Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth

Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth Globalization, Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy

EDUCATIONAL FUTURES RETHINKING THEORY AND PRACTICE Volume 2 Series Editors Michael A. Peters University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA J. Freeman-Moir University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand Editorial Board Michael Apple, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Miriam David, Department of Education, Keele University, UK Cushla Kapitzke, The University of Queensland, Australia Elizabeth Kelly, DePaul University, USA Simon Marginson, Monash University, Australia Mark Olssen, University of Surrey, UK Fazal Rizvi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Susan Robertson, University of Bristol, UK Linda Smith, University of Auckland, New Zealand Arun Kumar Tripathi, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Scope This series maps the emergent field of educational futures. It will commission books on the futures of education in relation to the question of globalisation and knowledge economy. It seeks authors who can demonstrate their understanding of discourses of the knowledge and learning economies. It aspires to build a consistent approach to educational futures in terms of traditional methods, including scenario planning and foresight, as well as imaginative narratives, and it will examine examples of futures research in education, pedagogical experiments, new utopian thinking, and educational policy futures with a strong accent on actual policies and examples.

Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth Globalization, Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy

By

David Geoffrey Smith University of Alberta, Canada

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM / TAIPEI

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ISBN 90-77874-62-3 (Paperback) ISBN 90-77874-61-5 (Hardbound)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands http://www.sensepublishers.com

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All rights reserved © 2006 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

To my brothers Stephen and Robert Together we suffered the pain of multiple displacement and eventually the liberty of it

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD: DREAMING OF A SINGLE LOGIC

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xix

INTRODUCTION: TRYING TO TEACH IN A SEASON OF GREAT UNTRUTH: GLOBALIZATION, EMPIRE, AND THE CRISES OF PEDAGOGY

xxi

CHAPTER 1: ON ENFRAUDENING THE PUBLIC SPHERE: THE FUTILITY OF EMPIRE AND THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE AFTER AMERICA

1

CHAPTER 2: THE SPECIFIC CHALLENGES OF GLOBALIZATION FOR TEACHING AND VICE VERSA

15

CHAPTER 3: . . . THE FARTHEST WEST IS BUT THE FARTHEST EAST: THE LONG WAY OF ORIENTAL/OCCIDENTAL ENGAGEMENT

35

CHAPTER 4: TROUBLES WITH THE SACRED CANOPY: GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP IN A SEASON OF GREAT UNTRUTH

59

CHAPTER 5: NOT ROCKET SCIENCE: ON THE LIMITS OF CONSERVATIVE PEDAGOGY

71

CHAPTER 6: GLOBALIZATION AND CURRICULUM STUDIES

81

CHAPTER 7: A FEW MODEST PROPHECIES: THE WTO, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE FUTURE OF REASON

99

CHAPTER 8: THE MISSION OF THE HERMENEUTIC SCHOLAR

105

NOTES

117

REFERENCES

119

INDEX

129

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FOREWORD

DREAMING OF A SINGLE LOGIC

DAVID W. JARDINE, UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

History has certainly taught us one terrible thing: that previous pretensions to speaking on behalf of all (claims, in the old discourse, of “universalism,” and, in the new discourse, of “globalism”) have inevitably ended up being very bad news for somebody or other. History has also taught us that those with such pretensions very rarely are able or willing to even hear of bad news at all. This inevitability of bad news has nothing at all to do with the good heartedness and right intent, or lack of it, of those involved. Neither is it especially directly related to what is claimed to be universal or global. It is the very “dream of the universality of a single logic” (p. 15) that is at issue in this brilliant, disturbing and hopeful new book by the Canadian author David Geoffrey Smith. Like his previous work (some of which is collected in Pedagon: Interdisciplinary Essays on Pedagogy and Culture [Smith, 1999]), there is a clarity and courage afoot in this book. It is full of ideas, images, names, faces, and dates. It is full of great beauty and urgent warning. But that dream of a single logic and the painful effects that logic has had, not only in education, but also in the world(s) that cradle it—these are dear to the heart of David’s work. David’s work, friendship, and encouragement have shaped my own life’s work. Much of my own work happens within the sometimes joyous, sometimes heartbreaking confines of elementary schools and the work of teacher education. This dream of singularity that David opens up for us with such care has had a profound effect on the logic that underwrites what my students, the teachers, parents, and school administrators with whom I work, and I experience daily and immediately. It fills the lives of each of the children I encounter in that work, each in different measure, just as their faces are different faces of the world. It frames the bludgeoning economic logic that has infiltrated the language and practice of schooling itself, turning students into clients and teachers into accountants and managers. It is rampant, too, in how we imagine the great human inheritances (housed so timidly in curriculum guides) that have been entrusted to teachers and students in schools. It underwrites how we imagine being a child, an adult, how we imagine “being educated” and what being educated is for. And yet, as David so clearly articulates, there is also a different logic at work in many teacher preparation programs and in the hearts, minds, and practices of many ix

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good teachers and good schools: an analogical, dialogical, imaginal, ecological, and ecumenical, proliferating, sometimes pandemonious cluster of logics, in fact. Many of us in education feel caught in between these two forces of singularity and diversity, of closure and openness. It feels some days like a recapitulation of ancient, monstrous battle(s) between the One and the Many. This is a perennial site of great suffering: Teacher preparation programs situated in academies where the epistemological revolution [from singularity to proliferousness] has been going on for almost 30 years are increasingly organised around conceptions of intersubjectivity, constructivism, and ecology. Story telling, multiculturalism curricula, teacher-as-researcher/interpretive inquirer, and group work are now part of the standard preparational repertoire. (p. 45) And then comes the terrible irony that most of my student teachers then face when placed in some school classrooms. The “clearly defined order” of a single logic rears up: All this [openness and proliferousness] is proposed to be acted out in the context of schools and educational systems that were original designed to serve a different, older, more clearly defined [singular] order, one which remains politically regnant even while its conceptual and practical infrastructures are inherently suspect and devolving in spite of themselves. (p. 45) This between spot is palpable. Part of the task of learning to teach involves coming to terms with this “between.” Part of that task involves learning that we have inherited a dream of a single logic and all its consorts and consequences. This is why I always have my students read David Smith’s work. Teachers need to know, deeply and intimately, the faces and names and hiding places of this inherited dream and its consequences for us, as teachers, for our students as inheritors of the world, and for the living inheritances that have been entrusted to us in schools. Even in these moments in schools when we deeply experience the emergence and movement of knowledge as vivid, abundant, and “open for the future” (Gadamer 1989, p. 340) (as one might reasonably expect of a living discipline of knowledge), even there, we are haunted by the ghosts of singularity. As Jean Piaget (1965), one of the great ancestors of contemporary education, announced, “A single truth alone is acceptable when we are dealing with knowledge in the strictest sense” (pp. 216217). Imagine. Even Piaget, one of those who helped us understand that children might think differently from adults, tells us that, in the end, there is only One, and that difference will, inevitably, be overcome as we developmentally converge on the singularity of Reason (see Jardine, 2005). Every time we invoke Piaget’s name, we invoke this age-old Enlightenment dream. Buddhism (in Chapter Three) enjoins us to recognize that sites of great suffering are also sites where the real work needs to be done, sites where insight can be gained and suffering reduced. In what David named “a season of great untruth” (p. x

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59) the real work lies “in this in-between” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 295). The task that David takes on in these pages is not to abandon or betray this experience of being caught or stuck in between, but finding what its truth might be, finding what this agonizing interstice is asking of us, here, now, in these cursedly interesting times. “The times seem precipitous” (p. 30). In some ways we can only hope so, because so many schools, so many teachers feel stuck and frightened and overburdened, caught in the drone of a story bereft of the possibility of a surprise ending (p. 53), caught in the repetition of “the Same.” And, again courting this sense of in between, all this happens squarely in the face of the crashes of life and possibility and diversity that daily pour through the doors of contemporary elementary schools. Asking what the truth might be in a season of great untruth? The prospects seem dim at first, but, as David’s words unfold, that prospect begins to glow. This book doesn’t offer either easy solutions or final ones. It does offer something that is our wont as teachers—the slow, difficult, sometimes deeply pleasurable, sometimes heartbreaking, never finished resolution of thinking. It is the sort of thinking that is deliberately done in the face of the young, in the face of those who ask us to come out of the orbit of our singular logic and listen to what their arrival portends about them and us and this world of ours. This sort of thinking is not only a matter of mere intellectual erudition (David’s ability in this regard is staggering), even though this is one thing that is clearly demanded of us in these times. We have to become students of the logics we’ve inherited, makers of family trees, archaeologists, storytellers, archivists with meticulous footnotes and scholarly referentialities, writers whose poetry oozes up out of the Earth, meditators, wanderers on the way. This is a form of thinking that David’s work asks of its readers, is one that invites, that provokes, that reminds, that demands. It is a form of thinking that does not provide solutions, but rather a sort of absolution—a loosening (< L. ab-solvere). David reminds us in another context that a love of etymology gets cultivated as you become practiced in hermeneutics (Smith, 1999, p. 39), that makes the tethers that have bound up our hearts and minds more visible, more audible, more forgiving, more capable, one always hopes, of transformation and renewal. More capable, perhaps, of being vulnerable to the arrival of the young and the difference they portend. More pedagogical, one might say. What is being suffered in schools is not, as so many of my student teachers initially believe or are told by some of their elders, “the real world” to which we must all simply submit and in which we must simply learn how to survive (“in the trenches,” as goes the warfare discourse of student teachers). Through repeated absolution, we learn, slowly and over and over again, that we have made this world of schooling, purposefully or through default, and that its making was also in the hands of our shared and contested ancestors who have handed it down to us in equally shared and contested ways and forms. Only through a deep and meditative understanding of these makings can those makings be undone, redone, loosened, xi

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sorted, rethreaded, rewoven. Education must become like textus, like a text, a story whose telling is not yet over. We find, slowly, that just as no single logic is absolute, our suffering is not absolute. We find, too, that our “grief is not a permanent state; it is a room with a door on the other wall” (Bly, n.d., p. 11). The purpose of this book, as with David’s oeuvre as a whole, as with his teaching practice and his way in the world, is human peace and freedom in its most difficult, localized, intimate, embodied sense. This is no singular proclamation of a not-especially-new cluster of universals. We all know full well how dangerous it is, especially in these terrorized times, to bandy about such terms, terms which have been forced down the throats of so many, and always, of course (as is the way of a singular logic) “for their own good” (Miller, 1989). What David is pointing to in this book reminds me, instead, of some of Ivan Illich’s (1992) final work, where he speaks of the difference between the enforcement of pacification under a single logic (like the Pax Romana or the more recent Pax Americana) and being “left in peace” (p. 16): War tends to make cultures alike whereas peace is that condition under which each culture flourishes in its own incomparable way. From this, it follows that peace cannot be exported; it is inevitably corrupted by transfer, its attempted export means war. (p. 17) You can hear an old complex bubbling under these words. Feeling besieged in schools makes us retract to the tried and true. It makes us more alike. And, inversely, as we organize teachers’ and children’s lives in schools, and the curricula with which they are entrusted, more and more around a set of universals, we make schooling more and more warlike. The aim of making more alike—the great dream of singularity—leads to what David (Smith, 1999) identified years ago as “monstrous states of siege” (p. 140) in an essay chillingly titled “Children and the Gods of War.” In such states of siege, imagination retracts, generosity becomes rarer, and thinking, as is the nature of a single logic, becomes paranoid. Paranoia then absolutizes the boundaries between “us” and “them” and can only venture into a “common” world with others to the extent that those others are rendered ahead of time into what I already presume them to be. Again, David provides a spooky image of what education might look like, spoken of in an early essay, “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns”: “We are no longer available for that which comes to meet us from beyond ourselves, having determined in advance the conditions under which any new thing will be acceptable and thereby foreclosing on the possibility of our own transformation” (p. 136). So, too, we don’t need to hear what Iraqis think of America because America believes, as is the wont of a single logic, that it already fully knows what a legitimate understanding of itself might be. Others can only agree with this single logic or be wrong. Others can only submit or be sacrificed—a lovely little description of provincial examinations. This might sound a little “over the top” put so generally, but it is precisely here that the abiding power of David’s work really lies. Even though at times in this xii

