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Notes
concerning Shaping Globalization: Civil Society, Cultural Power and Threefolding, by Nicanor Perlas
(Quezon City, Philippines: Center for Alternative
Development Initiatives, 1999).�
Paperback, 145 pages. Note:� This article was written with the first
(1999) edition of Perlas' book
in view.� A second edition, greatly
expanded, is now available.� See below
for ordering information. ��������������������� *�� *��
*�� *�� *� *� *�
*� * The
1999 World Trade Organization protesters in Seattle were, on one view, a
bunch of aging hippies looking to get high on a nostalgic reprise of their
glory days.� This may be a minuscule
fragment of the truth, but there
is, I think, a much more profound reading of the Seattle demonstrations
and their aftermath:� they are symptoms
of a significant social
awakening whereby civil society is becoming conscious of its own powers
and opportunities.� As Nicanor Perlas
puts the matter in Shaping Globalization: �� In its contemporary form, civil society is
the most important social �� innovation of the twentieth century.� It ranks in importance with the ��
invention of the nation-state beginning in the seventeenth century and �� the creation of the modern market starting
in the eighteenth century. This
is a breathtaking statement, and certainly counterintuitive for many people
today.� Perlas makes it the task of his
book to justify the statement.� I think he succeeds. Gatherings
of Power That
an awakening of some sort is going on can hardly be disputed. Writing
in the *New York Times* last December, Alan Cowell remarks on how the
nonprofit Global Witness, employing fourteen people on a budget of $800,000,
confronted the international diamond giant, DeBeers, employing twenty
thousand people on a budget of $3.4 billion.�
The result?� DeBeers reversed
its corporate policy and began certifying the provenance of its diamonds
to ensure that they are not helping to underwrite local or regional
conflicts.� Increasingly, Cowell
observes, �� with multinational corporations gathering
unparalleled power as the �� standard-bearers of freewheeling capitalism
-- in many countries, more �� powerful than the governments themselves --
they are being held to �� account by shoestring advocacy groups like
Global Witness.... The
holding to account may not seem very significant in the overall scale of
things at this point.� Yet, clearly
something is afoot.� NGOs (non- governmental
organizations) have been given a greater role in both the U.N.
and the World Economic Forum (the latter held annually in Davos, Switzerland).� Last July more than fifty corporations
committed themselves to
high labor, environmental, and human rights standards by joining NGOs in
signing a U.N. compact.� So-called
"sustainable development investment" in
the U.S. topped $1 trillion in 1997, up by 85 percent from the 1995 figure.� For many companies, Cowell writes, the
clamor of NGO demands for corporate
responsibility "can seem almost deafening".� These demands, according
to DeBeers spokesman Andrew Lamont, "are part of the twenty- first
century economic landscape". Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity Most
institutions of global governance were designed for representatives of
sovereign states -- a fact noted by last September's State of the World Forum
in New York, chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev.�
A Forum announcement suggested
that �� Successful global governance must include
not only governments but the �� private [commercial] sector and civil
society as peers in a co-creative �� process of discernment and
cooperation.� Only when these three
major �� sectors of society are included in the
deliberations concerning the �� human future will the answers we seek begin
to emerge. Again,
a radical statement.� Contrary to the
thought expressed here, most commentators
have vested their hopes for the future in just two social sectors.� As the standard view goes:� if you multiply the number of democratic
political states, and if you then let these states flourish economically
under a liberal capitalist trade and investment regime, you will
be bound to find the world a more harmonious and productive place. Yet,
as Perlas reminds us, "civil society was behind the collapse of the Berlin
Wall and the subsequent demise of communism".� Attempts to aid the former
Soviet Union have also given us ample opportunity to see what happens
when you undertake the fiat creation of a democracy and capitalist economy
without the necessary cultural foundation to support it.� Perlas cites
a World Bank statistic attributing sixty-four percent of the world's wealth
production to "social capital" and only sixteen percent to business capital. But
are there really grounds for considering civil society a co-equal participant
with governments and commercial entities in shaping our social future
-- and, if so, what are the principles by which these three estates can
come into a constructive relationship?�
In his book, Perlas cites a number
of theorists who have analyzed an emerging threefold character of society.� Among them are: **
Michael Mann, �The Sources of Social Power� (Cambridge: Cambridge �� University Press, 1986). **
Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, �Civil Society and Political Theory� �� (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994). **
