But surely our worldviews, political outlooks and religions aren't functioning at their best when they provide pat answers to life's biggest questions. The challenge to all thinking people is to resist the temptation to fall into yet another polarised, nationalist, or God-forbid, holy posture. Rather than retreating into the simplistic and childlike, if temporarily reassuring, belief that the answers have already been written along with the entire human story, we must resolve ourselves to participate actively in writing the story ourselves. It is not enough to go back to our old models, particularly when they have been revealed to be inadequate at explaining the complexity of the human condition. It is too late for the Western World to retreat into Christian fundamentalism, accelerating global conflict in an effort to bring on the messianic age. It is too late to push blindly towards a purely capitalist model of human culture. There is simply too much evidence that the short-term bottom line does not serve the needs of people or the environment. There are too many alternative values and cultural threads surrendered to profit efficiency that may yet prove vital to our cultural ecosystem.
Instead, we must forge ahead into the challenging but necessary task of inventing new models ourselves, using the collaborative techniques learned over the past decade, and based in the real evidence around us.
Chapter 4
Networked democracy
The values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may, in fact, prove quite applicable to the broader challenges of our time and help a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems. The very survival of democracy as a functional reality is dependent upon our acceptance, as individuals, of adult roles in conceiving and stewarding the shape and direction of society.
Religions and ideologies are terrific things, so long as no one actually believes in them. While absolute truths may exist, it is presumptuous for anyone to conclude he has found and comprehended one. True, the adoption of an absolutist frame of reference serves many useful purposes. An accepted story can unify an otherwise diverse population, provide widespread support for a single regime and reassure people in times of stress. Except for the resulting ethnocentrism, repression of autonomy and stifling of new ideas, such static templates can function well for quite a while. Dictators from Adolph Hitler to Idi Amin owed a good part of their success to their ability to develop ethnically based mythologies that united their people under a single sense of identity. The Biblical myth of Jacob and his sons served to unify formerly non-allied desert tribes (with the same names as Jacob's sons) in ancient Sinai. They not only conquered much of the region, but created a fairly stable regime for centuries.
So these stories enable a certain kind of functionality. Their relative stasis, if protected against the effects of time by fundamentalists, can allow for the adoption and implementation of long-term projects that span generations, even centuries. But when one group's absolute truth bumps up against another group's absolute truth, only conflict can result.
New technologies, global media, and the spread of international corporate conglomerates have forced just such a clash of worldviews. While cultures have been reckoning with the impact of cosmopolitanism since even before the first ships crossed the Mediterranean, today's proliferation of media, products and their associated sensibilities, as well as their migration across formerly discreet boundaries, are unprecedented in magnitude.
Globalism, at least as it is envisioned by the more expansionist advocates of free market capitalism, only exacerbates the most dangerously retrograde strains of xenophobia. The market's global aspirations (as expressed by Global Business Network co-founder Peter Schwartz's slogan "Open markets good. Closed markets bad. Tattoo it on your forehead"4) amount to a whitewash of regional cultural values. They are as reductionist as the tenets of any fundamentalist religion. In spite of the strident individualism of this brand of globalist rhetoric, it leaves no room for independent thinking or personal choice, except insofar as they are permitted by one's consumption decisions or the way one chooses to participate in the profit-making game. Mistaking the arbitrary and man-made rules of the marketplace for a precondition of the natural universe, corporate capitalism's globalist advocates believe they are liberating the masses from the artificially imposed restrictions of their own forms of religion and government. Perceiving the free market model as the way things really are, they ignore their own fabrications, while seeing everyone else's models as impediments to the natural and rightful force of evolution.
As a result, globalism to almost anyone but a free market advocate, has come to mean the spread of the Western corporate value system to every other place in the world. Further, the bursting of the dot.com bubble, followed by the revelation of corporate malfeasance and insider trading, exposed corporate capitalism's dependence on myths; stories used to captivate and distract the public while the storytellers ran off with the funds. The spokespeople for globalism began to be perceived as if they were the 15th century Catholic missionaries that preceded the Conquistadors, preparing indigenous populations for eventual colonisation. The free market came to be understood as just another kind of marketing. Globalism was reduced, in the minds of most laypeople, to one more opaque mythology used to exploit the uninitiated majority.