Globalization, democracy, and dialogue of cultures

Wasudha Bhatt, doctoral student at the Department of Political Science, Delhi University in conversation with Ramin Jahanbegloo, philosopher, CSDS, Delhi

 

Globalization is not just about an extension of market principles or an increase in capital flows, it is also about the cross-border flow of ideas that affect cultural diversity. How is globalization affecting the cultural diversity of India? What are the changes that you are witnessing?

Today when we talk about globalization, we invariably focus on the political and the economic, and do not pay sufficient attention to the cultural dimensions, or what we might call ‘cultural globalism’. Actually the post cold war era has hugely affected the general culture of humanity by creating new hybrid cultures around the world and by intensifying ways of communication among different cultures. This is not necessarily a ‘clash of civilizations’ as Samuel Huntington talks about, but creates possibilities of an inter-cultural and an intra-cultural dialogue, meaning a dialogue within each culture. This is a crucial aspect of what has been happening for the past 10-15 years in the world.

For India, I think, this is very true, because twenty million Indians live outside India and many of them are English speaking, and because English is the language of the elite. These people bring back to India the modern cultures of their host countries, especially when they are engineers, artists, academics and intellectuals. Even the middle class in India gets a taste of cultural globalization through different modes of communication and multi-media, which has actually led to a great deal of questioning of Indian traditions and traditional modes of living. Traditional societies open up to new cultural trends and start changing structurally. But some of them find themselves in a kind of twilight zone between tradition and modernity. This is where the menace of ontological schizophrenia becomes more apparent.

 

You talk of an ethical hermeneutical dialogue in your writings. How do we arrive at it, both in the larger context, and in the context of India?

I think that every dialogue has these two aspects – one communicative, and the other ethical. I would say that ethics is about responsibility, and dialogue is about responsiveness. And when one talks about response, one also talks about responsibility. So every dialogue, especially inter-cultural dialogue has with it this ethical side which is very important. Each time that one thinks in terms of human solidarity and togetherness, you have these ethical values necessarily accompanying. Now the hermeneutical side goes with it very naturally, because in dialogue we talk about different levels of interpretation of reality. This is why dialogue is so important, because it creates a multifaceted, multi-vision, multi-dimensional interpretation of reality. Often people do not understand that dialogue is about sharing ideas and not necessarily convincing or coercing one another.

 

You advocate experimenting with creative and dialogical non-violence. What is it, and how does it help in making contact with the woundedness and sacredness in lives of others?

I think that every dialogue is in essence non-violent. The very idea of dialogue means that in some way or another you are going against the idea of imposing violence. The opposite is also true; when there is violence there is no place for dialogue. This is why dialogue is not only about talking, it is also about the art of listening to the other.

The sacredness that you are talking about is also an important element in the process of dialogue. In a non-violent dialogue the other is sacred. You may not venerate it but you respect it. I do believe that at some point we can have a notion of a secular non-violence (by secular I mean respect for the diversity of different religions, not necessarily based on one religion). By sacred I mean something that is respected and needs to be protected because it is very fragile. So I think sacredness, in a true metaphysical sense, is a form of solidarity.

 

The outcome of a clash between intolerance and non-violence plays a crucial role in determining our destiny. How can dialogue be used to win over intolerance, when tolerance itself is a rather subjective concept, whose definition may vary in accordance with the society in which it is contextualized?

It is true that tolerance is a very subjective matter. I am talking of non-violence in the sense of having a proactive action towards the conservation of living matter. I think we use the word tolerance in two ways. We use it in the classical way of thinking about it, and we use it in the way of being radically indifferent towards it, in the sense you just tolerate it, but do not agree with it. But there is a third and a more proactive way of talking about tolerance, which is what non-violence is all about. You can say that when you are for tolerance, you are not indifferent to the ideas and opinions of others; therefore, you somehow engage yourself in an interactive dialogue with them. But I think there are common denominators and a number of shared values when we talk about tolerance in all cultures. The idea which is related to tolerance and which is very important is the idea of respect towards all human beings or living creatures. By not respecting the other and considering him/her as impure, we exclude him from the public space.

 

The struggle for diversity is also a battle for shared moral values. What are these moral values, and what factors determine their sharing and divergence?

Diversity cannot exist without moral values. We are today living in a very diverse world, one which has as its main foundation the problem of diversity. Because of the process of globalization the trend towards diversification in the world has been faster than changes in our moral values. Societies are getting out of their traditional mores, but at the same time cannot find new ways of ethical thinking. I will give you an example. As you know the Big Brother reality show turned out to have a problem with racism and finally it ended up as a huge media affair. Fifty years ago this would not have been a problem. Martin Luther King, who was a far more interesting person than Shilpa Shetty, suffered a great deal and went through a lot of trouble to make people in America and elsewhere aware of the injustice of racism. But today everybody around the world hears about the ‘Shilpa affair’ and is shocked by it, and tries to have his/her say in it. This has to do with the fact that we are living in multicultural societies. So we will need common shared values reflecting this idea of respecting the individual. Also, as Mahatma Gandhi said, the idea of duty is complementary to the idea of rights. But today we only talk about rights, and not about duty of the individuals towards each other. We have to think about the concept of duty in a situation of diversity.