Leslie Sklair, �Sociology of the Global System� (Baltimore: Johns �� Hopkins University Press, 1995). **
Rudolf Steiner, �The Renewal of the Social Organism� (Spring Valley NY: �� Anthroposophic Press, 1985). I
am not familiar with most of these works, and have only a casual acquaintance
with Steiner's notion of "the threefold society", which goes back
to the second decade of the twentieth century.�
But a certain way of conceiving
the three sectors of society, derived from Steiner, has for some
time seemed decisively important to me.�
It's a matter of grounding our
understanding of each sector in an aspect of human nature.� The French revolutionary
slogan, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", can point us in the right
direction. The
social sphere of equality is that of the political and legal system, in
a narrow sense.� It is the sphere where
there must be no respecting of persons,
the sphere where we are all equal before the law, seeking the same
justice.� It is rooted in the
fundamental, inalienable dignity of every
individual simply as a human being. Second,
there is what Perlas calls "culture" (overlapping, but not precisely
equivalent to "civil society").�
It's law is freedom, and its accomplishments
arise from the abilities of individuals whose contributions
must not at all be regarded as equal.�
The great achievements
of science, art, and religion, the institutions of education, everything
creative, everything aimed at truth and beauty, everything value-driven
-- all this constitutes culture.� The
values and insights of culture
cannot be legislated or coerced; they can be achieved and recognized
only through the freedom of the individual.�
They are what prevent
a society from descending into political totalitarianism or economic
slavery. In
the third place, we have the economic sphere, whose central principle is
"fraternity" -- brotherhood and altruism.� Here is where, engaging the stuff
of the world, one person works to satisfy the needs of another, and in
turn receives from the other the material to satisfy his own needs. You
may think it strange to characterize the "cutthroat, greed-is-good" world
of commerce as essentially altruistic.�
But I am pointing only to the
inescapable and defining principle of the matter:� we do in fact work for
each other, and if we do not choose within ourselves to work in that spirit,
then we are adopting a schizophrenic stance.�
It may be that the widespread
occurrence of such a stance results from our failure, so far, to
bring economics into proper relationship with the other two domains -- as
opposed to letting economics co-opt and degrade them. Perlas
poses the problem of "threefolding" this way: �� We are having a massive global disagreement
over dozens of issues �� because the key institutions representing
culture (civil society), �� polity (the state), and the economy (the
market) have no clear idea of �� how society is constituted and what are
their respective legitimate �� roles and tasks within society.� Lacking this understanding, they all �� engage in trying to dominate social life
when, in fact, each depends on �� the very vitality of each of the other
major subsystems of society they �� are trying to dominate. Keeping
the Three Domains Distinct Once
you begin reflecting on the three aspects of the human being -- and therefore
also on the three aspects of our life in society -- you begin to recognize
how a great deal of social conflict arises from a confusion of spheres.� To take a rather minor case:� every year or so in the U.S. there
is impassioned controversy over the worth of grants awarded by the National
Endowment for the Arts.� "How can
they spend my tax dollars for such
trash?" Of
course, one person's trash is another person's sublimity, and the point is
that people must choose their trash and sublimity for themselves, in freedom.� When the state makes these choices for us,
it employs the power of
the political-legal sphere, where we must all be treated as equal, to support
a few selected projects of the human spirit, about which the judgments
of the rest of us will radically differ.�
There will never be any
way to avoid the socially divisive effects of such an overreaching by the
state. We
see similar issues more gravely at work in the Balkans and wherever culturally
engendered ethnic clashes are tearing societies apart.� When the
political state impinges upon cultural freedom, leaving minorities feeling
that state control is essential in order for their own cultures to find
"breathing room" within the society, then ugly clashes for control become
inevitable. Likewise,
I have previously mentioned how bizarre it is for Americans, so obsessive
about freedom of thought and speech, to accept government attempts
to shape the development of our very powers of thought and speech.� These attempts, of course, take the form of
government control over
the educational curriculum -- which is quite different from the state's
proper role in simply assuring equal access to the education of one's
choice. There
are many other failures to respect the differing requirements of the three
social spheres.� What happens when
economic and political institutions
enter an unholy marriage is all too evident today in the susceptibility
of politicians to corporate influence and in the lack of a legal
