The European Dream (61 page)

Try to imagine the Asian mind grasping hold of the essentials of the American Dream, with its emphasis on individuality, self-advancement, autonomy, and exclusivity. Nisbett sums up the difference between an Asian frame of mind and a Western frame of mind this way:

The Asian frame of mind, at first glance, seems tailor-made for a network world and a globalizing society, with its focus on relationships, inclusivity, consensus, harmony, and contextual thinking. To a good extent, this common mindset is likely to serve Asian societies well in a quest to create a transnational political space in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. On the other hand, and this may just be my Western bias, what’s lacking from the Asian frame is sufficient individual differentiation to make each person feel a sense of deep personal responsibility for making his or her own way in the new world. The Asian way doesn’t always allow the individual to flower. If the self isn’t completely sacrificed for the whole, at least its full potential is often muted in the interest of advancing the welfare of the collective. If the American mindset is too individualistic and Darwinian, the Asian mindset might be equally criticized for being too oriented toward “group think.” Neither mentality alone is ideally suited for a connected world. New technologies are so decentralized and democratized but at the same time so globally connective that they foster both extreme individuation and extreme integration concurrently. Creating a new vision of humanity that can bring together these two seemingly contradictory forces into a new synthetic relationship is the key to making the coming era a transformative period in human history.

My personal belief is that Europe is best positioned between the extreme individuation of America and the extreme collectivism of Asia to lead the way into the new age. European sensibility makes room for both the individual spirit and collective responsibility. To the extent that the European vision can incorporate the best qualities of the American and Asian ways of looking at the world, its dream will become an ideal for both West and East to aspire to.

Creating a global consciousness presupposes an integrated persona that is capable of combining both individual free will and a collective sense of responsibility on a planetary playing field. Accepting another individual’s humanity is a deeply personal act. It requires each individual to recognize “the other.” While a group can help condition individual behavior and predispose its members to be empathetic, the feeling itself has to emanate from the individual, not the group. Where the collective responsibility comes in is in guaranteeing universal human rights and establishing codes of conduct and rules of enforcement to ensure compliance and punish wrongdoers.

How, then, does the European Dream become a truly universal dream? It would have to incorporate a new code of behavior that allows the individual to fully comprehend how his or her own very personal behavior and choices ripple out and affect the rest of the world. Universal human rights will succeed only if personal morality and ethics are universalized as well.

The European Dream has begun to advance the cause of universal morality, but only very tentatively. In a post-modern world where meta-narratives are treated with suspicion, any talk of universal morality is likely to be regarded with nervous dread. Post-modernism, after all, is a reaction to the Enlightenment idea that “one container fits all,” whether that container be a specific theology or ideology. But aren’t universal human rights a meta-narrative? The term “universal” before human rights certainly suggests so. Rights can’t exist without codes of conduct to go along with them. So if rights are universal, so, too, must there be a universal code of morality to accompany them.

The problem with our current notions of morality, at least in the West, is that they are too linear and localized to condition behavior whose effects are often far removed, far-reaching, and systemic in nature. Western morality is derived from the Ten Commandments. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all ascribe to what we might call a morality based on intimate, verifiable, causal harm. Murder, robbery, bearing false witness, and adultery are easily identifiable acts perpetrated by one person or group against another. These kinds of acts are relatively easy to attach responsibility to. They are what we might refer to as examples of “hot evil.”

But, in an increasingly globalized society of ever more dense connections, where everyone’s behavior affects everyone else, there is a new kind of morality, what one might call “cold evil.” (The term can be used in either a religious or secular sense to convey the idea of immoral behavior.) Cold evil is actions whose effects are so far removed from the behavior that caused them that no causal relationship is suspected, no sense of guilt or wrongdoing is felt, and no collective responsibility is exercised to punish the errant behavior.

For example, millions of Americans drive sport-utility vehicles (SUVs). These vehicles, in turn, burn far more gasoline per mile driven than other cars and therefore discharge more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, increasing the risk of global warming. While an educated elite is aware of the relationship between SUV use and global warming, the vast majority of Americans either don’t know or don’t care. Even though they might see a television news story attributing record rainfall, coastal flooding, and lost lives and property to the effects of global warming, it is unlikely they would associate their use of an SUV with the misfortunes unfolding somewhere else. And even if they did suspect some kind of causal relationship, it’s unlikely they would feel the same level of remorse and guilt as they would if, say, they were driving their SUV recklessly in a heavy rainstorm in some coastal region and smashed into another car, killing both its driver and passengers.

Or take another example. Millions of European and American youngsters wear designer athletic shoes from brand-name companies like Nike, not suspecting that the shoes might have been manufactured in a sweat-shop in Vietnam where child labor is exploited under the most draconian working conditions. If they were told about such conditions, would they likely still buy the shoes, knowing they would be contributing to the misfortune of exploited children halfway around the world?