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book we seem momentarily entangled, even stuck, in great ancestral nets, greatly scholarly tangles, great pantheons of faces—Marx, Hegel, Jesus, Chomsky, Descartes, Adam Smith, Buddha, and on and on—what is being opened before our eyes is precisely right before our eyes. That is, with David’s great guidance and persistence, we don’t simply learn about these ancestries; we learn from them how to see the great jeweled nets of interdependence and implication in the most ordinary of school events. It is here that David’s work begins to profoundly affect my own. The work helps my eyes settle on what is in front of me in my work in elementary schools. It helps tune my ears. It helps me slow my breath in the midst of the occasional nearpanics of Grade 1. For example, the paranoia of a single logic and its imperial dispensations helps to explains those little color-coded developmentally sequenced books that count as “reading” in many elementary schools. Those little readers and the competency checklists that accompany them have rendered singular children’s course towards literacy and have therefore re-imagined the work of the young child learning to read as a manageable sequence of monitorable steps that either anonymously replicate a “normal” child or follow a sequence whose abnormality can be measured (mathematically, precisely a system premised upon and demanding of singularity). By attributing a proximity or distance from normality (singularity) to the pathology of the child, the singular system of attribution remains imperviously in place, and the child remains the silent object of such attribution, unable to address its terms, its fairness, or its legitimacy. When David talks of the “futility of empire” throughout this book, it is not just some sociopolitical superstructure that is being addressed. This is not philosophizing in that old and tired sense of conceptual speculations and clarifications of concepts. As the talk of empire unfolds, the imperial insinuations of elementary school practices in language arts unfold at the same time. The little Ziploc plastic bags containing those readers becomes more than a simply possible practice in schools. They become Icons, the meditation upon which leads to ancient insight into old and silent forces that are still silently at work in the world. As the joyous uprisings of wonderful work with teachers and children occur—I think of the many powerful and intellectually provocative conversations I have witnessed with young children about the intimacies of learning to read—so too occur patterns of resistance to such imperial insinuations. Teachers are starting to ask with great urgency how they might articulate what they know in such intimacies. They are asking why their work is rendered into a Romantic fantasy by that single logic. Thus (and here again, David’s book is such a valuable resource) when students and teachers stumble over how to articulate what they are experiencing day to day, there is the opportunity to consider how we have inherited the discourse of singularity and tend to get caught in measuring our words and thoughts by it. When I have tried to interrupt the practice of culling children out into the hallway to be tested by developmental readers, some teachers react as if it were an “act of treason” (p. 30). When David discusses how the language of empire becomes angry, urgent, and exaggerated (see, for example, George W. xiii

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Bush’s recent exhortations of “Islamofascism”), we can hear the same tone in our own school mission statements or the gruff confidence regarding “Accountability” and “Parent’s Right to Know” when the results of provincial examination scores are posted, in rank order by school, in the local papers. We can hear it in the missionary zeal of “No Child Left Behind,” even though, at the same time, we can hear in these words the prospect of the totalizing of surveillance. Some elementary school teachers I’ve encountered have become spellbound and paralyzed by these latest (but not especially new or innovative) “literacy initiatives” that have arrived in their schools with great promise, great clarity, and great fear. No longer are they left in peace to venture into dark imaginal places by reading books with kids, except, perhaps, for fun. We are left with what one Grade 2 child said to me when asked why she reads: “In order to improve my reading skills.” Every child and every teacher knows full well that the real topic of every single one of those developmentally delayed books is “You can’t read” and that the future of any child’s learning to read is already fixed, already fully known before any child arrives. The future is already “frozen” into no future at all (see Smith, 1999, Chapter Four), or, certainly no future other than the one we have already singularly dispensed. David stunningly and damningly contextualizes this giddy sort of triumphalist and visionary (and, again, paranoid) mood into the ubiquitous icon of the perpetually smiling young elementary school teacher and its analogues in both consumer marketing and evangelical Christianity. All three celebrate “enthusiasm” as a cardinal virtue. They are the bearers of a verdict that, in the name of the future, the future is now closed. (p. 54) Under a single logic, nothing happens that could disrupt that logic. In fact, teachers who cuddle in the dark with kids and good books are understood, under this logic, in ways that are terribly familiar. The work of good teachers comes to appear Romantic and unreasonable, and teachers’ failure to concede the clarity and singularity of those reading assessment tools comes to seem provocative, threatening, even dangerous. “Ownership of the technical and political means to control the manifest rules of reason comes to rule the game. Henceforth, everyone else can be labelled unreasonable, unstable, wild, underdeveloped, feminine, weak, niggardly, primitive, childish, immature and ideological” (p. 128). Questioning such ownership simply increases its entrenchment, its paranoia, and its violence. Pulling away from this single logic is called cowardice; questioning it is unpatriotic. This sort of singular logic is what underwrites the spirit of colonialism and what has emerged as part of our intellectual heritage from the Age of Enlightenment. Once we believe that we have in hand the singular logic that underwrites being reasonable, civilized, free, mature, moral, developed, stable, it is our moral obligation to export these matters and, if necessary, impose them on a waiting world. As David describes so well via the work of Enrique Dussel, in the face of xiv

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such exportation, one is either saved or sacrificed. Being left in peace is not an option. David helps us to understand how deep is this swath of singularity: Historically, it can be argued that the dream of the universality of a single logic (the Enlightenment ideal) is primarily a religious conception tied to monotheism, and in the European context, to Christianity and the vision of a unified Christendom that guided Europe form the days of Roman emperor Constantine in the 4th century CE (after his conversion to Christianity). What we are left with today . . . is a secular residue of the Christendom ideal, with economic theory providing a “theological” . . . justification for the new universal operation of The Market as God. (p. 114) Before we return again to the issue of how enfraudening and untruth underwrite this dream of singularity, two more small comments about this colonial impulse with which David helps us. If we think, for example, of the British Empire (and/or the British or Canadian missionary ventures in, say, Africa, as David’s parents participated in with good hearts [see Smith, 1999, Chapter Ten]), we know how it understood itself as standing in the midst of the wildness, difference, and diversity of the world, as the greatest, the best, the most powerful, the most reasonable, the most civilized, the truest. England became understood and imagined and dreamtover as “home” where “Grandmother” lived. Home offices were set up, where, like schools, the colonized needed to get a pass or fail trying. And, once that Empire began to break down, England had to face the difficult arrival of great waves of “others” on its shores, now finally come home under the imaginary singularity of Empire. (I can’t help but imagine all of Alberta’s Grade 12 students huddled together for the provincial exams, all hoping for a “pass,” all indistinguishable under the singular eye of Alberta Education.) But there is another element here that is near and dear to the hearts of educators. Add to the dream of a singular logic the dream of development or progress or, in education, the sequencing of grades and images of developmental sequences, and developmentally appropriate curriculum materials, teaching practices, and assessment tools (Jardine, 2005). With this addition of the idea of development, a singular logic does not simply stand in the midst of wildness and difference and diversity as the greatest, the best, the most powerful, the truest. Singular logic stands in the midst of this roil as that towards which the wildness, difference, and diversity of the world are heading by its very nature. Only thus can we justify that preemptively exporting democracy to Iraq is simply a matter of helping the Iraqis towards a future that we singularly and unquestioningly know is inevitably in store for them anyway. Only thus can we justify those developmental readers that cull young, vulnerable children out of the embrace of language and books and stories and into the harsh glare of decoding skills and word, grapheme, and phoneme recognition. “It’s for their own good,” we smile. And, worse, yet, the deeply human embrace of language, the storied breaths between adult and child become suspect because they cannot be suitably managed.

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Here is the point, David shows us, wherein lives this season of great untruth, this situation of “enfraudening.” Under the dream of singularity, children and their education become “problems” to be re-mediated through controllable, predictable, and manageable interventions. Anything outside of the purview of such monitorable re-mediation becomes deeply suspect. When I claim for myself that I am well experienced in the ways of language, that I am a writer and a reader who has thought through such matters continually over 35 years, that I have worked with hundreds of children and teachers in the great territories of language and its arrival, when I point to the experiential evidence of having been immersed in rich and rigorous conversations about the ways of a character in a book with Grade 1 kids, when I cite their words and show the work that follows—all this, under a singularity-management logic, is subjectivized because the world (the so-called objective world) is understood to be only and solely a matter of the anonymous application of singular “rules of operation” (p. 113) whose identification, control, and management are paramount. To legitimately be part of reading is, at the outset, to be manageable. It is here that enfraudening and untruth ensue. To be true means to be able to manage. If little color-coded developmental readers help us manage the development of reading skills in young children, then their use is in this sense true. And the deep agony expressed by a vice-principal recently that certain Grade 1 teachers caught in the spell of color-coded developmental books have “forgotten to read to their babies” becomes Romanticized and rendered false. Even something we know to be patently true becomes “untruth” if it doesn’t help us to manage. And the inverse: Untruth becomes true if it helps us manage. And so student teachers, new to this difficult interface between the young and the old, between the new and the established, become spellbound by issues of “classroom management” and, consequently, how to “manage” to teach children to read. Even when they witness the delicious spells cast by books and the rich and compelling work that can ensue, they don’t know how to believe their eyes because the logic of singularity has co-opted ahead of time the possibility of belief. Once the interface with their elementary school students is imagined as something to manage, however, enfraudening becomes imaginable as one more management technique. Am I better able to manage the public space of the classroom if I disseminate this or that untruth? Will the scores on those checklists that go with those developmental readers get parents off my back and provide me with a warrant for the worth of the work I am doing? If the answer is “yes,” untruth becomes the truth, since “to be true” is “to manage.” “When the lines between knowledge and misrepresentation become completely blurred in the public mind, then education as a practice of civic responsibility becomes increasingly difficult” (p. 29). Worse yet, once “civic responsibility” becomes a matter of purposefully not questioning the officially promulgated version of the world (again, all in the name, as we’ve heard so much recently, of patriotism), then the blur deepens, and education becomes a futureless practice and willful, inquisitive, imaginative, impulsive children become experienced, in an old xvi

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parlance, as “little terror(ist)s” in need of rooting out and either saving or sacrificing; that is, passing or failing. As David returns to so delicately and fearlessly, education becomes a state of war; war causes further retraction into the tried and true. Walls go up. Reason becomes intolerant of anything that seems different enough to “rock the boat.” And, as we’ve heard so often recently, in a state of war, you are either for us or against us. So where is the good news here? David’s intense and often disturbing loosenings of the hold(s) of these dreams of singular logic have a slow and deliberate effect. This is not a book to be read fast or to be read once. It needs to be worried over, like a good bone. David’s work has always required something of me, something akin to a sort of monastic murmuring over illuminated manuscripts, a great underbreath muttering over and over until those texts open my heart at the very moment that they open a heretofore only hinted-at world of relations and bloodlines. Scholarly work at its best. I have been reading David’s work since we first met in 1986, and it has changed my life, saved it, I think. He has taught me that there is great relief to be had, great common strength or “comfort” to be found, in facing our fears and realizing that the great neuroses we have inherited can be worked out. David walks these paths beautifully and meditatively. There is hard, granular, meticulousness to David’s writing that makes some paragraphs long, hard, worth-it work. And yet, more than with any other writer I have encountered, there is another element in this book that is deeply pedagogical and pleasurable. It is an element of invitation and unfinishedness, as if certain lines, certain words, certain images were waiting upon my arrival in order to discover what they mean. This characteristic means that we are not presented with a finished text that simply speaks while its readers remain silent. This book embodies a critique of that dream of a single logic by presenting its readers with an open, convivial, urgent invitation to speak the truth they have seen, to bear witness to our individual and collective suffering and its loosenings. I end this Foreword with a difficult task. How do you properly thank your teachers, those who have lovingly guarded your wandering? For now, I’ll simply cite a passage (Chodron, 2005) by an eighth-century Buddhist master, Shantideva, found in his work The Way of Bodhisattva: Thus from this day forward I go for refuge To buddhas, guardians of wandering beings Who labour for the good of all that lives, Those mighty ones that scatter every fear. (p. 46) (Bragg Creek, Alberta, Canada, near Winter Solstice, 2005)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the University of Alberta for awarding me a McCalla Research Professorship for the academic year 2005-2006, which provided time for preparing this manuscript. Special thanks are due to David Jardine of the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, for writing the Foreword. His friendship and support over many years have been a special gift. Linda Pasmore has been wonderful as a manuscript editor. I could not have managed without her help. Phil McRae is a wizard on the computer, and especially at accessing material from the Web. His assistance in developing the book cover has been invaluable. Thanks to Michael Peters for first suggesting SensePublishers, and his series on Educational Futures. Peter deLiefde at SensePublishers has been a sensitive, supporting presence throughout the preparation process. I hereby recognize the original publishing sources for each of the chapters in this book and express appreciation for their willingness to allow republication here: A few modest prophesies: The WTO, globalization, and the future of public education. Canadian Social Studies, 35(1) (2000). Available from http:/www.quasar. ualberta.ca/css_35_1/index35_1.htm The specific challenges of globalization for teaching and vice versa. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 46(1), 7-26 (2000). Globalization and curriculum studies. In W. Pinar (Ed.),The new international handbook of curriculum studies (pp. 35-52) (2003). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. [Published there under the title Curriculum and teaching face globalization] On enfraudening the public sphere: The futility of empire and the future of knowledge after ‘America.’ Policy Futures in Education, 1(3),498-504 (2003). The mission of the hermeneutic scholar. In M. Wolfe & C. Pryor (Eds.), The mission of the scholar (pp. 75-88) (2003). New York: Peter Lang. Not rocket science: On the limits of conservative pedagogy. In K. Cooper & R. White (Eds.), The critical practical educator (pp. 121-131) (2005). Dordrecht: Springer. Troubles with the sacred canopy: Global citizenship in a season of great untruth. In G. Richardson & D. Blades (Eds.), Troubling the canon of citizenship education (pp. 124-135) (2005). New York: Peter Lang. ‘ . . . The farthest West is but the farthest East’: The long Way of Oriental/Occidental engagement. In C. Eppert & H. Wang (Eds.), Eastern xix

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thought, educational insights: New horizons in curriculum (in press). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates. I personally accept responsibility for any errors and omissions in this book. Finally, I wish to express profound appreciation to Julia Ellis, who over the past 20 years has revealed to me the true face of human compassion.

