What is the Essence of a Global World?

Richard J . Kelly

If one were to choose a key word to define the current times we live in, the

term 'global' would rank high on the list . Global interconnectivity is prevalent

in business, politics, culture and technology. The internet is putting individuals

from the four corners of the globe in touch with each other by sharing opinions

and information through social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter.

The great value of such networking is that ordinary and powerful individuals

alike can air their views on a public and international forum that is essentially

a neutral playing field. In the discussion that follows, the issue of globalization

is looked a.t through various lenses with the aim of inviting critical thinking on

its various facets and implications. The concluding part highlights the essential

role education plays in developing not just a better and fairer world but also in

nurturing more enriching and meaningful societies within that world. Knowledge

needs to be complemented by understanding and a ppreciation and that is why

human"ities-hased disc"iplines have a central role in education. As the School of

Literature, Arts and Cultural Studies at Kinki University celebrates its twentieth

anniversary this year, it needs to look forward as well as commemorate with pride

its achievements over the past two decades. Its challenge as it looks to the future

is to educate students with a critical understanding so that they can make a

lasting contribution to J apan and the wider world.

It is over twenty years too since a group of rock stars, led by the pop musician

and celebrity, Bob GeJdof, started a campaign called 'Live Aid' to raise global

awareness about the need for charitable giving to alleviate the plight of famine

victim s in Eth iopia . This was the first ever mass live global TV broadcast

that made the peoples of the worJd aware that we live in a multicultural and

interconnected age with ethical responsihilities to take care of those who are

destitute a nd despairing. However, the BBC's Africa Editor, Martin Plaut, has

just raised some interesting questions in a programme call ed 'Aid for Arms in

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Ethiopia', which is part of the BBC Assignment Series, about where some of the

aid money may have ended up. It seems that some funds were siphoned off to

purchase sophisticated arms for Ethiopian revels. If this is so, then the need for

more effective monitoring must be enforced for such charitable aid. In recent

times, we have witnessed another great act of worldwide spontaneous giving: the

response to the natural disaster and immense human tragedy of the tsunami that

devastated Southeast Asia on 26 December 2005, sweeping away in an instance

some 300,000 lives and reminding us all of our transience and vulnerability. In

September 2008, the whole world experienced its own tsunami in the form of a

financial onc that triggered a deep economic downturn in economies everywhere.

In recent days, t he world's poorest country in the northern hemisphere, Haiti,

has been struck by n devastating earthquake, again blotting out the lives of men,

women and children; nature has no favourites but it will be interesting to witness

how the international community will respond to the reconstruction of this poor

nation while the pain of economic recession is still continuing.

The economic woes of the developed world have taken centre stage in the

international media since their occurrence. This has resulted in news coverage

leaving little space for the reporting of lives lost in t he world's hot-spots like

Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Haiti ; these are the regular atrocities that

we have come to take for granted, without counting the cost of the lives lost or

pausing to imagine them as real people with loved ones and precious lives to be

lived. Recent estimates indicate that severa1 100,000 deaths have occurred in the

Haiti earthquake, let alone in its aftermath during the months and years to come.

Yct the issue is not one of numbers - the loss of one innocent life , wherever it

occurs, matters. For, to quote John Donne, the seventeenth-century poet-Dean of

St Paul's Cathedral in London:

No man is an island, entire of itself; everyman is a piece of a continent, a part

of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if

a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were, Any

man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore

never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee ...

(Meditation 17, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624)

Time will judge whether humankind has lived up to the heightened

expectations of the contemporary age. Challenges to apathy , complacency,

detrimental ambition and greed are timely and necessary, but for them to be

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meaningful they need to inspire amelioration through concrete and effective

action. Charitable giving is a great thing enshrined in many of the codes of social

behaviour and of belief that human beings have constructed. Charity does not

consist solely of the time-honoured practice of almsgiving. The word itself is

derived from the Latin caritas - which means 'love'. To love one's neighbour as

oneself is one of the oldest injunctions of human rights, enshrined in the ancient

law of Judaism, which was bequeathed to Christianity and Islam alike. It is a

principal that the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Sikh, the New Age Humanist and

many others embrace in their creeds. Many secular statements concerning human

rights likewise stress respect and due care to others. If one is to show true 'charity'

that love demands, then issues of justice, equality, mercy, compassion, tolerance,

mutual forgiveness and empathy must be to the fore. These are the qualities that

all people everywhere are called to endorse and enact by the giving of meaningful

forms of aid.

