It's Right To Rebel

The world in which we live is both remarkably comfortable and thoroughly miserable. There is unprecedentedprosperity in the world, which is incomparably richer than ever before. The massive command over resources,knowledge and technology that we now take for granted would be hard for our ancestors to imagine. 

But ours isalso a world of extraordinary deprivation and of staggering inequality. An astonishing number of children areill-nourished and illiterate as well as ill-cared and needlessly ill. Millions perish every week from diseasesthat can be completely eliminated, or at least prevented from killing people with abandon.

The dual presence of opulence and agony in the world that we inhabit makes it hard to avoid fundamentalquestions about the ethical acceptability of the prevailing arrangements and about our own values and theirrelevance and reach.

One of the questions that we have to face immediately is this: given the gravity and consequences of thecontrasts between the comforts and the miseries that we see in the world, how do most of us manage to liveuntroubled and unbothered lives ignoring altogether the inequities that characterize our world? 

Is theavoidance of ethical scrutiny the result of our lack of sympathy for each other - a kind of moral blindness orbreathtaking egocentrism that afflict and distort our thinking and actions? Or is there some other explanationthat is consistent with a less negative view of human psychology and human values?

This is not an easy issue to settle, but let me begin by arguing that our indifference and complacency maywell be connected with a failure of our understanding, rather than reflecting a basic lack of human sympathy.A cognitive failure can arise both from unreasoned optimism and from groundless pessimism, and oddly enough,the two can sometimes unite. 

To begin with the former, the obdurate optimist tends to hope, if onlyimplicitly, that things will get better soon enough. The combination of processes, such as the flourishingmarket economy, that has led to the prosperity of some in the world will presently lead to similar prosperityfor all. In this glowing perspective, the doubters tend to appear to be soft in head, whether or not they arekind in heart. "Give us time - don't be so impatient," asserts the voice of contented optimist.

On the other side, the stubborn pessimists acknowledge - indeed emphasize - the continuing misery in theworld. But they are, frequently enough, also pessimistic about our ability to change the world significantly."We should change things if we can, but to be realistic, we really cannot," goes that argument.Pessimism can - and often does - lead to a quiet acceptance of a great many ills. 

As Sir Thomas Browne put itmore than three and half centuries ago (in 1643), "the world....is not an inn, but a hospital."People can learn to live happily in a hospital, full of ailing patients, and manage to avoid thinking aboutthe miserable around them.

There is, thus, a partial but effective congruence between the stubborn optimist and the incorrigiblepessimist. The optimist finds resistance unnecessary whereas the pessimist finds it to be useless. As JamesBranch Cabell put it (reacting to a very different manifestation of this conundrum), "The optimistproclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." 

Theopposing viewpoints unite in resignation. Global passiveness is, thus, fed not just by moral blindness, and byapathy and egocentrism, but also by a conservative unity of radical opposites. Persuaded - or at leastcomforted - by our alleged inability to do any good (either because it is not needed or because we cannot makeany difference anyway), we can lead our own lives, minding our own business, and not see anything morallyproblematic in quietly accepting the inequities that characterize our world. 

Ethics can be killed by prematureresignation.

It is in this general context that we have to view the doubts about globalization that we see in the worldtoday, including the protest movements which have made organized international meetings so hard to hold. Theseprotests have many features (some of them rather hard to tolerate, including arrogance and violence), but theycan be, at one level, seen as a challenge to the ethical complacency and inaction generated by the coalitionof optimists and pessimists. 

The protest movements are often ungainly, ill-tempered, simplistic, frenzied andfrantic, and they can also be highly disruptive. And yet, at another level, they also serve the function, Iwould argue, of questioning and disputing the unexamined contentment about the world in which we live. 

In thissense, the global doubts can help to broaden our attention and extend the reach of policy debates, byconfronting the status quo and by contesting global resignation and acquiescence. That, it can argued, is acreative role of doubts, even if some of the presumptions and many of the proposed remedies that go with theprotest movements are themselves under examined and unclear. 

It is important to recognise that thequestion-mongering role of doubts can itself be creative and productive, and we have to separate thedisruptive parts of the protest movements from their constructive function.

The Nature of Globalization

The protest movements can, thus, be seen as expressing creative doubts. But doubts about what? There is, Iwould argue, a serious interpretational issue here. The protesters often describe themselves as"anti-globalization"? Is globalization a new folly? And are the protesters really againstglobalization, as their rhetoric suggests?

