Dear All

Avishai Margalit wrote that we need a decent society, meaning a society that does not entail humiliating institutions. I believe we need a decent global village; the national level has become too narrow.

Yet, what does this mean in detail and how do we get there?

I am at present working on a text where I reflect on the relational skills we need and how we could draw together elements from different cultural knowledge bases. I am currently trying to get a feel for Japanese culture, and I detect, for example, that it offers a lot of good "lessons" that resemble what I learned when I lived in Egypt.

However, when caring for a cancer patient, it is not enough to smile kindly upon her and apply good communication skills. While it is extremely important to keep up hope and passion for life in the patient, this does not mean that the financial means and surgical skills to treat the patient should be forgotten.

I just read Monbiot's book The Age of Consent and would very much like to have your views on this book.

Most warmly!
Evelin

Monbiot, George (2003). The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order. Hammersmith, UK: Flamingo.

Some quotes:

Globalization is not the problem. The problem is in fact the release from globalization which both economic agents and nations states have been able to negotiate. They have been able to operate so freely because the people of the world have no global means of restraining them. Our task is surely not to overthrow globalizing, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle for humanity’s first global democratic revolution (Monbiot, 2003, p. 23, italics in original).

...

There are hundreds of ... networks operating already within the global justice movement.
If such campaigns are to succeed, they need to call not only upon existing activist, but also upon many people who are not yet engaged in transformative politics. In most democratic nations, citizens are withdrawing from the political process. Mainstream politics has become, especially for young people, boring and alienating, as many correctly perceive that it has been reduced to a matter of management, that the competing parties in most nations have been captured by a class of people permitted by corporations and the financial markets to govern, whose aims and outlook are almost identical. There is no outlet, in most national systems, for passion. Globalization has increased the complexity of political issues and, by removing their resolution to levels at which there is no democratic control, exacerbated people’s sense of helplessness.

The global justice movement has become, for many of those alienated from national politics, an enfranchisement movement. By lifting their sights from the national sphere to the global or international sphere, they have discovered that the potential for political engagement has not disappeared, but merely shifted to another realm. Older activists have rediscovered, in the extraordinary numbers these global campaigns have mustered, some of the hopes which have lain dormant for the past twenty years. By demonstrating that we have the means of both democratizing and transforming global politics, we can turn this movement which id already the biggest global federation ever convened into a force so numerous and so effective that is becomes irresistible (Monbiot, 2003, pp. 258-259).