World 3.0
Page 34
What to do and where depends, in World 3.0, on where we're coming from and what we're interested in achieving. In addition to making it more appealing to help others, flexibility in this regard opens up the cosmopolitan project to all of us, rather than just the rarified few who can operate on a totally global scale. My daughter, Ananya, whom you'll meet later in this chapter, is a very (rooted) cosmopolitan soul with a keen yearning to help the world's neediest, but she does have to finish high school in Barcelona. So she helps out at a local center for the children of immigrants while nursing hopes of spending a summer doing social work in India.
Table 15-1 summarizes these and other contrasts between cosmopolitanism, rooted cosmopolitanism, and communitarianism/nationalism—under the acronym COSMOS. The distinction between cosmopolitanism and rooted cosmopolitanism—as conceptualized here—is much more than a nuance and the differences from the other “isms” loom even larger.
The elements of rooted cosmopolitanism summarized in the table sound energizing. But to really live them, we need to shift our own mind-sets, which is a little bit like performing brain surgery on ourselves. How do we pull that off? The rest of this chapter recommends an approach organized in terms of what I see as the three progressive stages of relating better to others across distance: awareness, acquaintance, and altruism. The focus across all three stages is on how to engage with and ultimately increase sympathy for others, particularly distant others.
Table 15-1: Rethinking cosmopolitanism
World 0.0/1:0: Communitarian/nationalist
World 2.0: Cosmopolitan/global citizen
World 3.0: Rooted cosmopolitan
Concern for foreigners
Zero
Equal to domestic welfare
Positive but distance-dependent
Objective function
Maxmin* (local/ national welfare)
Maxmin* (global welfare)
Reduce distance sensitivity
Self-identity
Local/national
Global
Multiple identities
Mind-set
“Realism”
Idealism and illusions
Idealism without illusions
Operational requirements
Minimal
Maximal
Variable
Spatial focus
Local/national
“Shallow ponds”/poorest countries
May depend on origin and interests
*To take the maxmin of an argument is to maximize its minimum value. Thus, the usual cosmopolitan imperative in terms of income (or welfare) levels is to focus on increasing the lowest levels in the world.
Stage One: Awareness
To say that we should become more aware of the world around us is rather trite, so let me begin with an illustration of a basic misperception that might matter a great deal. It concerns (lack of) knowledge of one's own country's involvement abroad, which might be expected to exceed knowledge about foreign countries themselves. In 2002, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs polled Americans as to how much of the federal budget should go to foreign aid, and how much actually was devoted to that purpose. Respondents said, on average, that 31 percent of the U.S. government's budget went to foreign aid, and that 17 percent would “be more appropriate.”24 In fact, only about 1 percent of the U.S. federal budget goes to foreign aid. Another poll in March 1997 had asked Americans which budget area (social security, defense, Medicare, and the like) sucked up the most dollars. Almost two-thirds cited foreign aid, even though each of the other areas mentioned dwarfs it in spending.25 Other surveys indicate that respondents were generally unaware of frameworks for aid such as the Millennium Development Goals—associated with the UN project, headed by Jeffrey Sachs, that aims to eradicate extreme poverty—and looked more favorably on aid when acquainted with them.26
Misinformation is also manifest when it comes to the help the United States gives in times of crisis. During the Asian tsunami, media reports in the United States widely touted Americans' generosity. Actually, the $350 million given by the U.S. government was smaller as a percentage of GDP than donations proffered by many other developed countries. And U.S. private giving lagged as well.27 In sum, information about foreign aid is so bad that more accurate media representations might conceivably help shift the outcomes. And, if our knowledge of foreign countries themselves is even worse, then we clearly have a lot of learning to do.
Beyond figuring out all that we need to know more about— the wishlist also includes knowledge of levels of integration, relative distances, distance sensitivity, et cetera—it seems even more useful to review how we might make ourselves more aware. Here I introduce a simplified version of a diagnostic tool I developed, the Global Attitude Protocol (GAP).28 Many of us like to think of ourselves as reasonably cosmopolitan and enlightened. Take this survey if you want to assess how far your exposure to the world's peoples and cultures really goes.
Global Attitude Protocol
Please respond to each of the numbered statements below with the one of the following five responses that best fits your own behavior or beliefs: “Strongly Disagree,” “Disagree,” “Not Relevant,” “Agree,” or “Strongly Agree.” If you own your copy of this book, you may want to write down SD, D, N, A, or SA next to each of the statements.
I speak multiple languages.
I have lived in countries other than my home country.
I enjoy traveling to and getting to know people from different parts of the world.
Some of my closest friends are of nationalities different from mine.
I think I would enjoy working in a country in which I haven't previously lived.