The 'You're History' publication (of which I was the co-editor) brings together

a range of issues relating to social justice, dignity, equality and survival. The

people who contributed to the book work ceaselessly to address these issues:

through the media, political repesentation, public lobbying and awareness­

raising. Those historians who are interested in the people of the present and the

future, as well as those of the past, seek to assess where we are and where we

might be going through an understanding of where we have been already. It is a

fruitful endeavour for questions to be turned around and viewed from different

perspectives, the focus zooming in and out as the picture takes shape.

There have always been those stricken by poverty , illness, warfare and

disasters, although not necessarily confined to the parts of the world with which

we most frequently associate them today. They are not merely the victims of

geography. The African continent, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America havc

produced some of the world's greatest civilizations. But as history unfolds, empires

rise and fall , as empires always do. They become victims of their own over­

extended ambitions, their own weight and obligations, internal corruption and

conflict, dissent amongst those they rule or competition with rivals. The aftermath

of empire and the challenges of post-colonialism take time to work through,

especially if new super-powers are raising the game and seeking new client

populations and markets to support their internal economies. The maelstrom that

followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century meant that new

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international relationships - political, economic, cultural and religious - had to

be forged by the successor states that gradually crystallized in its wake to form

Europe and the Middle East. Over the next 1500 years they remain haunted by

the vision of empire, seeking to recreate it in their own likeness: the Byzantine

Empire , the Carolingian and Ottanian Empires , the Mamluk, Seljuk and

Ottoman Empires, the Mongolian Empire, the Angevin Empire, the Holy Roman

Empire, the Portuguese and Spanish Empires, the Dutch Trade Empire, Austro·

Hungarian Empire. the British Empire and the German Third Reich.

Does this pattern of big fish gobbling up little fish , and of little fish banding

together to become big fish themselves, have to persist as a model of nationhood,

governance and economics? Will someday see the United States of Africa or

Central America as a number of devolved states? History is not necessarily

linear and progressive, nor is it inevitably cyclical, condemning us to a perpetual

'groundhog day' in which we repeat the same experiments and errors. Neither

need we subscribe to a Marxist theory of historical dialectic in which we lurch

from one crisis to another. We can all help to shape history, if only we take t he

trouble to study and comprehend the correlation between thinking and behaviour.

Relationships between rich and poor nations do not always have to take the

form of a clientele. It should be perfectly possible to mentor developing nations

without imposing prefixed ideologies upon them or making them victims of

the global labour market and 'free' trade. The world is too small a place for the

problems of anyone area to be contained. The solutions are complex, and faced

with complexity we so often retreat into over-simplistic responses that are black

and white, rather than working through the shades of grey. If we consider the

current age to be sophisticated· and in many ways it is - then it needs to be more

universally realized so that the less powerful can be permitted to improve the

quality of their livelihoods, especially through educational access.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some of the poorest people in

the world were the Celts of Ireland, Scotland and Cornwall. Forced from their

ancestral homelands due to poverty and hardship, their diasporas carried them

around the world where their skills and imagination helped shape the technology,

economy, literature. drama a nd music of younger nations like the United States

of America. Africa is now the world's poorest continent , beset by famine, HIVI

AIDS, disease, warfare and genocide. It is not that way by chance, but because

it is going through a similar process of reinvention fonowing its imperial colonial

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experiences. The world powers of today. while paying lip service to t.he need for

aid. debt relief and environmental controls, know that fast-tracking the process

will impinge on the cushioned comfort zones of their own societies. Humanitarian

impulses vie with the pragmatics of vested interest a nd t he poli tical web on

interrelationships that have been constructed between individuals. nations and

multi-national corporations. Such webs can distort reality and tie issues in knots.

To the educated English and Irish readers of the eighteenth-century tracts and

political essays. the bitingly satirica l 'Modest Proposal' advanced by Jonathan

Swift (the author of Gulliuer's Trauels) seemed at face value a completely logical

extension of policy in respect to the Irish demise - until they realized that it led,

quite logically and expediently, to the eating of the children of the poor.

This is also not entirely irrelevant to what is happening today. The rich may

not be devouring the children of the poor, in cannibalistic fashion , but they are

being deprived in order to sustain more affluent lifestyles. The TV screens in our

living rooms do report on the pLight of the poor: yet it does not seem to connect

emotionally. it would be interesting to gauge the response if those people were in

our homes and expiring beside our dining tables. perhaps many of us would feed

and shelter them. try to give them a leg up in life. But they are not, and faced

with the seeming frustration and futility of getting some of our plenty onto our

plates. we turn away and render them invisible. just as many do concerning the

homeless on the pavements and in the parks of big cities. The problems seem too

big for us to tackle alone. That is what ~e elect governments for - if indeed we

bother to vote and have not decided that all politicians are the same and in the

game for their own end. Democracy was hard-won and there Bre good. committed

people within the ranks of governments and administrations. but they also need

encouraging a nd reminding that they really can make a difference, if only they

steadfastly allow conscience to guide compromise. rather than vice versa.

