Educational Service Commercialized

Simultaneously another thing also happened. As part of the

globalization process more and more areas and activities were

opened for private capital and the state began to exit from the

fields of health and education. The hard-pressed peasants were

also forced to find more money for the education and health of

their children and other dependents.

7. Summary of the Reasons for Suicide In short,

consecutive crop failures and price-crashes, switching over to

cash crops as a consequence of which agriculture became a very

high-investment activity that necessitated them to go in for loans

from usurious private lenders, withdrawal by the state of its

extension and support services, helplessness of the bankrupt

peasants and agricultural labourers in meeting the soaring health

and educational bills and total loss of hope that the multiplying

debts could ever be paid back, forced the farmers to take to the

last recourse, committing suicide. And they did it, in thousands.

‘Depeasantization’

1. Under globalization, what is happening in India, is

transfer or ‘extraction’ of surplus from the agricultural sector to

the urban, commercial sector. In this process the rural areas are

stunningly deprived and impoverished. The rural society, as it is


strikingly described, faded from the ‘popular imagination’, and

the national priorities were directed to the urban, manufacturing

and service sectors.

2. Social scientists have attributed different reasons for

the grave agricultural crisis in India. i. With the introduction of

the economic reforms in the early ‘90s, what has happened is

total neglect of agriculture. The globalization motivated policies

led to, what is described, as ‘depeasantization’. Consequently

the rural, agrarian sector was totally marginalized.

ii. Under globalization, social relationships gave way to

market relationships and to a commercial culture with the result

that only those who are ‘market-competitive’ will be able to

survive or rather need to survive. iii. It was the failure of the

farmers and agriculturists to ‘acquire weberian rationality’

characteristic of modern capitalism that caused the crisis. iv.

Social scientists and ecologists like Vandana Shiva trace the

crisis to the ecological catastrophe set in by globalization

inspired crass commercial considerations. “Shiva along with

some others attributed the suicides by farmers growing cash

crops directly to the ecological crisis generated by the

introduction of new economic policies associated with the

globalization process. ‘The tragedy of farmers committing

suicides highlights some of these high social and ecological

costs which are linked to globalization of non-sustainable

agriculture and which are not restricted to the cotton growing

areas of various states but have been experienced in all

commercially – grown and chemically farmed crops in all

regions…” – Shiva et al 1999. [Ref. Surinder S. Jodhka.

‘Beyond Crisis’.]

3. An important point is to be noted in the discussion on

the impact of globalization on the farming community in India

and the agrarian crisis in India. It is the dramatic change that has

taken place in the political theatre in India. As the agricultural

sector evolved in India, peasants became politically powerful.

Farmers’ representatives were enthroned in seats of power but

with globalization sweeping across the country and agriculture


declining these peasant politicians were ‘de-peasantized’. What

was lost was not only a class of ‘peasant-politicians’ but a vital

dimension from the political agenda, political articulation and

policy-making.

Conclusion

1. Issues Graver than those met by the eyes: A detailed

study on the impact of globalization on the farming community

in India and a systematic analysis of the crisis engulfing the

agriculturists and agricultural labourers in India would lead us to

some graver issues than those met by the eyes. The farmers’

suicides, that too in thousands, with all the tragedy it entails may

force us to stay at the visible level of reality. Failure of crops,

crash of prices, soaring cost of inputs, non-availability of credit

at reasonable rates and on negotiable terms, absolute

incapability in escaping from the clutches of usurious money

lending ‘Shylocks’ and the last resort to suicide to save ‘self-

dignity’ and the trauma of the surviving members of the family

and relatives are the visible aspects of the crisis. Behind these

one should notice the deep changes taking place- at the

economic, political and even ethical dimensions.

2. Economic: At the economic level, agriculture is

converted, under globalization, into a market-controlled activity.

The production for food, that is production for human

sustenance, and the agricultural sustainability are, in the process,

ignored. The implications are grave. In this process, engineered

by global finance and global services, what takes place is the

extraction of surplus from agriculture and transfer of the rural

surplus. “Businessman, traders, industrialists, professionals etc

are all interested only in the extraction of surplus from

agriculture, as their profits or earnings are inversely related to

the net retainable incomes of those engaged in agriculture”.

(K.C. Suri) It results in impoverization of the rural areas and

pauperization of vast sections of people in a primarily


agricultural country like India. In this agricultural country,

agriculture is ‘downgraded’, with all the serious implications.

3. Political: At the political plane what we are witnessing

is the emergence of a new politics. The political process in

which peasants had a decisive sway gives in to a politics

dancing to the tune of metropolitan, global capital. Indian

politics, at one level, is being ‘depeasantized’. The agriculturists

and landless agricultural labourers are disempowered. At

another level, the Government surrenders its right to self-

determination and independent policy initiatives, and subjects

itself to the global financial and political structures like the

International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World

Trade Organization. The national government begins to act

within the framework determined by global, corporate players

and absolves itself of the responsibility to intervene in the

interests of the farmers and rural people.

4. Ethical: The spate of farmers’ suicides raises some

fundamental ethical questions also. These suicides are the

outcome of profound social transformations taking place in the

rural areas in India. The absence of the extending hands of the

state to save the farmer from the ‘loop’ is obvious but it also

reveals that the agriculturists have become ‘atomized and

fragmented’. Earlier, a few suicides would have shaken the

society. Now, it has become so common. The public conscience

doesn’t seem to be gravely disturbed. A new perception

regarding Government’s public responsibility is taking over.

Market values are forcefully replacing the age-old values of

concern and care.

The farmers’ suicides are a grim manifestation of the

grave situation prevailing in the Indian rural areas. And nothing

less than a new politics and a new economics based on a new set

of value-perceptions and human and eco-relationships would be

able to bring in a new life to the Indian villages and villagers.

References


Government of Punjab (2004): Suicides by Farmers in Punjab

Institute for Development and Communication (1998): ‘Suicides

in Rural Punjab’

Jodka, Surinder S. (2006): Beyond Crisis: ‘Rethinking

Contemporary Punjab Agriculture’ EPWXLI (16)

Mishra, Srijit (2006): ‘Farmers’ Suicide in Maharashtra’

Mohan Kumar S., Sharam R.K. (2006) Analysis of Farmer

Suicides in Kerala EPW 41 (16) 1553-1558

National Sample Survey Organization (2005): ‘Some Aspects of

Farming’, Situation Assessment Suring of Farmers, Report No.

496

Oommen M.A. (2004) Economic Justice, Globalization and

Quest for Alternatives, Korark Publications Pvt. Ltd. Delhi

Rao, Narasimha P. and Suri K.C.: ‘Dimensions of Agrarian

Distress in Andhra Pradesh

Sridhar V. (2006): ‘Why Do Farmers Commit Suicide?’

Suri K.C. (2006): ‘Political Economy of Agrarian Distress’

Economic and Political Weekly 41 (06) 1523 – 1529

Vaidynathan A. (2006) ‘Farmers’ Suicides and the Agrarian

Crisis’ Economic and Political Weekly, (2006) 4009-1013

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