When I travel/live in another country I try to learn about the political, legal, economic, etc., institutions of that country—and how they differ from my own.
When I travel/live in another country, I try to learn about the cultural traditions of that country—and how they differ from my own.
I think I can develop an opinion about a person independent of any preconceived image of his/her national culture or religion.
I am comfortable working with people located in different countries.
I am comfortable working together with people from different cultures and backgrounds in the same location as me.
I understand the socioeconomic/political ramifications of world events and can evaluate how they might affect my business or investments.
I read newspapers and magazines with significant international content (e.g., International Herald Tribune, Economist, Fortune).
I listen to the world news on international TV channels (e.g., CNN International, BBC World Service, Al Jazeera).
I have used the Internet to expand my access to international news and commentary.
When I travel/live in another country, I make some attempt to look at local media as well.
Scoring: For each response, give yourself –2 points for Strongly Disagree, –1 point for Disagree, 0 points for Neutral/Not Relevant, 1 point for Agree, and 2 for Strongly Agree; then add up scores across questions to get your overall GAP score. 20+ implies no (serious) gap, 10–20 some gap, below 10 a significant gap, and below 0 a huge gap!
What score did you come up with? With which types of questions did you tend to disagree or strongly disagree? These might suggest areas in your life to focus on in order to become more open and improve your awareness of the world out there. Remember, accurate mental maps and an understanding of distant places don't develop automatically: they require personal action. The U.S. journalist Walter Lippman articulated the agenda more than eighty years ago, writing: “The world that we have to deal with is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance.”29
Even those who tend to think of themselves as relatively urbane, global, or sophisticated often fall short of the kind of openness that Lippman had in mind. Technology can
help us learn about and connect with distant people and places, but really understanding distant others often requires putting yourself out there mentally and, if possible, physically. Mere passport stamps don't count: thus, there is evidence that very short trips, treks, et cetera tend to have very short-lived effects.30
Stage Two: Acquaintance
Awareness is one thing; getting to the next level of acquaintance and affinity is quite another. Acquaintance requires multiple contacts and engagement over time—in other words, a true exchange. For trust to develop, let alone sympathy, repeated interactions between people must take place. A process of learning about “the other” in the abstract usually isn't enough.
As a model for such interactions, I point to what technologists have called Web 3.0, the contextuated or semantic Web. Web 1.0 allowed us to look up information; Web 2.0, the one we are currently working with, expands that functionality by allowing social networking and mass collaboration. Web 3.0 is supposed to work even better, because machine-based learning and natural language processing are supposed to provide a context for online requests for information and other communications.31 In the same way, World 3.0 ideally requires not just communication across borders, but communication that is cognizant of and sensitive to what continue to be large differences in national context, that is, communication with understanding.
For an example of how far such a process of really understanding another local context might go, consider my family's move from the United States to Spain from the perspective of my fifteen-year-old daughter, Ananya. I recently asked Ananya to write down her thoughts about what the move—which she had protested bitterly as an eleven-year-old—had meant for her and particularly her self-identity. The box “Really Getting into Other Cultures” contains what she came up with, without further prompting or editing.
Really Getting into Other Cultures
Four years ago, I moved to Barcelona, Spain from Cambridge, MA. I left my primarily white, primarily Jewish private school for an international school, Benjamin Franklin, where most people spoke several languages fluently. Even though I had grown up speaking two Indian languages at home (Hindi and Bengali), I had more or less stopped actually speaking them, even though I could still understand when my parents spoke in them.
On my first day at school in Barcelona, I didn't know what to expect. I knew that everyone spoke English, and it was an international school, but I had no idea what that meant. I soon learned that at my school, no one would ask you, “Where are you from?” because no one student identifies themselves from one place.
The first time I was invited to a sleepover, all the girls called their mothers before they went to sleep—a symphony of Russian mixed in with lilting Dutch, Swedish and Afrikaans. They then hung up the phones and resumed chatting in a mixture of English and Spanish. At that moment, I realized exactly what being a global citizen meant—it is being able to go from one culture to another while retaining parts of previous cultures, and therefore, taking something from the earlier countries, languages and customs.
Halfway into our first year in Spain, I realized that I could no longer attempt to be just American, as I had been doing for as long as I could remember. I started to talk to my parents in Hindi and Bengali again and worked hard to learn Spanish. At the age of fifteen, I speak English, Spanish and Bengali fluently, I have basic skills in French and Hindi, and I am able to read and understand Catalan, the language spoken in the state of Spain that I live in.
One of the best parts for me about leaving the US was being able to see my homeland from a different point of view. In freshman year at my school, our social studies class studied “US History.” In September of that year, I thought I would pass the class without having to work in the slightest, because, well, I'm American. I could not have been more wrong. In the US, learning American history meant learning which Native Americans lived in eastern Massachusetts, or what year the Townshend Acts were passed. In Spain, it wasn't about who won, or who was right, so much as how the culmination of so many events could produce such a revolution.
