This is a significant question. The ecumenical debate on the "sustainability of society" has focused on the limits inherent to creation, which requires responsible choices, life-styles and economics. Here society and community stand in a certain relationship one to another. The issue of sustainability also includes the matter of sociality, understood in terms of those relations that construct community. In as much as the destruction of creation spells doom, the destruction of the moral and social centers of community is also under attack in the context of globalization.

I want to suggest that the West might consider a small gift we in Africa just could offer. It is the gift of ubuntu—a term difficult to translate into occidental languages. But it is the essence of being human, it declares that my humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in yours . . . I am because I belong.

 

That is the essence of being human for Africans, being human in relational and cooperative terms. The human being is not only a personality, but also a sociality. This is also the first thrust of the creation story: God created humanity in relationship.

The concrete person is a web of interactions, a network of operative relationships. A person is fashioned by historical, cultural, genetic, biological, social and economic infrastructure. These relationships are not mechanical ones, they do not allow for a competitive individualization which would damage the dignity of the human being. The dignity of human beings emanates from the network of relationships, from being in community; in an African view, it cannot be reduced to a unique, competitive and free personal ego.

Community is a gift of God (Modimo) in creation, unalienably guaranteed in the power (seriti) of God’s presence. In as much as the dignity of human beings, the chief foundation for human rights, arise from the idea of persons being created in the image of God in the Christian tradition, the dignity of communities in an African view proceeds from the notion of human beings being created in relation to God the creator and to one another. Thus, community first and foremost means being in community with the Creator and with creation.

Thus, when one speaks, as we often do, of "Africanization," we have in mind this particular African anthropological claim. Because this is a generalizable claim, we may further say that the project of Africanization is more than a continental effort, it constitutes a wider challenge to the dehumanizing forces of globalization. Put differently, the globalization of the project of Africanization as a political and economic agenda is essentially the quest for ethical community.

1. The metaphor of the oikos supersedes any narrow vision of history as the central category of interpretation of social reality; it reminds us that history is bound up with community, webs of relationships, belonging, and with life together.

2. The oikos is a space for living that enables relationships, evoking neighborliness.

3. It has an ecological structure that displays boundary and openness, independence and relationship, rest and movement.

4. It embraces the familiar and the alien in the "one household."

The New Testament equally breathes the centrality of this keyword. It opens with the claim that in Jesus Christ, God dwells among the people. Where the Spirit is, there the group becomes a household. The idea also opens up a new status for the children of God: From being slaves to being free persons, sons and daughters. They eat a common meal in the oikos. They pray together for that common meal. The first church is depicted as a household of life, sharing and cooperation. And again the weakest, the exploited, the poorest are preciously protected within the household. And they all say: Abba! Father!.

No one can pray for the kingdom . . . who thinks up a kingdom for himself (sic) . . . who lives for his own world view and knows a thousand programs and prescriptions by which he would like to cure the world. . . .

 

Thinking and acting for the sake of the coming generation, but being ready to go at any day without fear or anxiety—that, in practice, is the spirit in which we are forced to live.

 

Community and its values of co-operation are crucial for future generations. As such it is inherently part and parcel of the quest for sustainable society.

Are these considerations relevant to the theological discussion of globalization?

Globalization as an ideal allows for no alternative measure of thought; it presents itself as the only view on contemporary society. Neo-liberalism is the ideological vehicle of economic globalization. This ideology redefines humanity as homo economicus, and it influences behavior towards aggressive competitiveness in which only the strongest survive, claiming that "the trickle down effect" will solve the problem of poverty. It prescribes a certain autonomy to the market that increases inequality and fragments political life and communities.

The experiment was constructed to give students the option of choosing either to cooperate with others in the interest of all and thereby somewhat reduce their potential personal gain, or to aggressively assert their own individual interest over against the others, thereby doubling their potential personal gain. They were put in front of computers and told that they were in a game with other players. If you play aggressively, they were told, but your opponent cooperates with you, you get $10. If both cooperate each of you receives $5. However if both of you act aggressively, you each receive $2. Finally, if you cooperate while your opponent acts aggressively, you get nothing.

Frank and his collaborators studied the students’ behavior as they played the game. They found that students of economics were significantly more aggressive than students of other disciplines. They were also more pessimistic about the benefits of cooperating with others. Perhaps economics attracts non-cooperative types, one might ask? No, says Frank. The study was repeated with new enrollments of students who had chosen economics as their major. One might expect the same pattern as in the first result. But a different result in fact emerged. There was no difference between first year students in economics or first year students in any other discipline in their propensity to favor cooperation and a sharing of gains. Years later, however, when the same students were ready to graduate, the experiment was repeated with those students. At this stage, economics students now stood out among the rest as the most pessimistic about the benefit of cooperation, and similarly, they strongly exhibited a utilitarian aggressiveness.

The implication is clear: That a world-view driven by the rationality of contemporary economics does not favor the values of community. Will the priesthood of the koinonia, the oikomene, the oikos be wise enough and diligent enough to prepare a community of young people who are critical enough to engage the aggressive priests of economic globalization?

The question is particularly poignant for those of us who learned that apartheid was theologically indefensible because the oikos, the very idea of the household—whole and bound together by sacred ties—was at stake in its quasi-religious ideology. It threatened to destroy the oikos by taking as its point of departure the irreconcilability of people. South African churches and the ecumenical movement declared any theological defense of such a system a heresy, an idolatry.