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INTRODUCTION

TRYING TO TEACH IN A SEASON OF GREAT UNTRUTH: GLOBALIZATION, EMPIRE, AND THE CRISES OF PEDAGOGY

The papers collected in this volume represent work conducted over the past 10 years in an attempt to track and understand what has been going on in public education, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition, since the early 1990s when, during the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, neoliberalism and globalization first became terms of wide circulation. The end of the Cold War was taken as a time of triumph for global capitalism, now announced under American and British auspices as a universal truth destined for universal application. After 9/11, the formal globalization agenda morphed even more fundamentally, with the US and Great Britain pursuing an incrementally aggressive preemptive war in Central Asia to secure supplies of the one natural resource upon which the globalization agenda depends; namely, petroleum. In recent years a spate of Hollywood movies such as Constantine and Alexander has attempted to construct the public imagination through a kind of semiotic parallelism with the Greek and Roman empires of old, to suggest almost that this is the way of the world, and it is best to get used to it. Today the world teeters once again on the brink of global war as forces of resistance to this latest iteration of empire refuse to take it all lying down. The title of the book, Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth, requires some explanation. The season of great untruth refers to the fact that the publicly mediated accounts of what is going on in the workings of empire are in fact based on a massive, intense, and deliberate campaign of misinformation. 9/11, for example, was not an attack against an innocent nation by a group of deranged religious fanatics. It was an event carefully orchestrated by the highest levels of the American government, with the involvement of the Saudis and Israelis, to legitimize the military invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and soon Iran. No other interpretation of the evidence is possible, and in some of the essays that follow, I try to provide reasonable sources for such a claim, most notably the Centre for Globalization Research, at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and its website at www.globalresearch.ca, and related links; see also the websites www.fromthewilderness.com, and www.onlinejournal.com. Pedagogically speaking, what are the unique (and difficult) contradictions that teachers face when public knowledge is in fact based on a foundation of duplicity and misinformation?

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Given that 9/11 is so often characterized as a day when ‘everything changed,’ it is important to emphasize that in fact it was/is simply an extension of a long line of continuous developments stemming from three basic formations. The most immediate, relatively speaking, was the formation of the Age of Petroleum, which essentially describes the 20th century, going back to the discovery of black gold by “Uncle Billy” Smith and his two sons in Titusville, Pennsylvania, on August 27, 1858 (Yergin, 1992, p. 27). No doubt, that is a day when everything changed for the world. Petroleum inspired the internal combustion engine, which in turn inspired automobiles, power generation for household heating and illumination, redesign of towns and cities, polymer synthetic fabrics, fertilizers and pesticides that redefined the nature of agriculture, revolution in transportation, and, most important, the complete dependence of military vehicles (troop carriers, aircraft, tanks, ships, etc.) on a single source of energy. In 1911 the young Winston Churchill as First Lord of the British Admiralty recognized the efficiency of Persian (Iranian) oil over Welsh coal for powering the ships of the British navy and made the momentous decision to convert the entire imperial fleet from coal to oil. He also recognized, prophetically, that such a decision was “to take arms against a sea of troubles,” but that there was no choice: “Mastery itself was the prize of the venture” (as cited in Yergin, 1992, p. 12). In many ways, the histories of the two great global wars of the 20th century, and now the possible third (or fourth, if the Cold War is #3), can be read as national and corporate struggles to secure petroleum energy supplies. The second and broader formation within which 9/11 is significant is the explicit development of Western imperialism itself. This particular formation, which necessarily must be read as a “parenthesis” (Amin, 2003, p. 3) within the broader contexts of human history, reaches from its mercantilist origins in feudal Europe through the industrial period of the 18th and 19th centuries and into the 20thcentury development of monopoly capitalism now under the reign of transnational corporations. These corporations either are external to the influence of democratically elected governments or, through control of such governments, have played a key role in redefining in purely economic terms the essential character of what it means to be human. As the great economic historian, Karl Polanyi (1944/1989) has said, the industrial age of the 19th century produced Homo Oeconomicus, Economic Man (sic), privileging economic consideration of human problems over all other forms of consideration, and today, as Arlie Hochschild (2003) has shown, even the most intimate aspects of human experience have become “commercialized.” Of pedagogical relevance, under the banner of a sanctified Market logic, the commercial imprinting of childhood imagination is conducted through practices of “branding” for consumer loyalty (Ries & Ries, 2002). The third formation within which 9/11 is simply a marker is the allied and more extensive one whereby Western culture assumed its definitiveness over all others, culminating in the present crisis, which in turn represents a refusal of much of the rest of the world to accept this interpretation any longer. Of course, most people in xxii

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the world think that their culture is the best, so this is not a new problem per se. What distinguishes the tension in current circumstances especially for teaching is the fact that the very question of what constitutes knowledge, its nature and character, has been posed and answered for today’s world almost exclusively by Western powers. This has been the case since the 18th century, when so-called European Enlightenment philosophers sought the universal conditions of knowledge in human reason, thereby conflating and confusing their own determinations of what is reasonable with the determinations of everyone else. Western academies through their adjunct relationships to large corporations and governments still largely control the basic paradigms of the knowledge industry, and the fact that it is called an industry is instructive enough to show its roots in 18th- and 19th-century Euro-American industrialism, which gave rise to the massive imperial efforts of those times until today. Recent estimates are that 80% of all ‘knowledge’ about Africa is housed in European and American databanks (Kerckhove, 1997), and today education has become an important export commodity, for America and Britain in particular. Of course, it is important to recognize the scholarly critique from disciplines such as postcolonial studies and the rise of indigenous knowledges, but the impact of this work is still to be felt within the overall operating procedures of the knowledge industry itself. These then can be taken as the defining conditions of the season of great untruth within which pedagogy finds itself in crisis today. The imperial venturing of the Anglo-American alliance is motivated by an internal (less external) terror induced by an impending global financial crisis, itself inspired by the end of the age of oil and a feared global scramble for a limited resource commodity (Goodstein, 2004; Heinberg, 2003; Roberts, 2004). This terror is masked and kept from public view not just through tight corporate control of public media (McChesney, 2004), but also through rhetorical appeals to freedom, democracy, and human rights; that is, the standard rhetorical tropes of the Western tradition. Pedagogically speaking, the public bifurcation of fact from reality precipitates a crisis for teaching because the foundational languages of teaching have no means for critically dealing with the massive forms of misrepresentation and duplicity currently operating. The lived sense for many teachers today is similar to the experience of those living in a dysfunctional family in which the head of the household is engaged at large in criminal and abusive practices, but nobody in the family knows. All they know is that ‘something doesn’t feel right’; things are supposed to be fine, yet pervading the whole household is an undertone of uncertainty and a feeling of imminent disaster, coupled with a deep refusal to accept that such a disaster could ever happen to this family. The neurotic personal and social circuits nurtured through the culture of duplicity are survived by means of multiple forms of addiction (eating, drugs, alcohol, conspicuous consumption, extreme sports, and ‘reality’ television). Intellectually, and via the academy, the neurotic circuits are sustained through an epistemological tradition that is closed in on itself. As Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel (1995, 1996) put it, at the heart of the Western tradition is a belief, xxiii

INTRODUCTION

not in freedom, but in subjectivity. Freedom is the rhetorical trope that masks the true operating reality, which is complete self-enclosure, deaf and blind to any reality outside of itself. The fuller truth of the world could be available through deep reflection on the semiosis of the 9/11 event, showing the edifices of Western economic power punctured and destroyed by agents from ‘outside’ of the tradition. However, the irony of the act being constructed by the American government itself means that the narcissism is now only compounded and not relieved. If there is one common thread running though all of the essays in this volume, it is the importance given to an understanding of alterity or otherness. Self-enclosure, or the “logic of immanence,” as John Hobson (2004) described it, is a fatal disease that cannot be healed from within itself. Healing can be achieved only through genuine openness to the Other, and here I mean the social other, others of different traditions and circumstances, as well as what might be called the transcendental Other, the Everything that we both are and are not, and by the means of which we are continuously called out of our selves into fuller, ever more mature being. The central icon on the front cover of this book is an ideograph often used in Zen practice to characterize the aesthetics of emptiness. What is notable is that what is almost perfectly round, complete in itself, is in fact open and inhabited by an element from beyond itself. Emptiness, then, is actually a form of plenitude fulfilled by an Other, yet at the same time remaining an emptiness. Any momentary fulfillment by an other can never simply rest as one more fully circumscribed, self-enclosed identity without violating its nature as, for want of a better expression, a completeness that is knowable only as incompleteness. Reality is never simply what we experience from within the boundaries of tradition, tribe, or pregiven culture. Instead, reality is always constructed out of a dynamic, fluid relationship between what we know and what we do not know, what is said and what is unsaid, what is visible and also invisible. In ancient Vedic philosophy (Padoux, 1990) the relationship is also described as distinctly political, with the spoken, the visible, and the manifest always subordinate to the unspoken, the invisible, and the unmanifest. Pedagogically, what this calls for is an orientation to teaching that nurtures attunement to what lies outside of ordinary experience and common sense, as well as honoring that-which-is-still-to-be-revealed while always-already-everywhere at work in our present circumstances. In the context of global times, and indeed in the season of great untruth in which we live in the Anglo-American tradition, these ancient forms of wisdom cut across the particularities of time and space to remind us of the futility of empire as a mode of human organization. Our specific human identities constructed through tribe, race, or religion can never be ultimately secured, not only because they always open onto the horizons of others but also, more important, because they are always already everywhere inhabited by the Other in the context of the fully real. There is only one reality in which we all participate, and to confuse the specificities of one limited experience with the full picture is to set up the conditions for all those forms of human activity that guarantee self-destruction through greed, envy, malice, and so on. xxiv

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The cultural prejudices that drive the globalization agenda and now the horrors of empire are rooted in specific presumptions about Identity and the possibility of securing it. The Western tradition is constructed around what can be called a strong theory of Identity, and its roots are traceable to at least two sources. One gains inspiration from a pair of theories from Aristotle: the theory of substance, which argues that a thing is most itself when it is disconnected from every other thing; and the principle of non-contradiction, whereby a cannot be b and still be a. The second source is the Abrahamic tradition itself (Judaic, Christian, and to a certain degree Islamic), according to which the one true God chose one man to be the one true light to the nations. A strong theory of Identity inevitably sets up a social, political, and cultural architecture of insiders and outsiders, with insiders determined to maintain purity of identity by keeping outsiders at bay or by laying out the conditions of their acceptance as insiders. This architecture also defends itself through what can be called the Fallacy of BadAppleism: The world would be a wonderful place if only I could get rid of the bad apples, or, by extension, if only I could make everyone just like me. To make matters worse, the assumptions of BadAppleism are often sacralized (made sacred) through theological constructions that privilege my experience of the real, now transcendentalized as ‘god,’ over yours. As French theorist Rene Girard (2005) has suggested, there is a strong connection between violence and the sacred through a contestation he called “mimetic rivalry,” whereby people struggle to obtain a common object through demonizing the other as being what stands in the way of one’s own perfection. This is a particular problem for the world’s three great monotheistic traditions, and it is no accident that it is precisely competing monotheisms that threaten global peace in our time, especially the specific monotheism to arise out of the Protestant reformation; namely, the right to private wealth accumulation at the expense, if necessary, of all others. The theory of alterity, then, that runs through most of the papers in this book is guided by a particular set of assumptions. First, there is no other place to which ‘bad apples’ can be eternally assigned and driven, and any attempt to do so is completely futile. This is because, second, what I think is the bad apple is none other than the rotting shadow side of my own identity that I now project outwards on to others in an attempt to heal myself. My shadow side is rotting because I am not attending to it for what it is; namely, an invitation to consider the limits of my self-understanding, a failure I would rather not face and hence keep suppressed until it either ruptures and bursts, or else spreads like a poison throughout my whole system. Third, therefore, what is required is a new form of meditative sensibility whereby I face directly the ills that are pressing within me at the same time as I open myself to others who alone contain the essential cure for my decaying narcissism. As Girard (2005) further argued, the demonization of others is constructed through a dynamic of scapegoating through which others are consigned to take the blame for my own insufficiencies; hence the connection between imperial foreign policy and domestic malaise on the home front.