Most of t he world's conflicts throughout hi story come down ultimately to

competition for resources. If the poor were more vocal and proactive. we may

encounter strong opposition. But hopefully not and that sensible individuals

would intervene with dialogue and not just with force. and ensure that everyone

got a share - that no one went hu ngry to bed or injured to hospital. Conflict

resolution and valuing the rights of the individual as part of the social whole are

crucial aspects of sustainable life and meaningful living.

The sustainability of h uma n societies a nd of huma n history cannot be

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considered in isolation. It cries out to be considered in relation to the bigger

picture of the relationship and natural contact between ourselves and other

creatures, our shared habitats and the very fabric of the hospitable little planet we

live on. Yet we persist in condemning sentient creatures to tortured, undignified

existences in the cause of quick profit and careless consumerism. Cease to respect

other life· forms and it becomes ever easier to devalue human me too. Likewise,

our growing awareness of the implications of ravishing non-renewable resources

is in tension with our unquenchable thirst for energy and our unwillingness to

significantly change or modify our lifestyles.

One of the reasons that ancient societies persisted in their way of life for so

many millennia (some still helping to care for areas such as the Amazon to this

day) was that smaller, simpler societies suited them. The rate of technological

development Quickened a long with growing competition for resources. As

agricultural and metallurgical capabilities developed so too did warfare, conquest,

expansionism, tribal confederacies, trade, material culture and artistic diversity.

Multifarious civilization was born and its development has been speeding up

ever since. But is it an open·ended scenario? Is development finite or infinite, and

might it sometimes be advantageous to decelerate somewhat in order to ensure

sustainability and 'progress' in the best sense of the word?

We ignore the legacy of our environment at our periL Many of the wilderness

landscapes on our doorsteps are that very areas that were most over-exploited

from the dawn of history; for example, regions like Dartmoor, Exmoor and

Bodmim Moor in Britain have still not fully recovered from the experience.

Mexico City is now one of the most massive contemporary urban conglomerations,

part of a South American tradition of city living that begun in the ancient empires

of the Mayans and Aztecs. It is becoming apparent that a s ignificant factor in

the disappearance of these 'civilizations' was their over working and colonization

of the land. They simply became too voracious, too populous and too big. Today

immigrants from Latin America flock to the V.S. as underpaid migrant labourers;

they often live in scanty accommodation with their wives and children left

stranded back home. And yet it is also in Latin America that we can currently see

some of the most promising signs of growing popular awareness and constructive

activism. We congratulate ourselves on civil rights victories, such as the abolition

of slavery, and yet there are more people in what amounts to the condition of

slavery in the world today than ever there were in the ancient world, or in the

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cotton field!': of the ~outhern stRtes of AmeriCR Rnd sng::.r plantM:ions in t.he West

Indies. Today, however, those who exploit them bear little or no legal or moral

responsibility towards them. One only has to consider the plight of child labour

in India 01' China or the plight of sex workers in London or Amsterdam to realize

this.

History is there for us to learn from. It is not purely progressive and those

who reside in the developed world are not on some sort of evolutionary fast-track

in terms of historical or ethical development. There have always been people who

care and who have sought to make a difference for the good - we have no moral

monopoly on compassion today. Sometimes the circumstances are right or they

can inspire enough others to produce a shift in public opinion and social practices

which may subsequently be enshrined in policy and. more importantly, in law.

The role of the press and of freedom of speech has frequently played a vital role in

this; tbey have ensured that we can never again have peace of mind - unless we

reflect and act upon such knowledge.

Once ordinary people become more socially and politically aware and active

it can become harder for their governments to be wantonly exploitative and

corrupt - unless society becomes so cynical and blase about its politicians and

their motives that it leaves them to get on with it without demanding better.

This applies not only to those living in corrupt underdeveloped and developing

states, but also to citizens of developed democracies. Allowing our governments

to capitalize on the PR benefits of championing aid and debt relief is naIve and

irresponsible, whilst they are also cutting back on the means of understanding

the cultures and challenges of the beneficiaries, bolstering the arms trade and

prioritizing the interests of their own business communities. Cynics might justify

inactivity by denying that any attempts to help the poor can succeed in the face

of corrupt regimes. There is no excuse for leaving the innocent to their suffering

or fail ing to help set in motion the longer processes of change. The poor need

access to education, as much as to food and water, in order to help shape their

own destinies. Women, in particular, can make a little education go a long way

when it comes to caring for the welfare and livelihood of their families and their

neighbours, and improving their environments. The rights of women. children, the

disabled and the elderly need to be advanced and safeguarded if we are to achieve

a more equitable world.

