Jane Austen’s Globalism: Three Lenses for the Future
Jul 21st, 2008 • Posted in: Commentaryby Rushworth M. Kidder
OXFORD, England
In recent weeks, the U.S. presidential candidates have been traveling overseas to bolster their foreign-policy credentials. Like presidents before them, their task will be, in the words of that shopworn adage, to think globally but act locally.
But what does “think globally” mean? A deceptively simple question, it surfaced during a meeting of internationally minded think tanks here at Oxford University last week. Convened by the New York-based EastWest Institute, it brought together representatives from Brazil, China, Dubai, Ethiopia, Great Britain, India, Latvia, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States. The stated goal was to create a world-class alliance of public-policy research organizations, provisionally called the Global Leadership Consortium. But the conceptual challenge arose from a troubling fact: Much so-called “global thinking” is little more than narrowly national thinking strutting on an international stage.
English novelist Jane Austen, it turns out, may help sort this out. We’ll get to her in a moment. First, though, take a more homey example: U.S. energy policy. It is driven largely by national needs in the face of global pressures. True, those who think about energy — presidential candidates, for example — need to know the geopolitics of suppliers like Iraq and consumers like China. They must be internationalists, and they must travel to be so. But that’s no guarantee that they will think globally. If they see their goal solely as defending U.S. energy interests, they will wear their global hats atop only a national uniform.
Genuinely global thinking, by contrast, aspires to a universal standpoint. It seeks to rise above positions viewed by some nations as truth but by others as mere self-interest. Freeing itself from the provincial, the national, and even the regional, it gravitates toward a perception of truths so broadly acknowledged as to be apparently universal. It seeks energy policies that benefit all nations. Yes, it wears the hat of local and national action, but always as part of a global uniform.
At that notion, of course, the very walls of Oxford seem to recoil. “Nonsense!” they cry out. “How, given the multiplicity of cultures, can there be any universally acknowledged truths? Isn’t every truth simply somebody else’s fiction? How dare you disturb our exquisitely differentiated view of the universe by asserting so transcendent a commonality?”
So perhaps it was propitious that our meeting was held at Lady Margaret Hall. As the first college at Oxford University for the education of women, its walls have seen generations of thinkers demanding common educational opportunities in the face of sharp differentiations between genders. And perhaps it was not accidental that the words of Jane Austen, who never could have attended Oxford, though two of her brothers did, wafted into our conversation. “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” she wrote in the famously witty opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
Her words are rich with the irony of overstatement — what, after all, can a gaggle of chattering rural women be expected to know about so Oxford-like a construct as universal truth? Yet this sentence throws down a gauntlet to the naysayers. Is there a culture anywhere that disagrees with her proposition that wealthy single men ought to get married — not for giddy romantic reasons, but for the practical social purpose of propagating children they can well afford to raise and thereby perpetuating the culture?
If we can find one such “truth universally acknowledged,” might there be others? Can we, in other words, identify a basis for a kind of universal thinking that escapes the boundaries of nationalism and regionalism, looks at life from a global perspective, and sees things the way that people from a variety of cultures agree they should be seen?
In an age proud of its ability to deconstruct universals, that may seem a tall order, but one place to start looking is at ethics. It appears that some “universally acknowledged” values — honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness, and compassion — are held in common by many cultures around the world. If that’s true, global thinking can begin profitably by seeing the world through the lens of those values.
Another lens, as several of the conferees noted, focuses on trends of thought that might broadly be called expansive. Such trends move from the immediate to the long-term, from the one-dimensional to the multidimensional, from the partisan to the integrated, and from the self-centered to the community-focused. Thinkers rooted in these trends are more apt to think globally than nationally.
A third lens helps distinguish between two classes of issues. One class comprises those issues that are genuinely global — so interdependent that they lie beyond the ability of any single nation or region to control. Climate change, energy security, weapons of mass destruction, global terrorism, and the architecture of global markets all force us to think beyond the interests of even the largest nation or region — to look down from above, as it were, and see all the parts at once. A second class of issues — food security, governmental corruption, low-income housing, gender equity, and education reform among them — occur across the globe but don’t require that overarching view: Any single nation can make progress on them even if others don’t.
Can a group of think tanks, using these three lenses of shared values, expansive trends, and interdependent issues, help promote truly global thinking? If so, they can pool their valuable national and regional perspectives to help move governments toward holistic, transnational, and universal perspectives. They can help the world’s major corporations grasp the difference between the merely multinational and the genuinely global. And they can do so in ways that strengthen, rather than degrade, the local, tangible benefits that governments and businesses provide.
©2008 Institute for Global Ethics
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