Millions of well-to-do consumers in advanced industrial countries enjoy a diet rich in meat consumption, never suspecting a relationship between their food choices and increased poverty in the third world. Today, 36 percent of the grain grown in the world is fed to livestock. In the developing world, the share of grain grown for animal consumption has tripled since 1950 and now exceeds 21 percent of the total grain produced. In Mexico, 45 percent of the grain is livestock feed, in Egypt it’s 31 percent, in Thailand 30 percent, and in China 26 percent.
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Tragically, 80 percent of the world’s hungry children live in countries with an actual food surplus, much of which is in the form of feed given to animals who, in turn, will be consumed by only the well-to-do consumers of the world. It’s important to bear in mind that an acre of cereal produces two to ten times more protein than an acre devoted to meat production; legumes (beans, peas, lentils) can produce ten to twenty times more protein; and leafy vegetables, fifteen times more protein.
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The human consequences of the transition from food to feed grain were dramatically illustrated in 1984 in Ethiopia, when thousands of people were dying each day from famine. The public was unaware that, at the very time, Ethiopia was using some of its best agricultural land to produce linseed cake, cottonseed cake, and rapeseed meal for export to European countries to be used as feed for livestock.

The irony of the present food-production system is that millions of wealthy consumers in the first world are increasingly dying from diseases of affluence—heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and cancer—brought on by gorging on fatty grain-fed beef and other meats, while the poor in the third world are dying of diseases of poverty brought on by being denied access to land to grow food grain for their families. More than twenty million people die each year around the world from hunger-related diseases.

Few people in Europe, America, and Japan know anything about the relationship between food, feed, and hunger in the world. But if they did, would they feel morally compelled to eat lower on the global food chain with a more vegetable-oriented diet so that more agricultural land could be freed up to raise food grain rather than feed grain?

If we were to hear about our next-door neighbors’ starving their children, we would be morally outraged. Law enforcement would arrest the parents for child neglect and abuse. That’s hot evil. But could we muster up the same sense of moral outrage or feel as morally culpable if we knew that our dietary choices were contributing, at least in part, to maintaining an elite global food chain at the expense of the poor, resulting in starvation and death for millions of people throughout the world? In other words, would cold evil move us to act with the same moral passion and ardor as hot evil?

Recently, a broad coalition of religious groups in the United States launched a public-education campaign decrying America’s profligate use of gasoline, and targeted SUV owners. The campaign literature asked provocatively, “What Would Jesus Drive?” One of the religious sponsors accused Chevrolet and other car manufacturers of “encouraging people to buy automobiles which are poisoning God’s creation.”
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Another religious spokesman asked, “How can I love my neighbor as myself if I’m filling their lungs with pollution?”
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The campaign touched a raw nerve. Other religious leaders and political commentators rushed to the defense of the auto industry. One irate respondent even suggested that “Jesus would drive a Hummer.”
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This exercise in the ethics of cold evil drew an angry response. It’s one thing to talk abstractly about the global-warming crisis. It’s quite another to suggest that millions of owners of SUVs might be morally culpable.

A similar campaign waged by social activists and trade unionists to boycott the products of Nike and other shoe companies whose subcontractors in Asia were exploiting child labor drew mixed responses. While some college students in the U.S. and Europe stopped buying the Nike brand, most consumers continued to remain loyal to Nike, showing little interest in the fuss around child labor exploitation in Nike’s subcontracting factories.

Campaigns waged against the fast-food hamburger chains have met with similar mixed reviews.

Still, what’s important to point out is that these kinds of moral campaigns to address the systemic results of destructive human behavior are new on the world scene. It’s going to take time to create a felt morality based on systems thinking. Europeans seem slightly ahead of the game in this regard. Even so, we are a long way off from the day when cold evil is treated with the same sense of personal and public moral urgency as hot evil.

For hundreds of millions, even billions, of human beings to internalize and act upon a systems approach to moral behavior, it is probably going to require more dramatic and even catastrophic events being visited upon the world. There are a number of scenarios by which I could imagine our species coming to grips with cold evil and adopting a systems-based morality. Violent weather changes induced by global warming, the spread of deadly new bacteria and viruses resulting from inhumane animal-husbandry practices and factory farming, terrorist attacks using chemical and even biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction, more prolonged power blackouts around the world brought on by global energy shortages, massive starvation, and a global depression all could hasten a new systems approach to morality and ethics. But it’s just as likely that terrible events of this magnitude could lead to retrenchment, xenophobia, a breakdown of personal and public morality, and a lashing out at scapegoats of all kinds.

The nature of the human response will depend on whether the increasingly harmful systemic effects of the activity create a sense of shared vulnerability and responsibility for one another and the Earth or whether the fear generated by catastrophic activity creates a siege mentality and a feeling that everyone better fend for him- or herself in a war of survival. The latter approach would only exacerbate the systemic evil by creating a continuous positive feedback effect, with potentially devastating consequences for humanity and the world.

These, then, are the questions: How do we create a new moral bridge between “the self ” and “the other” that is expansive enough and encompassing enough to be global in scale and universal in outlook? Can we establish a systemic approach to ethics that allows us to identify cold evil in all of its various guises? Equally important, can we learn to exercise the Golden Rule on a much broader playing field that includes not only our immediate relations with our neighbors but also the totality of relationships that make up the larger planetary community in which we are all embedded? . . . A tall order, but that’s why we call it global consciousness.

For the European Dream to become the world’s dream, it will have to create a new story about the human mission—a new meta-narrative that can unite the human race in a shared journey while allowing each person and group to take their own particular path.

Owen Barfield, the British philosopher, has offered up some thoughts on the matter. His ideas help bring the American notion of individual autonomy and volition and the Asian notion of collective consensus and contextual thinking together in a new synthesis. That synthesis could provide a proper historical context for advancing a global consciousness and the promulgation of the new European Dream to every part of the world.