Ultimately some things matter more than property, position or even physical

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wellbeing as individuals bave found during wars and persecutions when they

have risked everything to save a neighbour or II stranger, acting intuitively or

knowing that they could not live with the personal sense of guilt if they did not.

You have to be able not only to live, but to live with yourself. Given all that we

now know about what is going on in our world and wc fail to ask questions and

seck answers, then it will be once more the case of the ostrich with its head stuck

in the sand - nothing will change to make a difference.

That people are prepared to exert themselves to help others in so many ways,

from creative performances, feats of physical endurance and using professional

expertise to phoning, texting, e-mailing or signing a standing order form for

regular, planned giving, is in itself a source of affirmation and hope. That others

place their own lives on the line and leave their comfort zones to meet others in

their place of pain and need is admirable. That people can be made to think, to

connect wires, to ask questions and seek answers is an essential process of change

for the better_ Once mobilized. public opinion is a powerful force. Individual action

or the force of circumstances may serve to energize the quest for change; yet

for real lasting change to occur and endure the reasons underlying it have to be

explored and understood and provision made for future sustainability_

Our time is but one episode in the epic of human history - in evolutionary

terms no more than a blink of a dinosaur's eyelid - if we are to make it reany

count we have to think of it in relation to the whole story. We have to truly value

what we have in every respect, enough perhaps to really give some if it away and

aHow the whole world a more equal share. The greatest gift we have is peace of

mind and the ability to live with ourselves as well as with others_ The only way

we can do that, in this information-rich age, is either not to look at injustice,

suffering and the threat of military and environmental annihilation, or to look

them squarely in the face and challenge our own preconceptions and practices

- a nd maybe even change them. We are part of history and we can shape it in

positive ways though being critically informed.

Jonathan Swift makes it clear over and over in Gulliuer's Trauels that

enlightenment through learning is what makes Yahoos more human. He saw

education as central to improving the quality of life for the general populous

of humanity. He a lso made a clear distinction between teaching and learning,

where learning is what one retains to make a difference. The great challenge

facing educational institutions at the present time, both domestically and

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internatinmllly, is to consider hnw they om p-duc.l'lt.e effectively. This mellns not

just to provide the necessary skills to secure good employment but also to give a

sense of the worth of the human person so that a more creative and self-enriching

society evolves for the benefit of all.

The School of Literature, Arts and Cultural Studies at Kinki University has

a unique and important role to play in the overall stmcture of the university

in that it focuses on human culture and communication, which are essential

human traits. Tbese are indispensable for enriching scientific and technological

disciplines in tha.t they inspire worth and value to the process of all learning

and research. Albert Einstein, the world's most renowned physicist, considered

the works of Shakespeare as essential reading fOl" his mind, heart and soul, and

savoured reading them regularly. It is interesting to note that Shakespeare and

Einstein were considered to be the two most significant figures of the second

millennium (2000) in a popular vote conducted by the BBC at the time; two of the

world's most renowned literary and scientific icons gaining the accolades, and in

that order.

The challenge for education in the contemporary world is that we now

a ll live in a globally connected age and we must not be fearful to embrace

interconnectedness in interdisciplinary contexts . This should not only take

place within academic institutions but also between academic institutions both

at a national and international level. The pioneers of the seventeenth-century

enlightenment realized this when, as John Donne states: 'No man is an island,

entire of itself; everyman is a piece of a continent, a part of the main.' These

sentiments are still more than relevant today as we begin the second decade of

the twenty-first century. The goal of education should be to pursue and attain a

truth whereby individuals not just acquire knowledge and information but also

gain a critical sense of its worth and value.

When You're Historyl How People Make the Difference was published in

2005 much of the content of the book was less than popular with political

administrations like the Bush Administration in the U.S. because several of the

issues discussed in the publication constituted uncomfortable content for them.

However, as time progresses the significance of their resonance grows more and

more, something that the pop musician and celebrity Bob Geldof foresaw and

stated in his Preface to the book. The pursuit of what is true and factual may not

always be popular, but it will never cease to gain respect and recognition. This

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is the essential challenge and goal of what it truly means to be part of a global

world. It is tbe duty of academic institutions to ensure that academic objectivism

shall be the guiding beacon of their educational standards and research pursuits.

Reference

Brown, M. P. & Kelly R. J. , eds. You're History! How People Make the

Difference. Continuum: London and New York, 2005.

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