The so-called anti-globalization protesters can hardly be, in general, anti-globalization, since theseprotests are in fact among the most globalized events in the contemporary world. The protests in Seattle,Melbourne, Prague, Quebec and elsewhere are not isolated or provincial phenomena. 

The protesters are not justlocal kids, but men and women from across the world pouring into the location of the respective events to havetheir global voice heard. Globalized interrelations can hardly be what the protests want to stop, since theymust, then, begin by stopping themselves.

I should presently come back to the question as to how we may sensibly view what the protests are about,but before that, let me turn to the second question: Is globalization a new folly? I would argue thatglobalization is neither especially new, nor in general, a folly. 

A historical understanding of the nature ofglobalization can be quite useful here. Over thousands of years, globalization has contributed to the progressof the world, through travel, trade, migration, spread of cultural influences, and dissemination of knowledgeand understanding (including of science and technology). To have stopped globalization would have doneirreparable harm to the progress of humanity.

Furthermore, even though globalization is often seen these days as a correlate of Western dominance,consideration of history can also help us to understand that globalization can run in the opposite directionas well. To illustrate, let us look back at the beginning of the last millennium rather than at its end. 

Around 1000 A.D., global spread of science, technology and mathematics was changing the nature of the oldworld, but the dissemination then was, to a great extent, in the opposite direction to what we see today. Forexample, the high technology in the world of 1000 A.D. included paper and printing, the crossbow andgunpowder, the clock and the iron chain suspension bridge, the kite and the magnetic compass, the wheel barrowand the rotary fan. Each one of these examples of high technology of the world a millennium ago waswell-established and extensively used in China, and was practically unknown elsewhere. Globalization spreadthem across the world, including Europe.

A similar movement occurred in the Eastern influence on Western mathematics. The decimal system emerged andbecame well developed in India between the second and the sixth century, and was used extensively also by Arabmathematicians soon thereafter. These mathematical innovations reached Europe mainly in the last quarter ofthe tenth century, and began having its major impact in the early years of the last millennium, playing amajor part in the scientific revolution that helped to transform Europe.

Indeed, Europe would have been a lot poorer - economically, culturally and scientifically - had it resistedthe globalization of mathematics, science and technology at that time. And the same applies - though in thereverse direction - today. To reject globalization of science and technology on the ground that this isWestern influence would not only amount to overlooking global contributions - drawn from many different partsof the world - that lie solidly behind so-called Western science and technology, but would also be quite adaft practical decision, given the extent to which the whole world stands to benefit from the process. 

Toidentify this phenomenon with the "Western imperialism" of ideas and beliefs (as the rhetoric oftensuggests) would be a serious and costly error, in the same way that any European resistance to Easterninfluence would have been at the beginning of the last millennium. We must not, of course, overlook the factthat there are issues related to globalization that do connect with the imperialism (the history of conquests,colonialism and alien rule remains relevant today in many different ways), but it would be a great mistake tosee globalization primarily as a feature of imperialism. It is much bigger - much greater - than that. 

The Well-frog and the Global World

The polar opposite of globalization would be persistent separatism and relentless autarky. It isinteresting here to recollect an image of seclusion that was invoked with much anxiety in many old Sanskrittexts in India, beginning from about two and a half thousand years ago. 

This is the story of a well-frog - the kupamanduka - which lives its whole life within a well and is suspicious of everything outside it. Beginningfrom about 500 B.C., there are at least four Sanskrit texts, Ganapath, Hitopadesh, Prasannaraghava, andBhattikavya, that warn us not to be well-frogs. 

The well-frog does, of course have a "world view,"but it is a world view that is entirely confined to that little well. The scientific, cultural and economichistory of the world would have been very limited had we lived like well-frogs. This remains an importantissue, since there are plenty of well-frogs around today - and also, of course, many solicitors and advocatesof well-frogs.

The importance of global contact and interaction applies to economic relations among others. Indeed, thereis much evidence that the global economy has brought prosperity to many different areas on the globe.Pervasive poverty and "nasty, brutish and short" lives dominated the world a few centuries ago, withonly a few pockets of rare affluence. 

In overcoming that penury, modern technology, as well as economicinterrelations, has been influential. And they continue to remain important today. The economic predicament ofthe poor across the world cannot be reversed by withholding from them the great advantages of contemporarytechnology, the well-established efficiency of international trade and exchange, and the social as well aseconomic merits of living in open rather than closed societies. 