counterweight that can preserve human dignity against compromise by economic
forces. More
positively, there is widespread and growing acceptance that at least some
strictly economic decisions should *not* be placed in the hands of the
state.� The Federal Reserve's independence
illustrates the benefits of leaving
such decisions ("What interest rate is demanded by current economic
conditions?") out of the hands of political officials, whose self-interest
could hardly help distorting their economic judgment. As
a final example, problems also arise when economics and culture are not properly
differentiated.� Perlas brings the
matter down to the immediately recognizable,
personal level when he cites an economist who was enamoured of
the notion of "opportunity cost" (the value of a foregone alternative action): �� One day this economist decided not to go to
a concert with his wife. �� Since he was a consultant, he argued that
he would experience an �� opportunity cost of $200 per hour if he
went to the concert with his �� wife because that would be time away from
his consultancy work. To
view our cultural life as a trading in commodities is to destroy it. Cultural
values and economic values are by no means exchangeable.� The attempt
to subject culture to economics is, Perlas suggests, reflected in such
things as elevated divorce rates, crime, drug use, and other social ailments
-- none of which, incidentally, is without its economic cost! Threefold
Interpenetration The
easiest mistake to make in thinking about social threefolding is to picture
the three aspects of society in a wooden, either-or sort of way. One
needs to bring a more flexible, imaginative mindset to the issues so as
to recognize interpenetrating realities rather than neat antitheses. For
example, no business is strictly and absolutely economic in nature. There
are matters of right in which every employee should be treated equally
(and the state will doubtless play a role in articulating some of these
matters).� Similarly, there is a crucial
place in every business for the
kind of culturally sponsored individual achievement that is a matter of
radical inequality among employees.�
Intel would not survive long if it decided
on proposed chip layouts by conducting a democratic vote instead of
by recognizing the unmatched achievements of its most capable chip designers. The
interweaving of the three spheres is also evident in the fact that "a spiritual
culture is the ultimate source of political justice and an essential
prerequisite to the creation of a truly dynamic and productive and
ecologically sound economy" (Perlas).�
Each sphere, then, is rather like
an organ system of the human body.� The
circulatory system, for example,
needs to be recognized for its own particular character, and yet the
blood's fluid passes out through the capillaries to bathe all our cells,
and is continually exchanging substance through the cell walls. You
cannot say where the circulation ends and other systems begin, but you *can*
recognize that the principles of the circulatory system are quite other
than, say, the principles of bone formation.�
A thinking that can distinguish
without rigidly dividing is, I'm convinced, essential to any productive
understanding of society (and is opposed by the much-too- brittle
habits of thought encouraged by our engagement with technology). There
is probably no place you can look in society where you will not see all
three aspects of human nature at work.�
The human being is, after all, a
unity.� But this should not lead us to
ignore all distinctions.� It is certainly
true that, when you look at a school, you will see, among other things,
an economic entity subject to the constraints and realities of commerce.� This is trivial.� But the central mission of the school -- to educate
the student -- is not an economic one.�
The attempt to place an economic
value upon the student's educational achievement leaves aside all of
our highest striving, which has little to do with our earning potential.� Only those who fail to see this could make
the disastrous mistake
of urging school privatization.�
Education should be neither government-controlled
nor commodified; it requires the independence and freedom
so necessary to every undertaking of the human spirit. Different
Forms of Power How
can the educational, scientific, religious, and artistic activities of the
civil, or cultural, sector effectively hold the balance against globally
triumphant, state-reinforced commerce?�
It is vital, I think for the
civil sector to remain true to its own character.� While it will certainly
draw on the political and legal apparatus of the state, and while
it will doubtless engage in some forms of commerce, its own peculiar power
hinges on nothing more than its appeal, in freedom, to what is highest
in others.� It's strength, you might
say, lies in its weakness. Possessing
no great wealth and no power of the sword, it holds up ideals that,
throughout history, men have been willing to die for.� "Ultimately", says
Perlas, "all forms of power struggles are struggles for meaning" -- so
don't discount those whose primary trade is the trade in meaning. Referring
to the persecuted Chinese sect and its leader, Perlas notes that �� Li Hongzli and the members of the Falun
Gong movement are very quiet �� and modest people.� Yet they trigger flashes of fear and hatred