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The hermeneutic of alterity suggested above has its obvious applications within contemporary geopolitical circumstances, and in that regard I have been much instructed by the work of Enrique Dussel (1995, 1996), whose suggestions about attending to those standing ‘outside’ of Euro-American modernity are extremely apposite. I would wish to extend his suggestions through consideration of ancient Wisdom traditions to develop a philosophical orientation that fully faces the historically derived injustices of the current global situation while at the same time articulating more urgently and fully the character of our common nature and fate as a species. In the language of Hindu wisdom, tuam sat asi, “that thou art,” or, in vernacular terms, I am you and you are me, and to actually learn to see this is the basis for human peace. So too in the Abrahamic tradition, “Love the stranger as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34). Dussel also spoke of the pedagogical violence at the heart of Euro-American modernity, and this can be related to how any broader educational vision has today been increasingly reduced to the simple production of skilled workers for the new global economy. Many teachers today find their natural altruism completely thwarted by the policy demands of a pure economism. The violence that inheres in this situation arises from frustration. There is frustration on the part of teachers because their preservice preparation programs do not give them any analytical insight into the deep structure of those global events that are determining their dayto-day classroom reality. In Canada, classrooms are increasingly inhabited by children who come to school traumatized by war, malnutrition, family disruption, language dissonance, and culture shock; yet teachers find themselves pressured to instruct only in terms of measurable achievement results, and this places them in a situation of conflict when their deepest desire is to stand pedagogically with the young, as their vocation beckons them. Children, especially adolescents, are frustrated because what is held out to them in the name of education so often seems to bear little relevance to what they perceive and experience through the dominant representations of reality in commercial media. The marketed promise of complete self-fulfillment through consumption is quickly recognized as an empty promise, yet other credible interpretations of human possibility are so rarely to be found, especially in the public domain. In conclusion, to speak of a “season of great untruth” in the book’s title is not to be mistaken as a proffered discourse on Truth or Untruth as philosophical or analytic constructs in the usual senses of, say, British analytical philosophy. Instead, my concern is that deeply embedded cultures of epistemology serve to occlude more comprehensive understandings of global reality and that when these epistemologies underwrite pedagogical and curricular practices, then students are inducted into a sense of the world that is essentially ‘untrue’; that is, the sensibility is so truncated in its forms of knowing that, with respect to the actualities of contemporary life, formal education in the Western tradition has become in fact an induction into increasingly diminished understanding. British historian Norman Daniel (1993) coined the expression “knowledgeable ignorance” (p. 12), which Sardar and Davies (2002) later formally defined as xxvi

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“knowing a people, ideas, civilizations, religions, or histories as something they are not, and could not possibly be, and maintaining these ideas even when the means exist to know differently” (p. 11). Daniel was referring primarily to European constructions of Islam since the Middle Ages and noted how knowledgeable ignorance is sustained through repetitive self-referencing circuits of knowledge production in universities and various media. I would suggest further that such circuits become increasingly delimiting of greater understanding when reinforced by the power of new information technologies that take traditional ‘data’ and embellish them through new logics, not of understanding, but of presentation, which in turn take on an epistemological power of their own. As a result, the growth of knowledge in the contemporary situation “concomitantly entails the possibility of increasing ignorance” (Hobart, 1993, p. 10). Scientific, technical, managerial, and, ultimately, economic knowledge is privileged over all other kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing, such that “as technical superiority grows, so does the growth of ignorance” (p. 10). In the essays that follow, I directly and indirectly elaborate John Hobson’s (2004) notion of the logic of immanence to the fuller sense of immanence, meaning a kind of mutual “indwelling” (Thompson, 1995, p. 678). This requires a deconstructing of the Euro-American notion of identity (the word does not exist in Chinese) to reveal its emptiness (< Skt. Sunyata), which also means, paradoxically, its fuller plenitude. Such a turn holds possibility for the Euro-American tradition to gradually dis-solve its logics of exclusion, uniqueness, and divine preferredness, and hence to more ably take an egalitarian seat at the globalizing table of deliberation over human futures. Pedagogically and curricularly, it holds promise for Western young people to better understand what is at work in their own increasing desperation over improbably conceived futures, and for thus being inducted into a new kind of epistemic grammar that may no longer present such a problem for the rest of the world.

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ON ENFRAUDENING THE PUBLIC SPHERE: The Futility of Empire and the Future of Knowledge After ‘America’

Special circumstances require language that may not exist exactly in the operating lexicon of the day, so for the purposes of this paper I wish to coin the term enfraudening to describe the condition of contemporary North American culture, the culture in which I live and work as an educator and concerned citizen. Specifically, I write as a Canadian, which means, much as my compatriots might like to deny it, from a quasi-colonial space under the heavy influence of a great giant to the south, the United States of America, whose very existence defines most of the rules of our operation, especially in terms of culture and economy. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Thompson, 1995) gives three definitions for fraud (from Latin, fraudis): (a) criminal deception; the use of false representations to gain an unjust advantage; (b) a dishonest artifice or trick; and (c) a person or thing not fulfilling what is claimed or expected of him, her, or it. To attach the prefix en to a noun or adjective means to “bring into the condition of”; to add the suffix en means “to become more so” (p. 583). So “enfraudening of the public sphere” means for this paper not just simple or single acts of deception, cheating, or misrepresentation (which may more accurately fall under the term defrauding), but a more generalized active conditioning of the public sphere through systematized lying, deception, and misrepresentation. I am referring, of course, to the practices of the Bush Administration of the United States and how the “war on terror” is being used to veil longstanding, but now highly intensified global imperial aims. Under these practices knowledge becomes, as John McMurtry (1998) described it, “an absurd expression” (p. 192). When the lines between knowledge and misrepresentation become blurred in the public mind, then education as a practice of civic responsibility is very difficult. The problem is not that American intentions for the world are completely hidden, but that the information is not readily accessible in the public sphere. Instead, it leaks into the world through veiled innuendoes; obscurely placed articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Washington Post; or hunted-down records of congressional committees. Outside of North America, reports of US military and political actions may be published routinely in local newspapers, but these rarely find space in American information media. Indeed, it is the lock-grip that the corporate-driven American government has on all dominant media (Chomsky, 2002; McChesney, 2004; Schiller, 1989) that is part of the conundrum that faces anyone trying to become informed about what is really going on. This 1

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state of affairs has prompted Canadian media analyst Barry Zwicker (2003) to suggest that the old bipolar condition of the Cold War is being replaced by a new antinomy, the American Empire versus the Other of global citizenry. That is, there is a bifurcation taking place between America’s publicly mediated accounts of its own identity, aims, and responsibilities and what everyone else in the world is gradually coming to understand to be the case, which is that an ideological agenda is at work that threatens the very identity of everyone else in the world. The Cold War has been replaced by a war on human diversity, cultural pluralism, the right of peoples to pray and worship in their own way, the right to speak openly, and the right to teach one’s children in ways that may offend the relentless logic of the new Caesars. Indeed, the times seem precipitous. A central aspect of such precipitousness has been the virtual silencing of the academy from speaking out against those forms of politics that in fact jeopardize the very future of the academy, not just as a place of free thinking, but also as a place that might serve the common good. Those who have studied the influence of neoliberal philosophy on universities, colleges, and schools since the 1980s (Ball, Newson, Lauder, Brown, etc.) are well acquainted with efforts to delegitimize all forms of public education not compliant with a logic of the Market. What is new under present circumstances, especially since the rushed passing by the US Congress of the Patriot Act in 2001, as well as the division of the world into an “if you are not for us you are against us” alignment, is that now, speaking, writing, or otherwise acting against the US government is culpable as an act of treason (Bello, 2002). Indeed, as many professors can attest, it seems that a war has been declared on the academy, with the university seen as a site of potential anarchy that must be policed. The role of university campuses in raising public consciousness, as witnessed during the Vietnam War era, is refused under threat of budgetary constraint, tenure denial, department closure, and efficiency reviews (Bruneau & Savage, 2002; Westheimer, 2001). There is another reason for the academy’s silence too; namely, its “reflective barbarianism” as Thomas Berry (as cited in Fox, 2001, p. 201) called it; an entrapment in the unique intellectual myopia and selfenclosure that is its legacy from European modernity. More on that later. “Post” theory (postcolonial, poststructural, postmodern), which has dominated North American humanities departments for the last 20 years, is being argued against through a rehabilitation of justifications for new forms of global colonial administration. Zbigniew Brzezinski (as cited in Research Unit for Political Economy 2003, hereafter referred to as RUPE) has proposed the establishment, especially in Central Asia and the Middle East, of a system of vassal states that would be answerable only to American authority. Indeed, within Brzezinski’s vision, the main task of the United States in the preservation of its empire is “to prevent collusion and maintain dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together” (p. 112). In the Anglo-American alliance, Tony Blair’s foreign affairs advisor, Robert Cooper (as cited in RUPE 2003 ) recently declared, “The need for colonization is as great as it ever was in the nineteenth century” (p. 112). Fronting the Bush foreign policy

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are influential high profile journalists. Max Boot (as cited in RUPE 2003) of the Wall Street Journal suggested that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets” (p. 113). Paul Johnson (as cited in RUPE 2003), a colleague of Boot’s at the Wall Street Journal, proposed a revival of the old League of Nations mandate system, whereby countries are administered under a “respectable” form of colonialism (p. 113). Charles Krauthammer (as cited in RUPE 2003) of Newsweek bluntly called for “a new imperium” (p. 113). Stephen Rosen, head of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard, stated directly (as cited in RUPE 2003)): “Our goal (that of the American military) is not combating a rival, but maintaining our imperial position, and maintaining imperial order” (p. 113) The basic blueprint for the new empire was drafted in 1997 as a confidential report to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee (FRC), under the primary authorship of Brzezinski. (The report was subsequently published in 1997 as a book by Brzezinski titled The Grand Chessboard). Detailed studies such as that of Nafeez Ahmed (2002) show clearly that as an example of its new imperial designs, it is the United States itself that has been especially instrumental in the fomentation of Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and the Middle East, through, for example, sponsoring the Muhajadeen and Chechen rebels and working closely with the Musharraf regime in Pakistan. The aim has been to incite extremism as a pretext for the need to invade under the banners of liberation and civilization. Ahmed’s (2002) work is the most astonishing and disturbing exposure of the American government’s complicity in the World Trade Center attacks of September 11/01. The attacks had been over four years in the planning, with the United States both encouraging and supporting the planners through pilot training programs, money channeling, and passport fraud. On the day of the attacks, all strategic air defense systems in the Washington-New York corridor were commanded, from the highest levels of the Pentagon, to “stand down” so that the attacks could be completed. The movie Pearl Harbor was playing throughout the nation as a subliminal call to massive reaction in the name of patriotism. Within days of the attacks, Bush’s speeches announced the new lines by which world order would be drawn. Long-standing plans for the invasion of Afghanistan were quickly put into motion; within months, the forces were being mobilized to invade Iraq. Today, Iran and Syria are targets of propaganda. On September 17, 2002, a document titled “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” (NSSUSA) was released that laid bare in very startling terms the full extent of American intention, not just for the Middle East and Central Asia, but also for global strategy generally. The report is based on a secret document prepared originally by Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby in 1990 for Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary for George Bush Sr. It reveals the multiple ways in which the war on terror is actually a mask to cover broader political and economic purposes. A brief summary of key points is in order here (I am indebted to the Research Unit for Political Economy [RUPE], 2003, pp. 67-78).

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The NSSUSA report begins with the statement that the 20th century has brought forth a “single [italics added] sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise,” a model to be protected “across the globe and across the ages” (as cited in RUPE, 2003, p. 68). This is “a time of opportunity for America” (p. 68). Europe is to be kept subordinate to, and dependent on, American power. NATO is to be reshaped as a global interventionist force under American leadership: “The alliance must be able to act wherever our interests are threatened” (p. 69). Echoing the earlier Wolfowitz/Libby document, the NSSUSA report cautioned, “We must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements” (p, 70). China is threatened with interference “to make that nation truly accountable to its citizens” (p. 70). American national security lies in the absence of any other great power: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from . . . surpassing or equaling the power of the United States” (p. 71). New military bases and stations are required “beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, as well as access arrangements for long-distance deployment of U.S. forces” (p. 72). Although “free trade” is a “moral principal” that ensures the US unlimited access to foreign markets, the NSSUSA report prescribed “safeguards [that] help ensure that the benefits of free trade do not come at the expense of American workers [read American corporations]” (p. 72). American diplomats are to be retrained as “viceroys” capable of governing client states. Reforming foreign states’ educational systems in line with American values (disciplined by the aid policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank) will be part of a new “war of ideas” (p. 74). Particularly striking are recommendations regarding weapons by means of which the imperial war can be waged. The NSSUSA report insisted that “we must make use of every tool in our arsenal” (p. 74). What do these include? Weapons of mass destruction are on the list, particularly “low-yield” nuclear weapons. Biological weapons programs have been updated “to produce systems that will degrade the war fighting capabilities of potential adversaries” (p. 75). The generic language deliberately leaves opens the possibility of bio-terrorist attacks on civilian populations to disable national economies—SARS, mad cow, and hoof and mouth disease notwithstanding. The most sinister aspect of the report may pertain to “information warfare,” which involves the deliberate spread of falsehoods as a weapon of war. A secret army has been established to unite the CIA, covert military action, and specialists in information deception. Its purpose is to provoke terrorist attacks which would then justify “counterattack” by US forces on countries who could be announced as “harboring terrorists.” According to a New York Times report (as cited in RUPE, 2003), the Pentagon’s new Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) is developing plans to provide false news items to foreign media organizations in an effort “to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries” (p. 77). Under pressure from concerned Democrat Congress members to scrap the OSI for its potentially liable intentions, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld (as cited in RUPE, 2003)

