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CADRE Library
"The Biology of Globalization"
Copyright 1997 by Elisabet Sahtouris
http://cyberjournal.org/.../Biology-of-Globalization.txt
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(continued...)
What's to be done?
The new wave of outrage at corporate greed, as I said earlier, is
a healthy reaction to this win/lose global economic Monopoly game.
But globalization is the unstoppable and natural next phase of
evolution; we are not entirely in control and it is very likely
beyond our power to stop. Clearly we have already globalized
transportation, communications, money, industries, food, weapons,
pollution and other aspects of human culture. The good news is
that we don't have to play Monopoly to globalize. There are, as
Hazel Henderson has urged us for decades, other games to play:
win/win games (Paradigms in Progress: Life Beyond Economics, 1991;
Building a Win/Win World, 1996).
As Henderson points out, it was the UN's most powerful nations
that commandeered the World Bank and the IMF, then dominated GATT
discussions and set up the WTO together with corporations and
financial institutions. Yet the UN's special agencies, during the
same timespan, formed agreements and treaties on nuclear
proliferation (IAEA), air traffic rules (IATA) and postal rates
(GPU), also working doggedly on health, education and security
issues, as well as accepting a great deal of criticism and
recommendations for UN restructuring, which is now an official
process. Obviously the UN can only be as good as its member states
will make it and as NGOs can push it to be.
Polls show clearly that the American people support the UN
overwhelmingly, while their presumably representative government
does not pay its dues and periodically threatens to quit.
Interesting global power shifts would happen if it did.
Henderson's recommends a new UN funding structure by a tiny tax
(.003%) on international currency transactions, global commons use
fees, "sin taxes" on polluters, drug traffic fines and taxes on
arms sales, to avoid the problems created by non-payment of dues
by its members.
The UN, whatever its problems and whatever our view of it is,
remains, as Henderson points out, "the world's major networker,
broker, and convenor of new global negotiations." All the new
problems of globalization are centered in its spinoffs, especially
the GATT and WTO. So we must also see as a sign of hope the
relentless popular pressure of NGOs that is proving itself
increasingly an agent of change. As an example, the UNDP under Gus
Speth has been restructured to include NGOs and grassroots
participation in its programs and supports demilitarization. In
1995 the UN World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen,
covered by two thousand journalists, discussed replacing GNP
measures with a people centered and ecologically sustainable "new
development paradigm." The 1996 UN Habitat II Summit in Istanbul
hosted a World Business Forum that set up a process for Global
Standards. Inside the World Bank, its own staff is creating
significant progressive changes. In addition to NGOs, Labor
organizations, religious bodies, investment and pension funds,
meetings such as the Gorbachev conferences and grassroots
movements are all playing a role in global awareness and the
restructuring of human society.
Historian Arnold Toynbee studied twenty-one past civilizations,
looking for common factors in their demise. The two most important
ones, it seems, were the extreme concentration of wealth and
inflexibility in the face of changing conditions within and around
them. We cannot go on playing Monopoly when a cooperative game is
called for by our new and obvious global problems. The February
1994 Atlantic Monthly showed a burning globe on its cover, to
illustrate the feature article "The Coming Anarchy" by Robert
Kaplan. He warned that anyone who thought things were still going
well was ignoring three-fourths of the world. This year, same
month, same weathervane magazine, new cover story, George Soros
tells us that global corporate and financial capitalism is at
fault.
Good! Now at least the picture is clearer and we can get on with
the task of insuring our civilization against demise. We can prove
ourselves a mature species, ready to learn from our parent
planet's four and a half billion years of experience in evolving
workable living systems.
The Principles of Living Systems:
Consider world economics and imagine it as the economics of a
living entity such as your body. Think what would happen in your
body if the raw material blood cells in your bones were mined as
resources by the "northern industrial" lung and heart organs,
transported to their production and distribution centers where
blood is purified and oxygen added to make it a useful product.
Imagine it is then announced that blood will be distributed from
the heart center to those organs that can afford it. What is not
bought is chucked out as surplus or stored till the market demand
rises. How long could your body survive that system?
When will we turn the UN and its spinoffs into a governing body as
dedicated to service as our central nervous system? When will our
diversity be as celebrated and non-controversial as the diversity
of our cells and organs? When will we be as concerned with the
health of every local bioregion in our global body as our
individual body is, or practice its cellular full employment
policy? When will we practice its efficient and universally
beneficial economics?
Obviously metaphors have their limits and I do not for a moment
suggest we slavishly emulate body models. But bodies beat
unrealistic mechanical metaphors of perfect societies running like
well-oiled machines. They are something we all have in common
regardless of our worldviews, our political or spiritual
persuasions, and they do exemplify the main features and
principles of all healthy living systems or holons (see box), be
they single cells, bodies, families, communities,
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Main Features and Principles of Living Systems
* Self-creation (autopoiesis), self-regulation (autonomics),
self-maintenance
* Self-reflexivity -- (autognosis)
* Embeddedness in larger holons
* Input/output flow of matter/energy/information
* Transformation-- of matter/energy/information
* Complexity-- diversity of parts
* Communications among parts (chemical, electrical, etc.)