in the �� hearts of the highest political and
economic powers in China.� Why? �� Because the communist leaders realize that
they no longer control the �� minds of tens of millions of Chinese.� Li Hongzli has created a new and �� more powerful meaning for many Chinese than
Maoism. In
his New York Times article, Alan Cowell writes, �� While corporations are generally able to
deploy vastly greater �� resources in public relations, litigation,
lobbying and advertising and �� are often skilled at co-opting adversaries,
"it's not such an unequal �� power relationship," an executive from
a London-based mining �� corporation said. �� "You can be an $8 billion company or
whatever," he continued.� "But
in �� the court of public opinion the
nongovernmental organizations start �� with more credibility than
businesses." In
an era when branding is thought by many corporations to be nearly everything,
a smudge on the brand counts for a great deal.�
"Consumer tastes
and preferences", Perlas notes, "are primarily formed in the cultural
realm".� The opportunity exists,
therefore, for an organization such
as Adbusters "to sow `symbolic pollution' on manipulative corporate advertising
to induce a critical attitude in the consciousness of consumers". Perlas
vividly illustrates the power for change emanating from the cultural
sphere.� This power is increasingly
acknowledged even in the boardrooms
of the largest corporations.� He cites,
for example, a talk by Stephen
Schmidheiny, who is director of the heavyweight World Business Council
for Sustainable Development.� The
Achilles heel of the corporation,
according to Schmidheiny, is demand, since without demand there
are no products to sell.� The "new
consumers", who are immune to advertising,
hold the corporation's fate in their hands. Schmidheiny
goes on to describe the emerging and unprecedented role of employee
conscience and family conscience.� In
Perlas' summary: �� For the first time an increasing number of
employees are asserting �� their disrespect for dubious practices of
corporations.� Management at �� TNCs [transnational corporations] are
increasingly becoming concerned �� that their top corporate secrets may end up
in nameless brown envelopes �� handed over to media or the corporation's
government regulator.� In �� addition, the children of CEOs are
increasingly becoming concerned �� about the public conduct and image of the
corporations that their �� father[s] or mother[s] run.� When the CEOs come home from work, they �� find that civil society concerns are now
part of their family dinner �� table conversations. The
list of major civil sector campaigns to reign in transnational corporations
continues to lengthen.� It extends from
the long and eventually
successful boycott of Nestle to PepsiCo's withdrawal from Burma to
more recent actions against Mitsubishi (to prevent its encouragement of illegal
rainforest logging) and Monsanto (to shut down its "Terminator" seed
technology and keep unlabeled, genetically engineered products out of the
food supply).� Perlas concludes that �� CSOs [civil society organizations] can ...
enter the halls of political �� and economic power without feeling
intimidated.� They can enter the �� vortex of transformation confident that
their advocacy is steeped in �� meaning, that central pivot of human
existence and social life, without �� which the world would rapidly descend into
chaos. Perlas,
by the way, has been a significant actor in the "threefolding of society"
movement.� He is head of the Center for
Alternative Development Initiatives
in the Philippines, and has played a major part in successful national
and Asia-wide efforts to secure high-level recognition of the role
of civil society.� He has received the
Outstanding Filipino award, as well
as the U.N. Environmental Program Global 500 Award for Sustainable Agriculture.� He pursued farming in the Philippines until
he realized that he
would have no future in farming if current globalization trends were allowed
to continue. A
Few Additional Observations There
are many aspects of Perlas' valuable book I have not touched on.� I conclude
with a few miscellaneous notes: **
Nothing I have said here suggests that the views or actions of civil society
organizations should automatically be taken as correct or well- advised.� The requirement is only that society find a
way to bring the civil
sector to the table, so that it can wield its particular sort of influence
based on the strength of its insight and wisdom. **
How the three spheres of society should be institutionalized is far beyond
me to suggest.� The main thing is to
avoid artificial, schematic proposals,
to watch what is actually happening, and to bring to these developments
a flexible, refined ability to reckon with the different principles
at work in the various social spheres.�
This sensitivity can enable
us to recognize, for example, whether a civil society initiative is being
true to its own nature. **
Healthy functioning within the economic sphere depends thoroughly upon the
vitality of continual, dynamic *exchange*.�
There are no political or scientific
principles that would enable one to specify, a priori, the true economic
price of a commodity.� The price must
emerge from the complex givings
and takings of myriad transactions.�
Even if, in special circumstances,
it were deemed necessary to impose prices from outside this system,