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proclaimed, “You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have” (p. 77). William Arkin (as cited in RUPE, 2003) reported that Rumsfeld’s intention is nothing less than a redesigning of the entire US military around this concept of information warfare. The new policy, suggested Arkin, “blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual information and news, on the one hand, and public relations, propaganda, and psychological warfare, on the other” (p. 77). All of these efforts may be regarded as implicitly criminal under the aegis of international law. The US government has therefore sought and obtained blanket immunity for all US citizens from the new International Criminal Court, set up to try cases of genocide, war crimes, and human rights abuse (RUPE, 2003, p. 78). On October 26, 2001, George Bush signed into law the USA Patriot Act (USAPA), which gave sweeping new powers to both domestic law enforcement and American international intelligence units. Among the measures now made legal are government spying on web surfing, including terms entered into search engines. (The Internet is no longer secure as a communication base for groups critical of government policy.) Those spied upon do not need to be the target of an investigation, nor is the government obligated to report to the court or tell the person spied upon what it has done. The government may also now serve a wiretap order on any person or entity nationwide without proving to a court that the information or communication acquired is relevant to a criminal investigation (Ahmed, 2002, pp. 268-274). David Corn (as cited in Bello, 2001a) in The Nation summarized other laws and executive orders that the Bush administration has signed since September 2001: Secret military tribunals can try non-US citizens, guilt by association can be imposed on immigrants, the Attorney General can indefinitely lock up aliens on mere suspicion, secret evidence can be used in immigration proceedings that aliens cannot confront or rebut, the confidentiality of the client-lawyer relationship can be destroyed by allowing government listening-in, and racial and ethnic profiling can be institutionalized. As Michael Ratner (as cited in Ahmed, 2002) international human rights lawyer, and Skelly Wright Fellow at Yale Law School, put it, “It is no exaggeration to say that we are moving toward a police state” (p. 266). The reasons for this extreme radicalization of the political right in the US are complex, but best examined through a matrix of domestic politics, a fight for survival in a profoundly shifting global atmosphere, and perhaps most important for purposes of this paper, a cognitive entrapment in a particular epistemological tradition. The ideological civil war between the political left and right that has marked the US since the Reagan era is well known and documented (see Lasch, 1995). What is less well known are the multiple ways that the neoliberal and monetarist policies enacted since that time have been largely failures for both domestic well-being and most of the world’s other economies, producing a crisis within the tradition of liberal democracy itself (Bello, 2002). The global recession that began in the 1970s has not been stemmed by policies of restructuring, deregulation, or free trade. Huge balance of trade deficits, massive industrial

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overcapacity, rising unemployment (hidden by statistical maneuvering), the evolution of “credit” society, the emerging power of the euro as an alternative to the dollar for many states angered by US aggression, and the chronic insecurity of the global oil supply on which American “civilization” depends—all this has conspired in recent years to reveal the depths to which the American economy rests on little but sand. Any triumphalist, self-aggrandizing rhetoric aside, the basic truth is that America is in decline as a world power. What seems on the surface to be a vibrant show of “shock and awe” strength is in fact a sign of moral, intellectual, and domestic weakness, such that in the not-too-distant future the rest of the world will be faced with the challenge of human dwelling-together after ‘America’; that is, after America has become more deeply contextualized as one semiotic space within a larger global imaginary. A good analogy for the present imperium is that of the supernova, which Thompson (1995) defines as “a star that suddenly increases very greatly in brightness because of an explosion ejecting most of its mass” (p. 1399) For the purposes of this paper, two features of these developments are worthy of special consideration. The first has to do with the way the new “totalitarianism” (McMurtry, 2002; Spring, (1998) inverts the logic of knowledge through a strategy of denial, creating what McMurtry called “‘the big lie’—a pervasive overriding of the distinction between fact and fiction by saturating media falsehoods” (p. 87). McMurtry’s argument is that the corporate structure of the current global economy (which the US dominates particularly through its petroleum corporations) has lost sight of the life-ground that is prevenient to its operations and without which human life is impossible. Because the ruling economic order “has no life co-ordinates in its regulating paradigm,” it is “structured always to misrepresent its life-blind imperatives as life-serving” (p. 55). Thus “the freedom of unfreedom, the terror of anti-terrorism, the peace-seeking of war are, like the life-endowing properties of dead communities, contradictions which are generated by the global market system’s syntax of meaning itself” (p. 55). This flight from the life-ground disorients the epistemology of human understanding by reversing the flow by which human understanding is normally achieved. Instead of attending to life directly as a prelude to understanding it, the reversal proceeds from predetermined meaning, contained in myths of patriotism, popular folklore, and so on, to the construction of life in its own image. America’s wars are theoretical wars, derivative of its theological tradition and bespeaking the time when theology and theory (metaphysics) were once married. In epistemological terms, we may call this the time of the Great Inversion wherein public and political logics of truth can no longer articulate the broader Truth now revealed by new global circumstances. As a consequence, by a process that ecophilosopher William Irwin Thompson (1988) called enantiomorphism, the logics turn into their opposite. With a perfectly straight face and in a matter-of-fact tone, US Secretary of State Colin Powell (2003) can declare that “the Millennium Challenge Account” of the Bush Administration is to install “freely elected democracies” all over the world, under “one standard for the world,” which is “the free market system . . . practiced

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correctly” (McMurtry, 2002, p. 28). This provides the justification for the slaughter of 500,000 Iraqi children since 1990 through NATO saturation bombing and the destruction of the public infrastructure (water, health care, etc.; p. 28), and for the destabilization of democratically elected governments throughout Latin America (most lately Venezuela), Africa (most lately Liberia), and Asia (ongoing in the Philippines) for the purpose of installing vassal regimes and the seizure of natural resources, especially petroleum (Bello, 2001b). It is also a policy from a “democratic” government that itself gained office through electoral fraud (Moore, 2001) The deep origins of the great inversion, and the conditions of its manifestation, have been well examined by Argentinian philosopher (now exiled in Mexico) Enrique Dussel (1995, 1996) in his powerful critique of Euro-American modernity. Dussel’s hermeneutic marks the second point of consideration for examining the implications of the American imperium for the future of knowledge. In essence, Dussel’s point is that the tradition of Euro-American modernity, extending from the 15th century (the time of Cristobel Colon’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas and the shift of the center of global power from Islamic Central Asia to Europe, with the rest of the world henceforward marked as periphery) to the present is underwritten by a two-sided myth. This “Myth of Modernity,” as Dussel named it, has for its dominant surface side the myth of emancipative reason; its underside is the myth of sacrificial reason. The myth of emancipative reason reached its fullest articulation in the writing of Immanuel Kant (as cited in Dussel, 1995), who in his 1784 essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” proposed that enlightenment “is the exit of humanity by itself from a state of culpable immaturity” (p. 19). This exit is facilitated by the exercise of free choice, or free reason; indeed to grasp one’s freedom is to exercise the God-given gift of reason to the highest degree. Anything less is culpable as human immaturity and the cause of human depravity. Here is the foundation of the philosophy of human development, or what Dussel called “developmentalism,” which underwrites the hegemony of Eurocentric definitions of civilization (see pp. 19-26). The theory of history incipient in Kant was later taken up and elaborated by Hegel as a philosophy of universal or world history (Weltgeschichte). Hegel portrayed world history as the self-realization of God, as a theodicy of reason and liberty, and as a process of Enlightenment. Most notably, for Hegel, “universal history goes from East to West. Europe (and now America) is absolutely the end of universal history. Asia is the beginning. . . . The principle has been fulfilled, and therefore the End of Days has arrived” (as cited in Dussel, 1996, p. 51) Rather menacingly, Hegel continued, “Against the absolute right of that people who actually are the carriers of the world Spirit, the spirit of other peoples has no other right” (as cited in Dussel 1995, p. 24). In a manner that would delight the Christian Right in today’s USA, Hegel proposed that “the idea of Christianity has reached its full realization” (as cited in Dussel 1995 p. 24).

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The myth of emancipative reason has earlier voices in, for example, Descartes’ (1641/1984) Cogito whereby whether or not I exist is something I can decide (think) for myself. Adam Smith’s (1776/1976) logic of self-interest marks a point at which Enlightenment rationality conjoins with the discipline of economics to legitimize infinite economic expansionism in the name of liberty. Kant’s (1784) developmentalism finds a later embellishment in Darwin’s (1859) theory of evolution. Central to Dussel’s (1995) argument is that these philosophical articulations are always posterior to the facts of European empire, not anterior; that indeed it is the sheer abundance of wealth that flowed into Europe beginning with the Spanish conquest that enabled the myth of emancipative reason to come into being. Furthermore, and this is perhaps the most important point, as the dominant myth of modernity, the myth of emancipative reason is in fact defined most profoundly not so much by liberty, as it pretends, but by subjectivity, or, most important, by an elision of liberty into subjectivity, so that self-enclosure, in the name of a strong sense of personal identity, becomes the character of modern Western man. It is this self-enclosure of the Western episteme, its basic narcissism, that is the source of its violence, because under the assumption of its inherent superiority, the myth of emancipative reason is actually incapable of registering the experience of those falling outside of its own operating paradigm, and most especially those suffering under it. Hence the myth of emancipative reason has its underside, which Dussel (1995) called “the myth of sacrifice,” meaning, in starkest terms, that any refusal of the myth of emancipative reason, or even ignorance of it, is just cause for genocide. Ironically, this marks the “irrationality” of the myth of modernity and its powerful underside, the irrationality of total rationality. Genocide as the practice of modernity’s underside is effected indirectly or directly. Indirectly, it operates out of a phenomenology of neglect, resulting, for example, in environmental degradation in the name of progress, or in turning a blind eye to the tragedies of human displacement that inevitably follow policies of market deregulation, or in the pathologizing of students who fail to meet the test of the ‘real man’ (what Dussel, 1995, called machoism). Directly, the myth of sacrifice means “play it our way, or we will kill you, because you stand in the way of the necessary unfolding of what we know to be universally true, and of which truth we are the bearers.” This basic argument was first made in 1550, in Valladolid, Spain, by Catholic theologian Gines de Sepulveda in a debate with Bartholome de las Casas. De las Casas, a Dominican priest in the new world of “latin” America, was appalled by the slaughter of Aztecs and Mayans by the conquistadors in the name of civilization and refuted but lost to the argument of Sepulveda that violence in achieving the compliance of Indigenous peoples was justified on the basis of self-defined superior truth. (See Dussel, 1995, pp. 63-72, for an elaborated treatment of this debate.) There are at least two reasons why Dussel’s work is relevant to this study. For one thing, it reveals how the empire that contemporary US foreign policy is currently attempting to construct has a specific and long-standing genealogy, the

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point being that not all empires are the same. As the remaining binary of the logic of the Cold War, this may be the last empire in human history to be constructed not just around territorial, tribal, monarchical, oligarchical, or natural resource claims—in one way or another, it is all of that. Most important, however, is its construction around a claim of Truth. Therefore its limitations—indeed, its folly— must be addressed as a philosophical problem as much as a political one. Dussel’s work offers insight into how the empire might best be engaged. Such engagement requires revealing not only the futility of America’s imperial designs, but also how the epistemological assumptions behind it can be shown for their fundamental poverty. It is on this last point that I will make attempt here to address the question of the future of knowledge after ‘America.’ This seems pertinent given Dussel’s naming of “pedagogical violence” as part of modernity’s legacy through the myth of emancipative reason. It must be said that Dussel is not the first to show the irrational side of dogmatic rationality, and hence the condition of Truth’s inversion into a culture of lying. The Greeks knew that Truth, aletheia, could mean “concealing” as well as “revealing.” The Frankfurt School in the 1960s (especially Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Adorno) well analyzed the multiple ways commercial culture capitalizes on the impossibility of sating human ‘need,’ and hence how propaganda as “marketing psychology” succeeds through the feeding of desire that it can never in truth fulfill, hence vending a lie of the possible against the reality of the impossible. In recent years French theory has articulated the way that “identity” rests on the existence of an Other that must be “faced” (Levinas), showing that pure identity is a fiction, that to be sustained requires a denial (a lying about) its dependencies on an Other. It is Dussel’s contribution to say that all of these formulations still circulate within a philosophical system that is closed in on itself. The Other that must be faced within this system still in a sense has a face that is recognizable to the spectator only insofar as it serves as an example of something that can be taken into account within preexistent registers. The critiques or apologies for modernity today (Habermas, Rorty, Taylor, etc.) are still inexorably Eurocentric. They fail on three counts: (a) The work is not located with any deep appreciation of the “world system” and an understanding of the “development of underdevelopment,” as Andre Gunder Frank (1969) demonstrated it, that is, the Euro-American contribution to the present condition of the global ‘order’ (or disorder); (b) the utter violence of that legacy in genocidal terms has yet to be acknowledged formally within the West’s dominant philosophical paradigms; and (c) the conditions for a genuine conversation between the world’s people have yet to be spoken, largely because under the solipsistic language of Eurocentric liberalism the Other cannot be taken seriously as a genuine interlocutor. Dussel’s (1995) suggestion is for a new kind of logic, what he called analogic or anadialogic—a manner of reasoning from “outside” the system of global domination (< prefix Gr. an, “without”). This provides the basis for a new “corealization” of human solidarity, which is “syncretic, hybrid and mestizo,” and can be described best as “transmodern” (pp. 136-140) rather than postmodern or