 

You say that democracy and non-violence are inseparable. Yet India represents a stark contrast between the coexistence of democracy as a form of governance and violence as an instrument to govern and coerce.

When I was talking about democracy and non-violence, I was thinking not necessarily of the governments that we have today in the world, because governments in practice everywhere around the world are instruments of coercion. Some practice coercion and violence in authoritarian and totalitarian ways and others in a more intelligent manner. Now we have different levels of coercion, because sometimes you have a very violent way of coercion, which happens for example in the Middle East, or in North Korea. But sometimes you have a soft coercion which happens in many liberal democracies.

Many philosophers like Giorgio Agamben are today talking about bio-politics, meaning somehow that the power relations being constituted by the new forms of governing the world, even under democracies, exercise a near total control over the destiny and the lives of citizens, how people should get educated and how they should work. I would say that having or not having babies could also be a matter of mass mediated influence. There is also a total control on the way people eat and have sex. Thus when I say that democracy should be non-violent, I am thinking of the concept of democracy as advanced by non-violent thinkers like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others who believed that a true democracy couldn’t happen with coercion, and that it should be accompanied by a minimal state.

 

Politics, you argue, has been reduced to an interaction between violence and coercive power. This reflects a brute contrast between the ends which are democracy and cultural diversity, and means like religious fundamentalism, violence and authoritarianism in varied forms. Can dialogue bridge this gap between the desired ends and the means used to attain them without lapsing into a kind of covert coercion in itself? How, for instance, do we engage in non-violent dialogue with those justifying violent means for non-violent ends?

This depends upon which tradition you are framing this. If you stay in the tradition of non-violent thinkers, there cannot be any difference between the means and the ends. Means and ends have to be balanced together. There is no such thing as a ‘just war’ or a ‘legitimized violence’. Violence can be justified rationally but it is never legitimate. So you cannot through violent means reach non-violent ends, this is what Gandhi, Vinoba, Martin Luther King, and many others believed. This is a big problem today which we are facing in our world. For example, you cannot expect to get democracy out of an invasion or war like the one we have in Iraq, for the good reason that it is the people of Iraq who have to build their own democracy. It is not like a gift that you can bring from one country to the other; it is not a global package that we can use everywhere in the world. It is absurd and obscene to argue that American or French experiences of democracy could be applied everywhere as a model. There is no such thing as a pre-fabricated model of democracy. So I am against the use of violent means in getting to a non-violent goal. I think it cannot work.

Nevertheless, I understand the complexity of the problem, because with many governments, and under many forms of authoritarian regimes, many people think that there is no space for dialogue and you have to engage in violent action or reaction. Once again I think that we have to somehow distinguish between the civil society and the state, or I would say the governors and the governed. If there is an attack against the governing institutions of a dictatorial regime, the governed, or the people are not supposed to pay for it with their lives. But unfortunately this is what happens all the time. So we have to think of modes of humanitarian or non-violent modes of intervention where you can have different levels of conflict resolution and dialogue.

I do think that non-violent measures in the Indian subcontinent will be more effective as opposed to violent measures taken by governments against each other, or against their own people. On this issue we have recent examples of political violence in Bangladesh and Nepal. I believe that destroying people who are heading the institutions of a state or political parties will not solve the problem. Terrorism has never been a solution to problems of humanity. It just creates new problems. It is not by replacing one evil by another that you will solve the problem of evil. The problem is the nature of coercion and violence and not only its forms. One dictator can come and kill another, and start a new authoritarian regime. Nothing is changed. What we need to think of is the problem of authority and political coercion itself. This is what Mahatma Gandhi did. That is why he is still a relevant thinker.

 

After having been detention for over four months, where do you find the strength to believe in ideals of non-violence and tolerance?

I think that this is true of anybody who goes to prison, but especially when one is in solitary confinement; one goes through a lot of suffering. However, if we examine the history of non-violence, I think that suffering has always helped people to both understand themselves better, and the others. Sincerely speaking, 125 days of solitary confinement helped me to understand that we cannot invent a sane and humane society through means of violence. I hope my time in political prison has helped me to be a better man like Socrates or Mandela. I think there is always an opportunity in life to start anew. This is what gives meaning to human beings as metaphysical animals.