one would have to reckon with the inevitable distortions resulting from
the imposition. This
distortion, by the way, is quite a different matter from the political
system setting a minimum wage consistent with the basic requirements
for life in the society.� Such an action
will affect prices without
dictating them, much as a severe or lush climate will affect the prices
of agricultural products.� There is no
intrusion in the economic sphere
here, but a setting of background conditions that the economic system
must then factor into its prices. **
Referring to recent social science work, Perlas identifies "Cultural Creatives"
as the force behind the emergence of global civil society. This
group is said to uphold a distinctive set of values: �� Ecological Sustainability (rebuilding
communities, limits to growth, �� stopping corporate polluters), Globalism
(acceptance of cultural �� differences), Women's Issues (against abuse
of women and children), �� Altruism, Self-Actualization, and Spirituality
(forging a new sense of �� the sacred that incorporates personal
growth, the spiritual realm, and �� service to others), and Social Conscience
and Optimism. Perlas
mentions a massive social survey in 1990-91 purporting to have uncovered
a "postmodern shift" in North America, Britain, and various Scandinavian
and European countries.� The shift
includes "loss of confidence
in all hierarchical institutions; declining trust in science and
technology to solve problems; decline in traditional religious involvement;
greater search for inner meaning and development; subordination
of economic growth to environmental sustainability; cultural pluralism;
greater freedom for women". Personally,
I am never sure what this kind of survey data (or, rather, interpretation
of survey data) really tells us.� Such
collections of data fracture
reality so severely that they become a kind of Rorschach blot in which
the observer can see whatever he is looking for.� Perhaps their greatest
significance lies in the way they can be used plastically to frame
a view of the future regardless of the current realities they point to.� And we will quite rightly embrace or reject
such a view in terms of its
intrinsic worth, not in terms of the survey data -- which in any case can
tell us little about the direction we *ought* to move in, as opposed to
the directions we have previously moved in. On
his part, Perlas offers a wonderfully fitting vision of the future when he
concludes his discussion of Cultural Creatives by paraphrasing a Filipino
hero:� in the end, there will be no
tyrants because there will be no
slaves. **
Perlas sees the fundamental conflict between cultural creatives and elite
globalization as reflecting a disavowal of the "materialistic framework"
shaping globalization today.� Many
activists in the civil sector
share this rejection of materialism, whereby the cultural sphere is dominated
by a shallow consumerism.� And as the
cultural creatives enter not
only civil society but also business and government, a powerful, threefold
alliance will emerge "that is destined to change the course of world
history". **
My saying above that political-legal organs of the state should not patronize
the arts does not mean I believe the arts (and other cultural activities)
should remain unfunded.� It's just that
the funding must be a matter
of free giving by those who are convinced of the healthy creative powers
of the people and organizations they support. One
hopes that, in a properly threefolded society, there would be much more support for
culture.� Our economic system is
currently distorted by the
moral falsehood that gives the owners of corporations *unlimited* claim
to profits.� (See "Who Owns
Microsoft's Profits?" in NF #106.)�
The "excess"
profits can be viewed as the portion accruing, not from individual
efforts of the entrepreneurs, but from the educational, scientific,
and spiritual resources they have been able to capitalize on from
the larger society.� If you place limits
on the personal claim to profits
accordingly, then a fair share of these profits will more naturally
find their way into the civil sector.�
This will happen, not because
a central bureaucracy takes the funds and redistributes them, but rather
because every business owner is made, to one degree or another, into
a trustee for a philanthropic effort. ��������������������� *�� *��
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*� * You
can order *Shaping Globalization* by sending US$20 to the Center for Alternative
Development, 110 Scout Rallos Street, Timog, Quezon City, 1103,
Philippines.� For further information,
send email to Related
articles: **
"The World Trade Organization: Economics as Technology" in NF #106. ������ http://www.netfuture.org/2000/May0900_106.html#3 **
"Do We Really Want a Global Village?" a chapter in *The Future Does
Not �� Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our
Midst*. ������
http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/fdnc/ch09.html Steve
Talbott is the editor of the NetFuture Newsletter. This article is from
NetFuture Nr. 120, reprinted with the author�s kind permission. Note:
Rudolf Steiner�s basic book on the tripartite society, "Basic Issues of the
Social Question" is available as an e-book from our E-Book Library: Basic
Issues of the Social Question
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