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modern. Indeed, the appeal to “transmodernity” constitutes a refusal of both the modernist as well as postmodernist agendas, which Dussel sees as trapped within a mutually self-serving antagonism and hence helpless to address the massive violence against human well-being perpetrated in the name of a parochial truth claim. The entrapment is easily observed in the Western academy, where the sciences and technology have metastasized into a universalist logic of instrumental reason, and the postmodern humanities’ celebration of particularity has rendered a collapse of concern for anything beyond what individual experience can express, whether in the name of autobiography, story, nation, tribe, personal therapy, or phenomenology. The poverty of this academic war has been well described by Dussel scholar Roberto Goizueta (as cited in Alcoff & Mendietta, 2000): What moderns and postmoderns have in common . . . is their inability to affirm the organic unity of corporeal life as it is lived. Both therefore silence the cries of the victims: the first by ignoring them and the second by relativizing their universal claims. Modernity suffocates those cries while postmodernity prevents them from making any normative, universal truth claims (p. 198). The notion of transmodernity therefore refers “not to much to a new way of thinking as to a new way of living [italics added] in relation to Others” (p. 189). John Gray (1998) has named America “the world’s last Enlightenment regime” (p. 2) by which he meant that in actions of contemporary America the great contradictions of modernity are being revealed with special luminosity. That America may be coming to an ‘end’ as the world’s only remaining superpower, and if so how, remains to be seen. Two conditions from the histories of empire point to a demise: (a) what Paul Kennedy (1989) called the problem of “imperial overstretch” that resulted in the dissipation of resources (economic, military, administrative) in the service of an expanding empire’s requirements; and (b) ”the crisis of legitimacy,” as Walden Bello (2002) described it—the inability to convince others of one’s moral right to rule. Of course the question of what is ‘America’ is complex, as is the question of what will remain at the end of its sovereignty. On the question of the impact of America’s decline on the future of knowledge, in the space remaining I wish to make a few remarks in two different ways: with respect to the conditions of knowledge and of knowing and with respect to knowledge itself and its possible character in a postimperium world. As a former school teacher, a teacher educator, and a professor of education for a quarter century, I have learned to pay close attention to the multiple ways in which what is in play in dominant culture affects both the conditions of knowledge for students and teachers and the conditions of their learning. This is not so much a literal matter, a matter of something clearly definable. Instead, it is so much more a matter of ambience, of cultural atmosphere. Indeed, the great psychoanalyst, Carl Jung (1963/1989), put it well: “Children pay much less attention to what adults actually say than they do to the imponderables in the surrounding atmosphere” (p. 89). One of the most disturbing aspects of the new political aggression in America is the complete disregard that it shows for its lived effects in the lives of

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ordinary citizens, perhaps especially young people; it also precipitates a pedagogical crisis for teachers. How so? We know from Chomsky and Marx of the relationship between surface structure and deep structure, and from Foucault of how the entrenchment and power of any discourse resides in its diffusion within the interstices of the social realm. Well, then, how can any teacher teach in the name of democratic pedagogy (participatory action research, discussion work, dialogical instruction, etc.) when the new politics is imbricated in exactly the opposite direction? If unilateralism and monological decision making mark the character of political leadership, what becomes, for teachers and students, of the relationship between thought and action, of my belief as a teacher that, indeed, what I and others may plan for tomorrow may bear an expectation of being brought into effect? If bullying, both domestically and internationally, is legitimized publicly (albeit euphemistically), how can I as a teacher counsel my students against what has become one of the greatest scourges in the contemporary schoolyard? If lying, duplicity, and deliberate misrepresentation are acceptable strategies by which to operate in the name of Truth, what is the basis upon which any human relations may be trusted? If the academic fields of child development and child psychology can be legitimately co-opted for commercial control of the minds of the young (Acuff, 1998), what becomes of intellectual liberty at even the earliest stages of new life, to say nothing of the problem of children learning early that exploiting others for personal gain is ‘the way to go’? The crisis of liberal democracy reflected in the radicalized neoliberalism of the Bush administration is largely the consequence of a breakdown in appreciation of the organic unity between the public and private spheres. As Marx (as cited in Turner, 1986) noted, there is a “swindle” at the heart of the theory of liberalism upon which contemporary liberal democracies depend. The swindle arises from the fact that the freedom to pursue private interests results in, not democracy, but plutocracy, because only the wealthy have the means to protect their interests— hence the increasing privatization of the public sphere and a severing of the nerve of responsibility between a politics driven by private enterprise and the broader communities in which that wealth is embedded. Teachers face the consequences of that nerve severance in very real ways, as noted above. But the question remains, What then? It is here that the nature of liberal democracy itself must be rethought. Again, I make a few remarks from the worksite of education. Emphasizing the organic unity between private and public spheres, between individual and community, between self and other presents special challenges for, say, curriculum and teaching, especially when linked to Dussel’s (1995) appraisal of the unity between the myth of emancipative reason and the myth of sacrifice. No longer can teaching and learning be practiced simply under the banner of individual liberty or personal interest; instead, there must be a deeper critical appreciation in several ways. Curricularly (epistemologically), the Western canon must be perpetually reread for its inherent suffocations and dependencies. However, this means more than just following the newer (postmodern) tradition of

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“deconstructive” reading. More important, it involves an active seeking out, not just of Others, but also of suffering Others, those whose very suffering stands in judgment of the failure of emancipative reason’s ultimate claims. It is precisely the denial of its human costs that turns the myth of emancipative reason into the new barbarianism that it has become. When Madeleine Albright (as cited in McMurtry, 2002), Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, can claim quite straightforwardly, “We think the price was worth it” (p. 28) when asked if she was concerned about the staggering loss of children’s lives during the NATO bombing of Iraq in the mid-1990s, the contradiction between principle and practice becomes quite transparent. In teaching, it is this contradiction within which teachers are increasingly enmeshed, caught between an altruistic desire for the welfare of their students and a subliminal (in most cases) recognition that the languages and practices of their academically sponsored expertise actually work in the opposite direction and therefore constitute a form of fraud. Learning solely for yourself may make you successful within the dominant scheme of things, although even that eventuality is diminishing as a realistic hope, as the increasing size of the overeducated underclass of today’s young demonstrates. No, the lie in modernist versions of education is that, although there is a slim chance it can make you ‘successful,’ it cannot make you free. Chances are, it will make you melancholy, as Alan Blum (1991) has mused about the contemporary professoriate. A new understanding of liberation, as Dussel (1995) has described it, will arise from a new sense of solidarity with “the underside of modernity,” from acknowledging what Gandhi recognized, which is not just that weakness is always inherent in dogmatic strength, but more that the apparently weak are only so because of their status underneath a dominant hermeneutic of power. In most basic terms, terms that on the surface may seem banal, yet when deeply understood are quite revolutionary for the current context, the apparently strong and the apparently weak both need each other to fully articulate the human condition. At this point the epistemological requirement is inherently an ethical one as the culture of dualism upon which the Western episteme is based gives way to a new sense of the inherent unity of human experience. What this calls for is not yet another theory of universal truth that can become yet another hammer in the hands of the selfrighteous. Instead, it calls for simply accepting the impossibility of such a theory while working for a deeper understanding and appreciation of the interdependent character of that global community that in fact we always already are as a species. This new sense of continuity between peoples operates, not from a romantic principle of commensurability between cultures and traditions, but from a principle of complementarity, which both honors the new forms of cultural interfusion that are part of the processes of globalization and recognizes the specific lacks and distortions that are inevitable, especially within traditions that pretend to the possibility of exclusive excellence. Nietzsche (as cited in Derrida, 1982), spoke of every culture being “inversely crippled” (p. 34) in its own way, crippled precisely through the vanity of its exaggerated strengths. A principle of cultural complementarity points to the multiple ways that cultures can turn to each other to

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heal themselves of their exaggerations. Euro-American politics can turn for guidance to the Confucian prioritizing of moral discipline as the essential criterion for effective leadership, and Buddhist traditions can teach the world how to let go of ego-driven manias. Monotheistic traditions can try to achieve better phenomenological understanding of what they are appealing to when they invoke the name of God so that the invocation can result in something other than the mere sacralization of prejudice. America can return to the theory of democracy that Thomas Paine learned, not from the Greeks or the French, but from the Iroquois on the banks of the Delaware river (Weatherford, 1989) whereby consensus making is neither logical nor based solely on compromise. Instead, it arises from ‘sitting together’ until that truth is found that can be held in common. Such an agenda in current circumstances can promise nothing but difficulty. The breakdown of the modernist consensus in the West has resulted in new forms of desperation and clinging. The calls for a new celebration of Eurocentrism (Huntington, 1998; Will, 1989) have their parallels in Aboriginal and Indigenous attempts to legitimize notions of pure identity as protection against the ongoing encroachments of White culture (Weber-Pilwax, 2003). As my own university department can attest, international students who come to the West are persistently resistant to invitations to reevaluate their own traditions through the eye of strength, so conditioned are their cognitive habits toward an infatuation with Western expertise. Departments of philosophy and economics (with rare exceptions) are particularly culpable for their reluctance to engage the deep issues of our time along the lines that I have tried to illuminate in this paper (Loy, 2002). A new age will be born, not just when ‘border crossing’ becomes the norm, but also when an attack on the center of American power like that of September 11/01 can be read and accepted for what it really is, as an announcement that Truth is always more than one nation, tradition, or tribe can claim for itself and that unless the rules of engagement for human procedure can be rethought in ways that are more equitable, fair and just, what lies ahead may be unthinkable.

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THE SPECIFIC CHALLENGES OF GLOBALIZATION FOR TEACHING AND VICE VERSA

In “globalization” . . . we have a myth that exaggerates the degree of our helplessness in the face of contemporary economic forces (Hirst & Thompson, 1998, p. 6).

INTRODUCTION

The language of “globalization” has been in common circulation for perhaps a dozen years, but the phenomenon itself, as a vision of empire within the EuroAmerican tradition, likely goes back at least to the late Middle Ages when papal reforms declared a new heavenly eschatological dispensation as henceforth a political reality on earth (Loy, 2000). Later, through the Renaissance and Reformation, this dispensation was linked to the celebration of individualism, personal autonomy and self-interest, which in turn became foundational to the new science of economics. By the 17th century, wealth accumulation had become a sign of divine favor and moral superiority, while poverty was taken to mark personal weakness and lack of self-discipline (Tawney, 1926/1960; Weber, 1930/1962). Insofar as empire always rests on a will to dominate others, so also do those dominated engage in strategies of resistance, with interesting and often creative consequences. The future shape of geopolitical reality is currently being worked out in the tensions between all these different forces. It should be noted at the start that there is an important difference between international trade (trade between different cultures and groups) and globalization, the former having been a practice since the most ancient of days, whereas the latter, at least when conceived as a planetary unified global trading network operating according to a common set of rules, the so-called “borderless world” envisioned by the World Bank, is a more recent and contentious development. Throughout all periods, education and teaching have had their role to play, defined in character largely by regnant ideas and dreams circulating in the political realm, as those in power have sought to secure the present into the future through the minds of the young. In this paper I wish to keep the two tropes of globalization and teaching circulating together conversationally, instead of polarizing them, as often happens today. Globalizers, operating in organizations such as the Organization for

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Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank and even in local and state governments, rarely develop their educational policies with a concern for the experience of teachers. Teachers are simply those civil servants who put into effect what others decide, “delivering other people’s mail”, as curriculum theorist William Pinar has put it (M.-L. Judah, personal communication, 2nd July, 1998). Indeed, much of the personal and collective agitation of teachers today arises from a growing recognition of their own powerlessness within contemporary educational decision-making. In turn, their voices of opposition against the forces of globalization, especially with respect to the commercialization of the educational enterprise and its technologization, are heard as shrill and irrelevant by the other side, largely under the accusation that teachers ignore both their historically constituted service function to broader orders as well as their complicity in the processes of globalization in their lives as common citizens. As a teacher, if you own shares in the General Electric Company, enjoy the choice and quality of goods at your neighborhood supermarket, and thrill to the growl of your SUV (sport utility vehicle), it is often difficult to acknowledge that the ultimate price for one’s good life is being paid by people who are invisible and far away. No, what is needed today is a more open and vigorous examination of the historical construction of globalization phenomena, a more profound analysis of how we are all implicated in the web of their operations, no matter what our political stripe, and the formulation of a teacherly response that emerges out of the heart of teaching itself. The unique purview of teachers, who spend their days in the presence of the young, may be an awareness of the conditions of life’s possibility, and this surely deserves a central place in any discussion about shared futures. My argument will be that today teachers and teaching are caught in the middle of both a political and an epistemological crisis. It is a crisis precisely because the epistemological revolution that has taken place in the Western tradition over the last fifty years or so (the shift from stable-state hard sciences and normativelydriven social sciences to relativity-driven paradigms such as postmodern fluidity, chaos theory, constructivism, and ecology) has not yet registered within the last great bastion of Enlightenment rationality, namely, the dismal science of economics, at least in its dominant configurations. The consequence is that a profound rupture is evolving between a new, deep social awareness of the human world’s interconnectedness (and its interconnectedness to the natural world) while hard-line economistic interpretations of life are insisting on an older rationality that relies on exactly the opposite⎯on the split between subject and object, on a conception of radical personal autonomy, and, most disastrously, on a split between politics (now conflated with economics) and history. Today, economies may boom while quality of life for the average person declines, and those in power of necessity turn a blind eye, precisely because to actually see the disjunction, to have it land within one’s cognitive set, would inspire a crisis of confidence for which the solution is nowhere to be found in any comprehensive sense.