* Coordination of parts and functions
* Balance of Interests among parts, with whole and with embedding holons
* Reciprocity of parts in mutual contribution and assistance (Win/Win
economics)
* Full employment of functional parts
* Conservation of what works well
* Creative change of what does not work well
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ecosystems, nations or the whole world. By understanding them we
can assess the health of any particular living system and see
where it may be dysfunctional. This in turn will give us clues to
making the system healthier.
Xilonem Garcia, a Meshika elder in Mexico, once said to me,
"Anyone who knows how to run a household, knows how to run the
world." This could be restated as "Anyone who knows the principles
of living systems can apply them to any holon at any level of its
holarchy." Oddly, we are aware of those principles operating in
our bodies, and we seem to get them fairly well at the family
level. Not many people starve three of their children to overfeed
the fourth, or cultivate one corner of the garden by destroying
the rest of it. At the community level they work to the extent
that there is real community. Beyond that we seem to lose sight of
them.
We must not let globalization override the interests of people and
local economies. The balance between the interests of the global
holon and those of the regional and local holon economies it
comprises is as important as the balance between the interests of
any local economy and those of the people and other species which
comprise it. The appropriate response to the world corporate state
that railroaded the GATT and the WTO into existence under the
rubric of "economic liberalism" without democratic vote, is the
strengthening of self-sufficient local economies, as David Korten,
Herman Daly, Edward Goldsmith and other members of the IFG explain
clearly. It is also to launch a sufficiently strong movement to
demand change in the GATT/WTO itself, and in their parent UN.
Taking our cues from our bodies, or from the Earth itself, with
its diverse ecosystems, we can see that bioregionalism-- basic
local self-sufficiency economics-- is as necessary and important
an aspect of healthy globalization as are equitable international
trade relations. Certainly no one part of a healthy globalized
economy will be able to exploit another. That means local
economies will have to protect themselves against unfair trade and
strong economies will have to genuinely assist weaker ones in
their self-development.
President Clinton's Commission on Sustainability, in its initial
meetings, which I attended, actually argued whether discussions of
ecological sustainability need involve economics. In the brief
moment I was given to address the Commission, I pointed out that
ecology in Greek is the logos, the organization, of the oikos (the
household as society), and ecology the "household's" nomos or
rules. The problem is not whether they need be linked but that we
separated them.
In nature living holons promote their own health, the health of
their embedding holons (e.g. ecosystems) and the health of their
embedded holons (e.g. cells) in the improvisational dance of
negotiating interests I described above. The best life insurance
for any species is to make sure all of its output in product and
waste is beneficial to itself and its embedding holons. Recycling
is a critical feature of Earth's dance-- there is no waste in
nature.
Other species, whether fish, birds or mammals, have innate
knowledge of how to live their lives, and their negotiations over
territory are largely ritual and rarely involve murder. But humans
have vast and unique freedom of choice with almost no innate
behavioral limits. A healthy human social system requires invented
guidelines for behavior. Law and ethics are the guidance systems
we develop to limit our negative behavior and inspire our positive
behavior. And they must begin with values.
Soros' thesis is that "Market values served to undermine
traditional values." As he says, "Unless [self-interest] is
tempered by the recognition of a common interest that ought to
take precedence over particular interests, our present system--
which, however imperfect, qualifies as an open society-- is liable
to break down." Clearly he espouses communal values, and there is
more: "Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on
money as the criterion of value... What used to be a medium of
exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values."
It is of course the market and monetary values of Soros and his
peers that provide the role-model for all of our consumer society
and, worse yet, for the poorer countries that made it possible
though they have little chance of sharing in it. So we must cheer,
or at least breathe a sigh of relief into the winds of change, at
Soros' change of heart and his warning. If his peers can hear him,
we may be able to avoid extinction yet!
Could I address them, my message would be that we must consciously
re-form our human systems into an Open Society conforming to the
principles of healthy living systems, for we are driven by
evolutionary momentum to self-organize a worldwide body of
humanity whether we like it or not. My preliminary list of
features and principles [see box] is intended as a guide to this
process and is given here are a start; surely others will add to
them, rearrange them, find new ways to weave them into our
improvisational dance.
Mark Twain tells the story of a young man returning from his first
forays out into the world, amazed at all his father has learned
while he was gone. It is of course a characterization of budding
maturity: the ability to listen to an elder's accumulated wisdom.
When we humans, after all a very new species, drop our adolescent
arrogance of thinking we know it all and read the wisdom in our
parent planet's accumulated experience, we too will mature as a
species, to our own benefit and that of all other species, as well
as the planet itself.
(end)
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Restore democratic sovereignty
Create a sane and livable world
Bring corporate globalization under control.
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