IT WAS with great satisfaction and pleasure that I read the speech by Sir Shridath Ramphal, Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, at the launch of the Chancellor's Forum reported in The Sunday Gleaners of March 3 and 10.
Having been writing article after article on various aspects of the globalisation of humankind throughout the planet; how it came about, its impact, its dangers and what we should be doing about it, with little or no support or comment from the academic writers who contribute to this newspaper, I had started to wonder if they had all been left behind in the 20th century and were not yet awake to the realities of the 21st. It was very satisfying, therefore, to learn that no less a person than the Chancellor of UWI himself is fully awake and deeply concerned.
It is also a pleasure to learn that independently we have come to almost identical conclusions in so far as what he has said.
I should like to highlight some of the important topics he mentioned, using his own words but in curtailed sentences;-
1 The singularity of human destiny.
2 The evolution of identity over the entire span of human existence.
3 The evolution of a global consciousness is an inexorable process.
4 The need for a global civic ethic supporting the rights and responsibilities of all people.
5 Adapting old norms like self-determination and even sovereignty.
6 The urgency of demilitarising human society.
7 The urgent need to reform the United Nations.
I have already written on all of these subjects but in this article I should like to concentrate on No. 5, adapting old norms like self-determination and even sovereignty.
The emotive drive behind these norms is patriotism and I question whether the globalised world of today can sustain this somewhat outmoded luxury. The Chancellor says that identity with a wider group does not have to come at the expense of loyalty to a more immediate circle. This is true, but in the present state of the world something must be done to change the narrow tribal and nationalistic attitudes of people throughout the world if we are to survive in anything but chaos.
Let us look at Afghanistan and Palestine if we need to be convinced. In Afghanistan every valley is said to have its own tribal warlord and its own loyalty. In Palestine the Israelis and Palestinians appear to be irreconcilable and the differences stem from the way they conceive of themselves historically and their patriotic commitment. While these may be extreme cases, the problem is universal in a world dominated by nationalism and divided by numerous cultural, religious, racial and political backgrounds.
In 1939 H.G. Wells read a paper titled, The Poison called History to the Association for the Advancement of Science in which he challenged the way in which history was being taught, maintaining that the incompatibility between historical traditions and the new conditions created by invention and discovery were at the root of most of the world's imminent troubles (World War II). This has not changed fundamentally. We now have more small fragmentary states like Jamaica trying to create narrow traditions of their own by digging up national heroes to put on pedestals; unfurling new flags playing new anthems, establishing more armies to protect themselves or molest others, more hatred of outside interference and infringements of sovereignty even for the common good. All these are negative things of which the world needs to be rid.
As I have said before, we need to be educated to be citizens of the world and divisive practices like the celebration of Black History Month should be dropped. They could only inflame race relations.
Jamaica now has two histories one written under colonialism by people like Clinton Black and another, such as The Story of the Jamaican People, by Sir Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett deliberately intended to put a new slant in favour of the rising Afro-Jamaican generation. The former may be misguided in some respects but the latter is really a huge pamphlet to promote a cause. It is special pleading and not a history in a detached and unbiased sense. On the global scale this divides rather than unites. In some countries such an approach to history might inflame passions.
If globalisation is to work on the political plane, every country will have to give up much of its sovereignty, including its army which might survive as a police force but no more.
It is difficult to see how this could be done without item 4, a new global civic ethic supporting the rights and responsibilities of all people. During the enlightenment the encyclopedists set out to gather all human knowledge then available and interpret it to arrive at an ideology, scientifically-based, by which reasonable men might live. This was later abandoned and encyclopaedias became big dictionaries with no ideological leanings.
Perhaps the time has come to reverse this. I have already expressed the view that the United Nations should take on the task of arriving at a working consensus on a worldwide basis, just as it did when it drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Such a charter could be used for educational purposes (among others) in an attempt to unify human thinking and resolve, in this area. This does not have to wait on Item 7, the urgent reform of the United Nations.