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Teachers inevitably feel the current uncertainty and its underlying tensions very deeply at both conscious and subliminal levels. Teacher preparation programs, situated in academies where the epistemological revolution has been going on for almost 30 years, are increasingly organized around conceptions of intersubjectivity, constructivism, and ecology. Storytelling, multiculturalism curricula, teacher-as-researcher/interpretive inquirer, and group work are now part of the standard preparational repertoire. However all this is proposed to be acted out in the context of schools and educational systems that were originally designed to serve a different, older, more clearly defined order, one which remains politically regnant even while its conceptual and practical infrastructures are inherently suspect and devolving in spite of themselves. Serving the stable nation, creating the solid citizen, valuing a commodified liberal education for its own sake⎯what do, what can, these traditional hortatory imaginaries mean for teachers in the age of economic globalization? If once they served to anchor the teaching profession and provide it with public moral authority, where lies the anchor, and from whence comes moral authority if the nation turns into a dynamic narration while constructing the citizen as nothing but a capital resource, with education nothing more than job training? Teachers thus find themselves living in both the old and the new imaginaries at the same time, and it is a difficult place in which to dwell. The task here, then, will be to briefly profile the historical construction of contemporary globalization phenomena, noting the role traditionally played by teaching and education generally within them. Then I will attempt to articulate an understanding of teachers’ work that may provide an open space within which pedagogically responsible work can be both considered and conducted in relation to the processes of globalization themselves. The Construction of the Globalization Phenomenon Held, Goldblatt, McGrew, and Perraton (1997) made a good statement: “Globalization is not a singular condition, a linear process or a final end-point of social change” (p. 258). This characterization addresses a number of important issues. For one thing, some parties do in fact operate as if globalization were a singular condition, if not in actuality, then in imaginal terms, in terms of a dream that drives practices in the now. This is particularly the case with American selfunderstanding. As US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared in her speech to the 1997 graduating class at Harvard, “Today, I say that no nation in the world need be left out of the global system we are constructing. . . . Every nation that seeks to participate and is willing to do all it can to help itself will have America’s help in finding the right path [italics added]” (Spring, 1998, p. 8). This dream is a legacy of America’s leadership role in the reconstruction of world order after World War II, but today its rhetorical force is largely anachronistic, and all the more dangerous for being so. It simply ignores some basic facts: America’s own version of economic development is a product of its

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own time/space configuration as a frontier New World culture that privileges geography over history, seeing the rest of the world in terms of spatial conquest, with little regard for other people’s historical sensibilities. (Campbell, 1992). Also, as John Gray (1998) has suggested, America is the world’s “last great Enlightenment regime” (p. 2), by which he means that the eighteenth-century project of proposing Reason as the condition of universal peace is still kept alive within the preachments of American neoliberal economic theory taken as reasonable science, even though such theory has proven a dismal failure in the new Russia, is denounced as predatory and rapacious by struggling emergent peoples, is completely untenable within the social contract atmosphere of post-World War II Europe, and contradicts the deep sense of familial obligation that inhabits many Asian definitions of commonwealth. If globalization is not a “singular condition,” then how might it best be described? The different circulating influences at work today are the result of historical evolutions that can be traced briefly as follows. The “borderless world” idea of the OECD and World Bank is the natural extension of the Euro-American tradition of capital development organized around the processes of production and consumption, inspired especially by the industrial revolution of the 19th century. It was this tradition that was responsible for the colonization of the world under European and later American requirements for natural resources and markets. Education played the role of handmaiden in this process both at home and abroad under specific definitions of progress and development that had their origin and legitimation in the philosophical writing of people such as Kant and Hegel, and later Darwin (Eze, 1997; Schmidt, 1996). During the period, say between 1884 when the Berlin Conference of European powers convened to divide up Africa, and 1945 when the pre-World War II structure of world order lay in ruins, education was chiefly organized for the production of elites to run that same order both at home and abroad, coupled with the training of the masses to serve the machineries of both capital and the state in their various particularities of bureaucratic functioning, military development, and technical training (Carnoy, 1974). In the colonies, Western-style education for Indigenous peoples was reserved for a tiny minority nurtured to take their place in local leadership, with the rest minimally instructed to form the service class for their European overlords. The period of post-World War II to the 1970s, sometimes called the Long Boom, is marked by many contradictions in terms of educational as well as economic development. On the one hand, the Euro-American experience involved the construction of the “mixed economy” wherein capital development was held to a strong sense of social responsibility as a way of allaying the social disorder that seemed always inevitable under the boom and bust cycles of undisciplined market theory. Under the social responsibility framework, institutionalized, statesponsored public education flourished at all levels. Partly, this was a way of securing the West’s social strength and stability against the feared enemy of Communism. Its offshoot was the creation of appetite for formal education as a

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way of social advancement. Education became heavily commodified, a purchasable “thing” available to the rising middle class under equal-access legislation and other forms of “rights” politics (Meighan, 1981). This particular vision of education is now dying. In the colonies, nationalist independence movements successfully fought to gain political sovereignty, but the various machineries put in place to enact the new conditions quickly revealed the many subtle and profound ways that old orders were reluctant to fall away. This was partly because of arrogance, partly ignorance. Puppet local leaders were often installed in former colonies to ensure continued rights to natural resources. Definitions of education were still inspired largely by Western models even though their relevance for solving local problems was suspect (Coombs, 1985). They were tied, however, to the development logic of organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations Education, Science, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and could be taken as early signs of a move toward a unified global network of peoples. This period was also marked by new forms of movement between cultures. Many idealistic young university graduates from Britain, America, Canada, and Europe, for example, taught in the former colonies under such programs as World University Service Commission (WUSC), Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), the Volunteer Service Organization (VSO), and the Peace Corp. Such experience often served, for the Euro-American young people involved, as an education into the ethnocentrism of their own received traditions. It was also a time of mass migrations from the colonies to former imperial centers and included many who sought higher education. These parallel phenomena, moving in opposite directions from center to periphery and back, contributed importantly to the great epistemological revolution that has characterized Western academies since the late 1960s, the so-called “Post” revolution (McClintock, 1994, p. 292) carried on under the various banners of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. The Post revolution in the West had its intellectual genesis in the work of Algerian scholars such as Franz Fanon in the 1950s/early 1960s and later Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Helene Cixous (Fischer, 1992, p. 55), who challenged the organizing principles and structures of the Western episteme, charging it with responsibility for the continuing hegemony of Western economic, cultural, and political interests throughout the world. They showed how the episteme could have been constructed and sustained only through a dependent, but silenced relationship to an Other (other peoples, cultures, groups, gods), and that the time had come for those Others to begin claiming their debts. This claim put into effect an epistemological crisis for Western academic work that continues to this day. It involves a whole host of issues, such as the meaning of Identity, the nature of “Man,” the question of authority in knowledge, science as a cultural artifact, racial and gender biases in curriculum, and so on. The future of intellectual work, including teaching, will depend on how these issues are taken up and

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creatively resolved, perhaps especially within the multicultural environments of the West’s urban landscapes. Understandably, the work of postscholarship was seen as a threat by those who saw the purpose of intellectual labor as being to serve the technical requirements of state-capital linkage. During the 1980s administrations of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, universities came under attack for being subversive and anarchic and for teaching distortions of the narrative of Western culture as being the natural and proven evolutionary pinnacle of human progress, exemplary for the rest of the species. The actions of the two administrations marked the beginning of the end for the Western academy as a place of free reflection and autonomous scholarly work, a process of devolution that is ongoing. The period from the early 1970s to the mid 1990s marks the time when the basic configuration of today’s globalization processes fell into place, and this was a result of a number of interrelated factors. For example, the move in 1971 of the Oil Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the Middle East to control the global price of oil revealed the stark vulnerability of Western industry to non-Western interests. In the realm of education, the failure of American military efforts in Vietnam by 1972 was blamed in large measure on the mobilization of war protest on college campuses. Ronald Reagan, as a law-and-order president pledged to securing the conditions for US domination of world order into the next millennium, commissioned a series of reports, such as A Nation at Risk, on the state of pubic education. These were thinly veiled attacks on public education generally, and on teachers and teacher training institutions especially, as failing to work in harmony with the ideological requirements of true “global competitiveness.” “Soft” programs in the arts and social-issues curricula concerned with the environment, race, gender inequity, and so on began to suffer from lack of funding. All this was happening at a time when the basic infrastructure of Euro-American business was entering a crisis phase. Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, which had enjoyed American military protection under the arrangements of the Cold War, had begun to prosper and pose a threat to Western industry. The ready supply of cheap labor in those countries contraindicated the heavily unionized labor of America and Europe whose businesses in turn began to move offshore to take advantage of an unregulated labor market. The new global economic competitiveness forced American businesses to seek from their federal and state governments new rules of taxation protection, especially because much of their industrial manufacturing was not now being conducted on local soil (Clarke, 1997). The rewriting of taxation rules in favor of economic interests over social and cultural ones has marked the most fundamental and profound change in Western societies since the mid-1980s and has been most largely responsible for the gradual devolution of all those public and social institutions that flourished during the Long Boom under the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1945. The basic turn was

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made during the Reagan period under the influence of the Chicago School of Economics at the University of Chicago, whose leader, Milton Friedman, espoused the neoliberal economic theory of Fredrick von Hayek. The Hayek/Friedman thesis reinstalled The Market as the preeminent concern of government (Spring, 1998, pp. 120-157), whereby the function of government was to protect the conditions of The Market against social and cultural interests, which were usually and contemptuously derided as “special interests.” The logic of neoliberalism, as it was often referred to, became enshrined as sacred doctrine after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, events which, for free-marketeers, were taken as a sign of “The End of History” (Fukuyama, 1992) a true eschaton proving the complete superiority of Western economic theory over all competitors. Public education, first in Britain, then in the United States, New Zealand, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Ontario, began to fall to the logic of market rule, with language such as educational choice and education-business partnership gradually infiltrating the halls of educational decision making under pressure from federal, state, and local political administrations (Barlow & Robertson, 1994). The mantra of global competitiveness brought into effect in public education new levels of paranoia and uncertainty, especially amongst the teaching profession, along with an almost complete collapse of any older virtue of learning being valued for its own sake. Education must now constantly demonstrate how its various programs serve The Market. The OECD called this the “human capital resource” (Spring, 1998, pp. 159-190) model of education. When such service actually shows complicity in the destruction of the common good, any expressed concern is quickly dismissed as irrelevant to the larger picture. This has also been a time of efforts to “harmonize” curricula across national boundaries in an effort to produce a set of commonly held knowledges, skills, and attributes that can feed into the converging requirements of the proposed global system. It is also a way of imposing a common discipline on educational systems (Barlow & Robertson, 1994; Spring, 1998). If market logic has become the new rule of governance, nothing has been more instrumental in its habilitation and entrenchment than the revolution in computer and communications technology. This revolution has been well discussed in many quarters and needs only brief highlighting here to show its pertinence to the changing roles of teaching and public education. As writers such as William Greider (1997) and Jeremy Rifkin (1995) have so clearly shown in their excellent documentary investigations, the computer/communications technology revolution has not just resulted in a Copernican change in the conditions of work, with its attendant restructuring of entire systems of production, but it has also precipitated profoundly elevated levels of global instability, both within the systems of production themselves, and within the international financial systems that now operate as a kind of virtual manager of the international scene but without visible accountability to anyone or any place, except perhaps to the shadow population of international shareholders.

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With respect to systems of production, the technology revolution has broken down the old structures of independent in-house corporate activity and forced new kinds of cooperation and merger. Airplanes and automobiles once built from scratch in a single plant in Seattle or Detroit are now assembled from parts made all over the world, through new kinds of production agreements and negotiated labor pacts. Production measures have assumed a form of international complexity that no one company or country can alter without serious consequences to multiple partners, partners representing every ideological and political stripe. The steep competitiveness of the globalized system of production has effected an essential blindness to such issues as the environment and human rights concerns related to working conditions, the feminization of labor, the male infantilization phenomenon (Norberg-Hodge, 1993) and child labor. The computer/communications revolution has also made possible lightningquick processing of international financial operations and the virtual negotiation of commodity exchanges in such a way that these activities have rendered whole economies, such as those of Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, and so on, extremely vulnerable to stock market fluctuation. As virtual operations, they bear almost no responsibility to the peoples and places most affected by them. The chronic instability of international finance has had widespread spin-off effects in the realms of society and culture. The extreme competitiveness it produces for market share, for predatory searches for lowest commodity prices, for speculative ventures in financial services such as insurance and credit and so on, all have an effect at the local level of ordinary citizens, from the deregulation of labor with its effect on family life (Gray, 1998) to chronic instability in most agricultural sectors. In the educational sphere, the general uncertainty that globalization processes have produced is endemic. Postmodern worry over what may be authoritatively taught is merely exacerbated by the difficulty of understanding what it means to teach authoritatively, especially when, in the so-called new knowledge economy, teaching so often reduces to simply “managing” the educational space, without any special personal qualities being required of teachers other than organization and planning skills. The relation of knowing to being is of no apparent relevance within the cult of information, except perhaps as a personal side task over which one labors individually, alone, with no help from the teacher, who, of necessity for survival within the cult, may have already made the split between fact and value or sold out to the heralded belief that the only facts of any value are commercial in nature. Finally, mention must be made of the dialectic currently operating between the forces of global unification and disintegration. The disintegration of the old bipolar world of the Cold War is giving way to increased efforts to secure national, tribal, and ethnic identities that had been formerly subsumed under the old order. Also, the “borderless world” agenda is producing new forms of resistance, both as religious fundamentalism (Marty & Appleby, 1994) and in the form of nongovernmental citizens’ action groups seeking to recover local control over local life (see the journal Third World Resurgence), wresting the local away from the