If then economics is essentially the interest in the nomos of the oikos (the administration, the rules and regulations, of the productive and reproductive household), may we similarly say today, under the impact of globalization, that we are facing a single-minded interest in the nomos which has the capacity to threaten the well-being of the oikos or even, perhaps, the existence of the oikos and its sociality as we know it? Put differently, what is an oikos without agents of cooperation?

One may go further, I think. Globalization includes and excludes peoples and countries by its very nature, by its particular set of preferences and penalties applied variously to those who engage with or challenge its forces. The military concept of the "triage" has been used quite often to describe the exclusionary nature of the global economy. The triage principle requires that a wounded or weaker soldier sometimes be left behind in the interest of the immediate gains of battle and warfare.

First, the dimension of "people in community" counteracts the rough public individualism of globalization. It refuses Darwin’s view of humanity in favor of Peter Kropotkin’s. The latter’s view is that even in the animal world co-operation defines the nature of things; living beings and creatures are in the first place co-operative entities. Applied to the oikonomia, the economy, this dimension further implies that the alternative to poverty is not property, but community. Together, in solidarity, the poorest find a home, the wealth of friendship, and the gift and gifts of neighbors.

Second, the notion of "community in generations" proposed that human life is not only horizontal, but longitudinal. People are created in generations, they live in relation to generations. This suggests not only a communal, generational contract within the family. Everyone lives in the sequence of generation and owes their lives to it. Everyone has a duty towards past and future generations, the old and the young. Generational justice is required for this dimension of community life to be sustained.

Third, the idea of "generations in the natural environment" suggests that humanity and nature belong together. Human development can only happen in equilibrium with the cosmic conditions of ecological reality. This requires the conversion of human life styles, and by implication, of industrial production, for community with creation to be restored.

Fourth, Moltmann’s view of the church as "a church of the whole creation" takes us beyond the dualism of humanity and cosmos: We shall no longer want to know nature to dominate, destroy and spoil it. This has important implication for economic globalization where ecological destruction is endemic.

We know that the concept and the reality of community norms, or of the oikos as primary, is not uncomplicated. It can easily lead to the oppression of individual freedom, the suppression of creative imagination, and intolerance. I would not want to romanticize the value of community at all cost. But neither can I accept the cost of a nomos that threatens the very oikos it was meant to serve.

I claim no less than that globalization is at odds with the oikos of life, the community base of being and the household narrative of the Bible. It is not accidental that the concept of "sustainability" caught the attention of all those many scholars, community leaders and ecumenical forums that concerned themselves with the matters of the global economy and its impact on the ecology. The term has received a wide range of meanings over the years including sustainability of future generations, justice for the poor, debt relief, etc.

I am led to think about another great leader who asked "Where are we going from here: Chaos or community?" Martin Luther King Jr., in these words, called on people to learn the art of cooperation in communities, to break with the most subtle and most overt forms of aggression, even as aggressive self-interested people set out to kill him. King left us with the choice to die with or without a dream of community, of oikos restored, of an oikonomos where the oikos takes priority. Can we restore community against the odds?

1. Julio de Santa Ana, Sustainability and Globalization (Geneva: WCC, 1999), 1-22.

2. Enrique Dussel, Ethics and Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986).

3. Literally, "household."

4. A shorthand term for a longer phrase often translated as "a person is a person through other people," a strongly communal anthropology.

5. Thomas F. Best and Günther Gassmann, On the Way to the Fuller Koinonia: Official Report of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order (Geneva : WCC Publications, 1994), 101.

6. K. Raiser, Ecumenism in Transition: A paradigm Shift in the Ecumenical Movement? (Geneva: WCC, 1991).

7. Ibid., pp. 87-88.

8. Raiser, op. cit., p. 89.

9. The question of the relevance of Bonhoeffer’s theology to the South African context has recently been examined and affirmed; see H.R. Botman, "Is Bonhoeffer still of any use in South Africa," in J.W. De Gruchy, (ed.), Bonhoeffer for a New Day: Theology in a Time of Transition (Michigan: Eerdmans, 1997).

10. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology (London: Collins, 1960), pp. 27, 31-2.

11. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thy Kingdom Come (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), p. 34.

12. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1971), p. 15.

13. Peter Beyer, in Religion and Globalization (London: Sage, 1994, 7), argues convincingly that "The core hypothesis in this discussion is that, increasingly, there is a common social environment shared by all people on earth and that globality conditions a great deal of what happens here, including how we form theories about it. Any social analysis that ignores this factor is incomplete and misses a key aspect of the human condition in our contemporary world."

14. Cf. Varoufakis, Y.1998. Foundations of Economics: A beginner’s Companion (New York: Routledge).

15. Update, World Alliance of Reformed Churches, June 1996, Vol. 6, No 2, 1-2.

16. D.W. Hardy, "Created and Redeemed Sociality," in C.E. Gunton and D.W. Hardy, (eds), On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community (Edinburgh: Clark, 1989).

17. Jürgen Moltmann, "Has Modern Society Any Future?," in Concilium, 1990/1, 54-65

18. "A Postcommunist Manifesto," in W.G. Boulton, et. al (eds), From Christ to the World: Introductory Readings in Christian Ethics (Michigan: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 484-488.