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Date Published: 22/04/2001
Author: Jakob Von Uexkull we desperately need new models, says Jakob Von Uexkull, to reflect our true common global values. |
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Twenty years ago I founded the Right Livelihood Awards (the ‘Alternative Nobel Prizes’) to honour and encourage those who have dared – sometimes at great personal risk – to think the unthinkable, to break the taboos that prop up unjust systems and empower others with new ideas and opportunities. Over the past two decades, almost a thousand individuals and organisations, working in many areas in most of the world’s nations, have been nominated for, and over 80 have received, the Right Livelihood Award.
One thing this has convinced me is that something different is needed if we are to change course in time to avoid the collapse of our planet’s life support systems, and what the historian Lewis Mumford calls the ‘barbarisation from within’ of society.
What we need is a new paradigm; for the present paradigm will not release its hold until a new one becomes and remains more clearly visible. We need to tell a different human story, for the present one can have no happy ending. To do this, we first need to understand our society’s values.
The old story
Our current human story describes a world created by chance, where the material level is the ultimate reality and morals are mere ‘emotions’. This (post-) modern story sees all other human stories as fairy tales. We are ‘robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes’ (Richard Dawkins). Previous cultures have been ‘wrong, always wrong’ (E O Wilson). We have elevated increased consumer ‘choice’ to the highest societal goal. Yet this goal is in direct conflict with the task of maintaining a liveable planet.
The story is cynical about everything except cynicism. It substitutes markets for politics, ethics and faith. The world has become a Western theatre where this dismal play is performed daily, supported by all the skills and billions which Madison Avenue can muster. The status quo triumphs, for no moral argument against it can be taken seriously.
The result is paralysis – at a time when we can least afford it. Never has the gap between short-term thinking and long-term consequences been wider. Restoring environmental security is by far the most difficult challenge we have ever faced and the most morally compelling issue of our time. Yet the ‘minimum which is environmentally and scientifically necessary is more than the maximum which is politically feasible or even thinkable’ (Al Gore).
We need to deconstruct the modern myth which has brought us to this impasse, deeply wounding both our outer and inner environments. This myth has several parts, but one of the most powerful is the fallacy of wealth creation.
The fallacy of wealth creation
The Japanese have savings of $90,000 per capita. From 1990-98, real wages increased by 15 per cent, while they fell in the US (OECD). Manufacturing output exceeds that of the US. Japan’s current account surplus grew in the 1990s at twice the rate of the 1980s. Net external assets increased in the same decade from $294 billion to $1,153 billion, while the US deficit and liabilities grew even faster.
Yet the story we now hear is that the Japanese economy ‘collapsed’ in the 90s and the country is an economic basket case. Why? Because its citizens, having decided that they are rich enough, are ‘dangerously’ low consumers. Living in an ageing society with a weak social net, a large public deficit and a polluted environment, they sensibly prefer to save. Yet their frugality is now lambasted in the Western economic media for endangering the global economy.
Meanwhile, the US – the supposed model for us all – is collapsing. Since 1979, the income share of the bottom 80 per cent of society has fallen – the poorest losing most – while the richest 1 per cent have gained the most. According to government statistics, most US workers now earn less than in the 1960s and 1970s, but work longer hours. Fossil fuel use is still increasing but the government will do nothing ‘to jeopardise the American lifestyle’ – as the US representative at the Hague Climate Summit put it.
We need a new story, and we can learn from Japan – but not from its previous ‘success’; from its failure. We need to know how our economies can be rebuilt so that frugality is experienced as a bonus, not a threat. This involves, for example, looking at the environmental and social effects of current discounting, accounting and tax regulations. Our new story needs to include the externalised ‘takings’ of our economic success stories – and the absurdities and costs of a ‘wealth creation’ built on the depletion of nature and ethics, ‘selling the family silver’ and the monetarisation of non-market wealth.
The new story needs to challenge the naïve nonsense of market populism, portraying us all – from workers to corporate raiders – as daring rebels against governments who want to take our money. We need a story which prepares us for the huge structural adjustments required in the rich economies and societies so that we can cut fossil fuel use by the necessary 70 per cent. Denial of natural limits – despite the mounting evidence – has cost us over half our global forests and species in the last 50 years. We cannot afford to keep pretending.
And yet we do. Nothing better illustrates our hubris than the claim that you cannot stop ‘progress’ or ‘turn the clock back’. The past is full of examples of extinct (mono-) cultures. Shortly after the Roman poet Juvenal declared that ‘wealth is our divinity’, the clock was turned back to such an extent that some technologies widely used in ancient Rome were lost and not re-introduced in Europe for over a thousand years.
Building on common values
Yet pessimism can be countered. There is ample evidence that a global citizens’ community with common values already exists. Research by the Institute for Global Ethics and others has found a remarkable global convergence, and even consensus, on common values. This basic consensus overrides diverse worldviews. It is shared by religious believers and non-believers of very different social backgrounds and in very different countries.
