Humanity's Common Values: Seeking
a Positive Future
By Wendell Bell
Overcoming the discontents of globalization and the clashes of
civilizations requires us to reexamine and reemphasize those positive values that all
humans share.
Some commentators have insisted
that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath demonstrate Samuel
P. Huntington's thesis of "the clash of civilizations," articulated in a famous
article published in 1993. Huntington, a professor at Harvard University and director of
security planning for the National Security Council during the Carter administration,
argued that "conflict between groups from differing civilizations" has become
"the central and most dangerous dimension of the emerging global politics."
Huntington foresaw a future in which nation-states no longer play a
decisive role in world affairs. Instead, he envisioned large alliances of states, drawn
together by common culture, cooperating with each other. He warned that such
collectivities are likely to be in conflict with other alliances formed of countries
united around a different culture.
Cultural differences do indeed separate people between various
civilizations, but they also separate groups within a single culture or state. Many
countries contain militant peoples of different races, religions, languages, and cultures,
and such differences do sometimes provoke incidents that lead to violent conflict--as in
Bosnia, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Moreover, within many societies
today (both Western and non-Western) and within many religions (including Islam, Judaism,
and Christianity) the culture war is primarily internal, between fundamentalist orthodox
believers on the one hand and universalizing moderates on the other. However, for most
people most of the time, peaceful accommodation and cooperation are the norms.
Conflicts between groups often arise and continue not because of the
differences between them, but because of their similarities. People everywhere, for
example, share the capacities to demonize others, to be loyal to their own group
(sometimes even willing to die for it), to believe that they themselves and those they
identify with are virtuous while all others are wicked, and to remember past wrongs
committed against their group and seek revenge. Sadly, human beings everywhere share the
capacity to hate and kill each other, including their own family members and neighbors.
...
Interfaith global cooperation is one way that people of different
civilizations can find common cause. Another is global environmental cooperation seeking
to maintain and enhance the life-sustaining capacities of the earth. Also, people
everywhere have a stake in working for the freedom and welfare of future generations, not
least because the future of their own children and grandchildren is at stake.
Many more examples of cooperation among civilizations in the pursuit of
common goals can be found in every area from medicine and science to moral philosophy,
music, and art. A truly global commitment to the exploration, colonization, and
industrialization of space offers still another way to harness the existing skills and
talents of many nations, with the aim of realizing and extending worthy human capacities
to their fullest.
...
There is an emerging global ethic, a set of shared values that includes:
- Individual responsibility.
- Treating others as we wish them to treat us.
- Respect for life.
- Economic and social justice.
- Nature-friendly ways of life.
- Honesty.
- Moderation.
- Freedom (expressed in ways that do not harm others).
- Tolerance for diversity.
The fact that deadly human conflicts continue in many places throughout
the world is due less to the differences that separate societies than to some of these
common human traits and values. All humans, for example, tend to feel loyalty to their
group, and may easily overreact in the group's defense, leaving excluded
"outsiders" feeling marginalized and victimized. Sadly, too, all humans are
capable of rage and violent acts against others.
In past eras, the killing and destruction of enemies may have helped
individuals and groups to survive. But in today's interconnected world that is no longer
clearly the case. Today, violence and aggression too often are blunt and imprecise
instruments that fail to achieve their intended purposes, and frequently blow back on the
doers of violence.
The long-term trends of history are toward an ever-widening definition
of individual identity (with some people already adopting self-identities on the widest
scale as "human beings"), and toward the enlargement of individual circles of
caring to embrace once distant or despised "outsiders." These trends are likely
to continue, because they embody values--learned from millennia of human experience--that
have come to be nearly universal: from the love of life itself to the joys of belonging to
a community, from the satisfaction of self-fulfillment to the excitement of pursuing
knowledge, and from individual happiness to social harmony.
...
About the Author
Wendell Bell is professor emeritus of sociology and senior research scientist at Yale
University's Center for Comparative Research. He is the author of more than 200 articles
and nine books, including the two-volume Foundations of Futures Studies
(Transaction Publishers, now available in paperback 2003, 2004). His address is Department
of Sociology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208265, New Haven, Connecticut 06520. E-mail wendell.bell@yale.edu.
This article draws from an essay originally published in the Journal
of Futures Studies 6.
Excerpted from THE FUTURIST, September-October 2004. Click to
order.
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