So where am I from? Everywhere, and yet no specific place. I get emotional when I land in Logan International Airport and a security guard says, “Welcome home.” I will always love the smell of the soil in India after the July monsoons, and yet I also know that because Spanish law allows citizenship after seven years of residence, I will be filing for that right as soon as I turn 18. To me, at this point, Boston is my hometown, India is where my family is from, and Barcelona is my home. I don't think I will ever identify myself as being from one place, or one culture, or one type of people, and I'm glad. I wouldn't change this for the world.
—Ananya Ghemawat
Ananya expresses the power of changing contexts in cultivating rooted cosmopolitanism. As she suggests, you don't leave behind the local cultures and identities you've made your own, yet you don't identify perfectly with any one of them, either. Rather, you become more deeply acquainted with multiple cultures by understanding them in a comparative context. Relocating to a new country is particularly transformational because the overwhelming bulk of your interactions now take place with people who were formerly foreign to you, and you have to fit your own life into the flow of their lives, institutional arrangements, customs, et cetera.
Picking up and moving to a different country is, of course, a fairly extreme way of broadening your circle of acquaintances. For many, a more practical starting point is to focus on learning about one foreign country or region in detail. Learn about its geography and history and what they reveal about its links to other places. Understand its internal and external distances. Try to empathize with the problems people face there, and remember that even in places that seem idyllic from afar, real people there still have real worries that deserve respect. Then bring this context alive through interaction and travel with real people, not just once but over an extended period.
Stage Three: Altruism
Awareness and acquaintance are steps on the way toward achieving the rooted cosmopolitan ideal of helping people at some distance from oneself, but they are not, by themselves, sufficient. As the Dalai Lama has observed,
Only a spontaneous feeling of empathy with others can really inspire us to act on their behalf. Nevertheless, compassion does not arise mechanically. Such a sincere feeling must grow gradually, cultivated within each individual, based on their own conviction of its worth. Adopting a kind attitude thus becomes a personal matter. How each of us behaves in daily life is after all, the real test of compassion.32
Since I can't say much more about how to develop such empathy, let me simply share with you an example that I encountered as I was wrapping up this book. After moving to Barcelona, I joined the board of Ananya's school, and met David Risher, a Harvard MBA and former tech executive, who chaired it. When David stepped down from the board in summer 2009 to spend a year traveling with his family before returning to the United States, I was sorry to see him go—and surprised as well as pleased to see him turn up again in 2010, which is when he explained Worldreader.org to me.
Worldreader.org is a venture that seeks to make digital books available in the developing world. It was sparked by an epiphany that David had while visiting an orphanage in Ecuador. David noticed a small dusty building, all locked up, which upon inquiry, turned out to be the library. And when he expressed interest in seeing the books in there, he was told that the key had been lost long ago. The contrast with how his family had been using e-readers to keep up with the children's education while traveling was striking!
David returned to Barcelona and shared his epiphany with Colin McElwee, another MBA working as director of marketing at a local business school who, in a fit of enthusiasm, drew up a “business plan.” And the two decided that if they were to pursue this opportunity, they would have to do so full time. David deferred his plans to look for paid work, Colin resigned his paid job, and the two set up WorldReader.org, initially funding the nonprofit through their own savings
and David's tech contacts. They focused first on Ghana, an English-speaking country and former British colony relatively close to Barcelona, whose government seemed willing to fund broad deployment of the new technology if Worldreader.org could prove its value with a large-scale field trial.
Talking to David and Colin was interesting not just because of the story's intrinsic appeal—they've already appeared on CNN and been discussed in the Wall Street Journal, among other places—but because of the perspective that their case provided on the topics of cosmopolitanism and social business.
While David and Colin had focused on West Africa out of a desire to help some of the least fortunate, the notion of shallow ponds didn't resonate with them: they were more interested in making a lasting impact than providing short-term relief. They validated what they were trying to do there in terms of the theory of market failures, concluding that creating a culture of reading offered huge positive externalities that might not be internalized adequately by market forces. And their choices about what to focus on were rooted not just in perceived needs, but also in their own passions, talents, and interests. Both David and Colin had enormous faith in education's transformative powers—faith that reflected their sense of the role that education had played in their own life possibilities. Moreover, the combination of David's tech background and contacts and Colin's expertise in marketing educational programs implied some degree of fit with their capabilities as well as their interests. Such conditioning on where people are coming from is incompatible with the general cosmopolitanism of World 2.0 but integral—as a way of building engagement and effectiveness—to the rooted cosmopolitanism of World 3.0.