OLIVA BLANCHETTE

Boston College

Globalization has resulted in a split in the way we think about the world between a center of control and a periphery of many peoples, the large majority in most parts of the world, who have been excluded from control of any kind, not only over the whole but also over their own lives. The view of cultural foundations for person and community can differ widely not only among the many different peoples who have been excluded from the center of control but even more profoundly between those who think from the center and these who think from the margin or the periphery, where cultural foundations as centers of control for personal and communal life are under threat of obliteration.

We come from different parts of this world, some from the center and some from the periphery, to discuss a problem we all have to face, which is the survival and the promotion of a wide diversity of cultural foundations for humanity against a cultural foundation, that of the center, that would reduce them all to some lowest common denominator, its own. I come from the center, though I view the problem in a way that is not typical of many in the center, especially those who have the reins of power firmly in hand and will not let any of them go. What I would like to express here is how I view this problem of cultural foundations as one close to center, but not part of it and usually at odds with much of what goes on at the center, in order to invite others to express their view of the problem who may feel further removed from the center, more on the periphery.

Let me do this by indicating briefly four important points of contention in this complex of ideas concerning person, community, cultural foundations and cooperation among peoples that modern globalization calls into play for us.

First, with regard to the idea of person, we should recognize that it is very contentious in the way it comes out the modern thinking of the center. On the one hand, it fixes on the individual as absolute, and an end in itself, the foundation for rights, at least human rights if not civil rights as well. On the other hand, we associate with this what we call personal relations as values that transcend this kind of absolute individualism. This is where our sense of community comes in perhaps as something that takes precedence over isolated individualism.

Second, however, this sense of community is also contentious in its own way. The idea of community is often used loosely to designate any grouping or collection of individuals such as a crowd of consumers in Times Square or a conglomerate of banks that stretch around the globe, without regard as to whether there are personal relations involved at all. This gives such ways of grouping individuals who essentially remain isolated in their individuality an aura of personality which they do not have except for bureaucrats who think persons count only as numbers. When we think of community more precisely, however, we think of people coming together on a basis of mutual recognition, mutual respect and mutual regard for one another and for common interests shared by all, in other words a real personal interest in one another, no matter what our differences, including relations of justice and friendship.

This is what the Greeks spoke of as koinonia, Hegel as Volk and we as a community or a people. I'm sure that people all over the world have such an idea for themselves and for people with whom they feel associated in a special way as persons.

Third, when we introduce the idea of cultural foundations into this mix of ideas, we find ourselves even more perplexed in this contention about person and community. Cultural foundations are built up historically by particular communities, as persons consolidate themselves in relations of justice and friendship among one another and, to include the religious dimension that is usually found in these cultural traditions, in relations to the divine. This has to include a very rich understanding of the many different ways in which different peoples have humanized themselves through very personal relations indeed. But it also happens that cultural foundations take on a life of their own in civil society independently of people and in abstraction from the community that brought them into existence. When this happens, and it does more often than not, these cultural foundations can be used by individuals, not just to lord it over the community, but even against the community and its common good. This is what happens when some people speak loosely about community to cast an aura of absoluteness about a particular way of organizing society and then to have this particular way spill over into other communities that already have their own way. They take one particular cultural foundation, as the absolute right of private property in a framework of competition, for example, and then try to make it the cultural foundation for all other communities around the globe in a process called globalization, thus stripping all other peoples of their own cultural foundations.

This brings me to the fourth level of contention in our theme for discussion here, the very idea of cooperation among peoples as a form of globalization. Some people like to think of globalization as a new way of coming together, as in a community based on mutual recognition, respect and regard for one another. This is the idea that underlies such expressions as "cooperation among peoples." It is an ideal that we should strive for in the context of common interests we all share and want to participate in, an ideal we try to institutionalize in things like the UN or what we call the international community. But is that what in fact globalization has become or is it not rather the imperialistic expansion of a particular cultural foundation spreading out from a center to dominate and exploit all other cultural foundations for its own competitive purposes. Western style capitalism is a cultural foundation now well established and spreading to all parts of the globe. It is the only cultural foundation that is universally established, but it is one that is established at the expense of other cultural foundations and for its own exclusive benefit. It works by standardization of all goods and values to comply with the requirements of its means of production and distribution. This is a betrayal of the very idea of international community and a reduction of all cultural foundations to something that will serve its own private interests.

The problem for us then is to figure out whether the idea of a real cooperation based on mutual recognition, respect and regard for one another among peoples is only an illusion or a pipe dream, as those in the center who have controlled globalization so far would have us believe, or is it something we can still work out cooperatively in mutual respect and regard for one another with everyone participating on a footing of some equality, which I have referred to as mutual respect and regard, in what is to become a common good for all the cultural foundations that sustain the different communities around the globe, east and west, north and south.