Rather, the main issue is how to make good useof the remarkable benefits of economic intercourse and technological progress in a way that pays adequateattention to the interests of the deprived and the underdog. That is, I would argue, the principal questionthat emerges from the anti-globalization movements. It is, constitutively, not a question about globalizationat all, and the linkage with globalization is only instrumental and contingent. 

Non-market Institutions and Equitable Sharing

What then is the main point of contention? The principal challenge, I would submit, relates, in one way oranother, to inequality - international as well as intranational. The inequalities that irk concern disparitiesin affluence, and also gross asymmetries in political, social and economic power. The issue of inequalityrelates centrally to the disputes over globalization. A crucial question concerns the sharing of the potentialgains from globalization, between rich and poor countries, and between different groups within a country. 

Itis not adequate to understand that the poor of the world need globalization as much as the rich do, it is alsoimportant to make sure that they actually get what they need. This may require extensive institutional reform,and that task has to be faced at very the same time when globalization is defended.

Perhaps the most important thing on which to focus is the far-reaching role of non-market institutions indetermining the nature and extent of inequalities. Indeed, political, social, legal and other institutions canbe critically significant in making good use even of the market mechanism itself - in extending its reach andin facilitating its equitable use. Their overwhelming importance are relevant both for disparities betweennations and for inequalities within nations.

Distributional questions are far more complex and far-reaching than the recognition that they typically getin the usual advocacy of globalization and the championing of high rates of economic growth. Consider theon-going debate on the role of economic growth in removing poverty, which if often fought over very a narrowground. 

It is obvious enough that economic growth can be extremely helpful in removing poverty. This is soboth because the poor can directly share in the increased wealth and income generated by economic growth, andalso because the overall increase in national prosperity can help in the financing of public services(including health care and education), which in turn can be particularly useful for the poor and the deprived.

And yet the removal of poverty and deprivation cannot be seen to be an automatic result of economic growth.The basic problem concerns not merely the obvious point that it must make a difference how the new incomesgenerated are distributed among the different classes. 

But more fundamentally, we have to recognise thatdeprivation with which we have reasons to be concerned is not just the absolute lowness of income, butdifferent but interrelated "unfreedoms," including the prevalence of preventable illness, needlesshunger, premature mortality, unceasing illiteracy, social exclusion, economic insecurity, and the denial ofpolitical liberty. The income going to the poor is only one determining influence among many others in dealingwith deprivation. 

Institutional Bases of Participation and Security

A second issue concerns the process through which income is earned as economic growth occurs. The abilityof the poor to participate in economic growth depends on a variety of enabling social conditions. It is hardto participate in the expansionary process of the market mechanism (especially in a world of globalized trade)if one is illiterate and unschooled, or if one is bothered by undernourishment and ill health, or ifartificial barriers such as discrimination related to race or gender or social background, exclude substantialparts of humanity from fair economic participation. 

Similarly, if one has no capital (not even a tiny plot ofland in the absence of land reform), and no access to microcredit (without the security of collateralownership), it is not easy for a person to show much economic enterprise in the market economy.

The benefits of the market economy can indeed be momentous, as the champions of the market system rightlyargue. But then the non-market arrangements for the sharing of education, epidemiology, land reform,micro-credit facilities, appropriate legal protections, women's rights and other means of empowerment mustalso be seen to be important - even as ways of spreading access to the market economy (issues in which manymarket advocates take astonishingly little interest). 

Indeed, many advocates of the market economy don't seemto take the market sufficiently seriously, because if they did, they would pay more attention to spreading thevirtues of market-based opportunities to all. In the absence of advancing these enabling conditions forwidespread participation in the market economy, the advocacy of the market system end up being mereconservatism, rather than supporting the promotion of market opportunities as widely as possible.Institutional broadening needed for efficient access to the market economy is no less important for thesuccess of the market economy than the removal of barriers to trade.

A third issue concerns the recognition that the fruits of economic growth may not automatically expand theimportant social services; there is an inescapable political process involved here. Decisions have to emergeat the social and political level about the uses to which the newly generated resources can be put. 

The routeof "growth-mediated" advancement may be full of promise and favourable prospects for livingconditions and freedoms of human beings, but political and social steps have to be taken to realise thatpromise, and to secure those prospects. 

For example, South Korea did much better than, say, Brazil (which toogrew very fast for many decades) in channelling resources to education and health care, and this greatlyhelped South Korea to achieve participatory economic growth and to raise the quality of life of its people.