Of course there is diversity in how values are interpreted and implemented. For the poor, the most important human rights are economic. War and peace, tradition, climate and geography will also influence our priorities. But that is a far cry from the story of irreconcilable Western, African or Asian values. When examined, the claimed disdain of Asians and Africans for political and civil rights reveals itself to be a convenient excuse for local dictators and their Western backers reluctant to grant democratic rights which might endanger their economic privileges. Significantly, the only Africans and Asians to accuse me of not understanding their different values have been the representatives of the former Nigerian and Indonesian dictators, complaining about Right Livelihood Awards given to human rights activists in their countries.
In fact, the main values gap today is not between most Europeans, Americans, Asians and Africans, but between all of us and the values of the ruling economic fundamentalism – which even in democratic countries is presented as sacrosanct and without alternative. Our problem today is not a ‘values vacuum’ but that widely-agreed human values are not acted on. Indeed, they have often been rendered invisible by the refusal of commerce and finance to accept that they should be restricted by the values of the societies in which they operate. As a result we become less confident about our moral judgements.
Consumer or citizen?
It is a sign of the trivialising effect of our soundbite public debate that the distinction between our value judgements as citizens and our preferences as consumers is hardly ever articulated. It is simply assumed that the latter govern the former, that our overriding value is competitive greed. This is not so. In The Economy of the Earth, US Professor Martin Sagoff describes his students’ reactions to the decision by the US Forest Service to lease a wilderness in the middle of a National Park to Walt Disney Enterprises to develop a ski resort. Asking his students how many had visited or would visit this wilderness as it was, he received only a few responses while many responded positively when asked if they would go if the area was developed in the way Disney planned; ‘The class got really excited’. The consumer demand was clearly there.
Sagoff went on to ask his students if they thought the government was right in giving Disney a lease to develop this wilderness. ‘The response was nearly unanimous. The students believed that the Disney plan was loathsome and despicable, that the Forest Service had violated a public trust by approving it, and that the values for which we stand as a nation compel us to preserve the little wilderness we have for its own sake and as a heritage for future generations’.
This is not an isolated example. Questioned in depth in a recent international study about current priorities and future preferences, large majorities in the USA – as well as other industrialised countries – wanted less emphasis on ‘economic opportunity’ and more on cultural and educational opportunities, emotional and environmental security and the ‘spiritual dimension’. (Journal of Human Values Vol 5 No 1, 1999).
Citizen values come a poor second to consumer preferences when policies are set on the national level. On the global level, where more and more decisions affecting us are now taken, citizen values are seen by the corporate globalisers as an undesirable impediment to trade. But global corporations who insist on the right to penetrate every area of life, cannot then expect to be shielded against the ensuing responsibilities. Global values of honesty, compassion, fairness, community etc apply to everyone; and especially to those benefiting from the huge privileges of incorporation and limited liability. If forceful international agreements are possible to protect the values of commerce, then they are also possible to protect more fundamental human values, including the right to protect diversity against the threat of a global monoculture made in Washington and Hollywood.
New global structures
We urgently need global structures which articulate our common global values. That is why I have proposed a World Future Council, giving a voice to our common future. Council members would be 50 to 100 respected and open-minded individuals from various countries, backgrounds and beliefs. While they would serve on the Council in their personal capacity, the aim will be to include recognised political, religious and civil society leaders as well as representatives of business, the sciences and so on who have shown an awareness and understanding of global values.
The World Future Council would not claim to ‘represent’ others, but rather to express and manifest common values and goals – as citizens taking responsibility for the future. The Council would aim to be a catalytic force that crystallises and manifests universal concerns and formulates value-based responses. Its power would be moral. It could stimulate the creation of regional and local councils who would bring their issues and propositions to the World Council for debate and promotion.
The responses I have already had to this proposal have convinced me that it is an idea whose time has come. And I invite anyone thinking or working along similar lines to consider joining forces to ensure that ‘globalisation’ does not mean the worldwide imposition of the values and interests of a small privileged minority. For the most serious threat to us all today is not the (impossible) continuation of ‘business as usual’. It is the collapse of our societies, as our leaders lose their credibility and are replaced by preachers of intolerance and obscurantism, leading the reaction against market radicalism. Even local diversity needs a global voice to speak up for its values.
The alternative is terror on a global scale – not just by a few fanatics but by the many hundreds of millions who see their livelihoods and lands destroyed, their families and futures threatened by the West’s unwillingness to change. If we wait too long, then the West may be confronted with very different global values as the poor majority lose their patience and decide ‘the time has come for destroying those who destroy the earth’. (Revelations 11:18).
Jakob von Uexkull is a writer and translator who specialises in environmental issues. A professional philatelist, he sold his rare stamp collection in 1980 to create an endowment for the Right Livelihood Awards. Annual awards are now worth $US230,000.
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