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aggressive subsumptive power of global market logic. This move is especially notable in contemporary Latin America. Globalization in Summary The following points can be made about globalization as a contemporary condition: 1. As a generative force, globalization is an extension of an approximately 500year-old development in the thought and action of the Western tradition going back most likely to the papal reforms of the late middle ages (Loy, 2000) which led in turn to visions of sacred empire eventually underwritten by Protestant-inspired “virtues” of self-interest and wealth accumulation. Such virtues became the foundation of capitalist economic theory portended for universal application. 2. “Empire” always means an encounter with Others, who at first may be contributive to the empire, but eventually serve to undermine its original character and authority. This is clearly the case today. The Euro-American empire is devolving under the very structures and influences it originally put in place. For example, the postcolonial critique is rewriting the rules of epistemic authority for schools, academies, and curricula. The former colonies of Asia are regrouping after the “Asian Crisis” in the late 1990s to formulate theories of economic, social, and cultural development more in line with their own traditions rooted in Confucianism and other forms of wisdom not grounded in a myth of personal autonomy. It is the essential complexity of global interconnectedness today and its unpredictability, not its univocal character, that is the most striking feature of the globalization phenomenon. 3. The privileging of economistic interpretations of human life over political, cultural, and social ones has led to the gradual devolution of the power of the state over the public sphere, such that national identity is increasingly assuming a chimerical quality. Given the rapid economic integration of Canada into the United States, for example, what does the future hold for Canadian identity? And if it was the state that once gave teaching its moral and professional authority, from whence will that authority come if the state itself is on the wane? Currently, the most influential educational policies are being written not by national or local governments, but by international think-tanks and organizations such as the World Bank, funded by the private corporate sector (Barlow & Robertson, 1994 Spring, 1998). Some scholars have suggested that the nation-state system that has defined world organization since its inauguration with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is falling away to a new network of global cities (Sassen, 1998) The cities will become nodes around which populations gravitate and through which personal identity is constructed. 4. The communications/technology revolution is rewriting the rules of production in both material and intellectual spheres. Materially, in the West the new technologies, tied to the mantra of global competitiveness, are reshaping the meaning of labor, with career labor being replaced by just-in-time contractual work

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that suffers diminishing security (Gray, 1998). International finance is becoming “virtual”; that is, disconnected from people and places most affected by its operations, accountable only to shareholders dispersed throughout the world. Intellectually, knowledge generation and dissemination are heavily influenced by the fact/value separation sequent to the commercialization of the educational enterprise. Computerized information systems are usurping the traditional roles of universities and schools as primary sites of knowledge and information, so that teachers’ work is being defined largely in managerial terms rather than in terms that maintain any fundamental connection between knowledge and being. Knowledge itself is becoming disembodied and virtual, disconnected from the person and place of the knower. Generally, these conditions fall under a condition that can be called delocalization, to be discussed later. 5. The radical commercialization of human values on a global scale introduces into the discourse surrounding possible futures the question of human values itself, and increasingly forms of resistance are emerging that may prefigure a global conversation, if not confrontation, regarding what it means to live well, humanly speaking. Clearly, a vision of endless and endlessly variegated consumption, which is the necessary flipside of endless and endlessly variegated production, is an absurd and futile vision for many people, as well as, perhaps, absurd and futile in its own right. The most radical challenge to this vision comes from religious traditions that do not share the sacred/secular conflation that lies at the Protestant root of Western economic theory. Saying this, however, means only that discussions regarding shared futures must inevitably involve religious questions; that is, questions about meaning, purpose, and what is truly required to nurture and sustain human life in its most noble and dignified senses. 6. The intertwining of the world’s peoples that is largely the result of the earlier colonial period has produced new forms of cultural interfacing that hold promise for a new kind of dialogue regarding a shared future. But this dialogue will not be possible as long as different parties hold on to the dream of their own singular logic, whether economic or religious in nature, being recommendable for universal application. Far more important may be a careful examination of the effects of our differences on each other; how what you individually/collectively assume to be true, generally affects me individually/collectively⎯and vice versa⎯and an honest opening of ourselves to the conditions necessary for our mutual survival. Implications of Globalization for Curriculum and Teaching What remains now is to explore more specifically the tensions between globalization processes as described and the conduct of teaching. In particular, I direct interest to the question of what might constitute an appropriate teacherly response to globalization, in the midst of its unfolding complexity. Here, I will attempt to formulate a kind of pedagogical hermeneutic that honors globalization’s complexity while also honoring that pedagogical integrity without which teaching as a form of life-practice can neither survive nor be called teaching as such.

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Indeed, probably the greatest threat to teaching today is the seeming indifference shown to the experience of teachers by those most responsible for framing the educational policies of the contemporary period. Like most other forms of labor today, teaching is being reduced to a commodity in a deregulated labor market, with planners showing little interest in what teaching is in its own right and with scant concern for the effects of new plans on the quality of life for either teachers or students. What can teachers say that is constructively contributive to the conversation about a world that is inevitably ‘globalizing’? Clearly, it is impossible to return to an earlier condition in which public education was firmly tied to a relatively unproblematic understanding of the meaning of public; that is, before the crisis of state control increasingly tied education to the processes of commercialization. Nor is it possible to return to the sensibility existing before the “post” critique or before the communication and information technologies revolution or the foregrounding of fundamentalism in its various economic, religious, and ethnic guises. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to predict what the future will hold regarding the shape and character of public education. But as Asian wisdom teaches us (Park, 1996), there is always only Now. So perhaps that is the first challenge for teachers, learning to live Now, although it may not be as easy, for a number of reasons. The first reason is that teaching, at least in the Western tradition, has always operated inordinately in the future tense, within a temporal frame that privileges the future over the present as well as the past. “When you complete this [course, grade, assignment, year, etc.], then you can . . .” is a phrase that echoes throughout the discourse of all levels of education, from kindergarten through postdoctoral work. This is an orientation that is honestly come by if teaching defines its role as being the handmaid of market logic, because, as David Loy (2000) has argued, The Market emerged through a template of Christian eschatology in which future time became now time. Indeed, to paraphrase Loy, the West lives in a kind of frozen futurism in which what was expected to be revealed has been revealed, and what the revelation discloses is that the future will always be more of this, a perpetual unfolding of more and more of this. In this context what education becomes is nothing but more and more of what it always was. The details may vary over time, but the essential grammar remains the same: Education seems like a preparation for something that never happens because, in the deepest sense, it has already happened, over and over. So built into the anticipations of teaching is a mask of the future that freezes teaching in a futurist orientation such that, in real terms, there is no future because the future already is. Hence the ubiquitous icon of the perpetually smiling, young elementary school teacher and its analogues in both consumer marketing and evangelical Christianity. All three celebrate “enthusiasm” as a cardinal virtue, which means, literally, “inside god” (< Gk en, inside + theos god). They are the bearers of a verdict that, in the name of the future, the future is now closed. Loy’s point is not that the future is in fact frozen, but only that a particular understanding of it is, an understanding in which the secular and the sacred are conflated within a rationalist schema that provides Western economics

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with its theoretical justifications. The real work of the contemporary period is to recover a future that truly is a future; that is, a condition that is actually open. It is easy to see how frozen futurism is a recipe for despair for students as well as for teachers and why public education historically has served the forces of conservatism. If the future is frozen in an anticipatory set through which nothing ever really seems to change, even though all of the language perpetually gives assurance that things are always changing, what could one really come to expect after all? Well, more of the same, including perhaps lots of little changes and variations on a theme, but no change in the sense that it actually seems to make a difference in the way one lives. Hence the frequently heard reasoning of new graduate students to the question “Why did you decide to do graduate work?” Answer: “I want to make a difference,” one implication being that something is stubbornly resistant to becoming different. Indeed, the very trope itself projects difference into the future and is therefore part of the very futility it seeks to address but cannot, because the underlying cultural grammar has undergone no fundamental investigation. One of the most pronounced effects of the frozen futurism inherent in market globalization can be called the phenomenon of delocalization, whereby people and cultures everywhere find themselves being told that all aspects of life are now being defined in terms of a connection to “global” networks and that the immediately-at-hand only has value insofar as it feeds into those networks. Irony abounds. A friend visiting from India simply could not understand what I was talking about when I described the fact that today in Canada a farming family of five to six persons, living on almost 1,000 acres of land, increasingly finds it hard to “make a living” on their farm. From his Indian frame of reference, “One acre could easily support a family of ten.” The most sinister effects of delocalization may be the most ordinary. As John Gray (1998) put it, “We increasingly cannot recognize ourselves in our work” (p. 45). For us as teachers, this may be especially true. The plethora of technical and curricular innovations and recommendations under the rhetoric of globalization has left teachers alienated from what their experience has taught them over time, which is that effective teaching depends most fundamentally on human relationships, that there indeed is a profound connection between knowing and being, and that any attempted severance can only produce a deep cynicism with respect to knowledge itself. In this context, if knowledge production and dissemination are tied most securely only to events that happen far away, eventually a crisis is precipitated with respect to the value of any knowledge ‘for me.’ The issue of delocalization is also linkable to the language of global competitiveness, which is so often used by globalization planners to whip the imaginal energy of frozen futurism into a frenzy. “Unless we do X, we will fall behind.” This is a simple but powerful recipe for the creation of Loser Culture. Winning implies losing, so that any social and educational planning motivated by the sheer desire to win of necessity breeds not only hypercompetitiveness within

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the social realm, but also its adjunct effects of heightened social paranoia and the turning of friends into enemies. Most essential, it makes more and more people feel that they are losers; that the race to “keep up” cannot be won; that the game is for winners only, who by definition must be very few; and that therefore, for the rest us, life becomes a race to the bottom. A recent Statistics Canada (1999) survey indicated that 80% of small businesses in Canada fail within the first two years of operation. Those that survive after five years then become attractive to larger corporations who either develop their own competitive clone industry or seek a buy-out of the original firm. As Canadian philosopher of technology Ursula Franklin (1999) recently remarked, “The language of global competitiveness is the language of war”. As teachers we might ask, “Who can survive it, and how?” The more important work, however, lies not in laying out further examples of frozen futurism and its effects, which are there at every turn should we care to pay attention; the real work may lie in trying to articulate what the meaning of living Now could mean in the context of the dynamics of teaching and learning. Is there a way of living Now that could address the futility of frozen futurism while honoring the truth of human aspiration and dreaming; a way of living Now that makes possible a radical new acceptance of things, of one another, in the Now, without giving up on the possibility of continual regeneration through our mutual encounter? Perhaps most important, is there a way of living Now that can make possible a reclaiming of ownership of the local space⎯in the classroom, in the community, in the home⎯in such a way that the best aspects of globalization, especially its inauguration of new forms of cultural interfacing, are not sold out to the formulaic logic of The Market, but are held in the present as an invitation to consider the grounds of a truly shared future, and one filled with that rich diversity of life already everywhere on display, but which is now under deep threat from the forces of homogenization that the dominant, conservative interpretation of globalization preaches as inevitable? Indeed, the first thing that we may do as teachers is to make problematic this very belief in the inevitability of the current course, not just in the usual manner of protesting its influence, but, more creatively, in affirming what the wisdom of our experience has taught us to be true of the work of teaching itself. We may begin by asking a simple question: “What makes teaching a livable experience?” and then elaborate the answer through positive and negative examples. Through the negative examples we can identify the various ways that teaching can no longer be called such and teachers break down, finding themselves in circumstances that clearly are not livable; that is, that cannot sustain life in any meaningful sense. Positive examples in turn identify the ways through which the teaching life is worth living, or better, life is discovered to be worth living through teaching. Most notably, teaching cannot be a living if there is no truth told in its enactment or, more accurately, if the classroom is not first and foremost a place of truth seeking, truth discovering, and truth sharing. This is a difficult thing to say in a time when truth is usually claimed to be “relative” and a matter of “perspective,” terms that are themselves relative and perspectival, especially within the culture of

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science and rationalism that has been our legacy since the 18th century. But there may be a way of speaking about truth more hermeneutically so that in those moments when teachers and students find themselves together saying, “Wow, that was a good class!” they are saying that they have discovered a truth for Now, something that provides sustenance for Now precisely because of how coming into truth has its own energizing power. When the veil of lies, duplicities, and happy delusions that I ordinarily hold up to shield myself from the glare of truth is suddenly or gradually or even only momentarily lifted, something happens to me. I feel enlivened, unblocked, ready for life in a new way, more prepared to be open to life as it meets me and I meet it. What, then, are the main ways that truth, as truth seeking, truth discovering, and truth sharing, get blocked in teaching? The vivifying quality of teaching-as-truthdwelling (as it may be called) gets blocked if teaching is understood primarily as an act of implementation, with the curriculum as a settled commodity emerging from a settled anterior logic heading for a settled posterior conclusion. Teaching itself is reduced in the process to being nothing but a form of procedural manipulation in which the being of the teacher requires no true encounter with the being of the student, or with curriculum as something open and interpretable, something that could show the way to a possible future. In the spirit of relocalization, and a pedagogy of the Now, let me give an example from my own neighborhood and local school that seems to reveal some of these dynamics in a small but specific way. Billy is my seven-year-old neighbor, and he is having trouble in school, where he is in the second grade. His teacher says that he is inattentive, speaks out inappropriately in class, and disrupts classroom harmony by making jokes, passing rude notes about “bums,” and so on, and not completing assignments. At first, his behavior made him a favorite amongst his peers, and even amongst students in the upper grades. For a while he was a kind of folk hero. Eventually, however, teachers’ perpetual criticism of his behavior began to rub off on other students. They began to see him as a troublemaker, someone to avoid in order to avoid guilt by association. His sense of isolation, and now confusion about identity, have only exacerbated his alienation within the school community and made his attempts at attention grabbing all the more exaggerated, in turn alienating him more. Indeed, his teacher is upset most of all by this “attention-getting behavior.” As in many schools today that suffer the pressures of the withdrawal of political and financial support, the academic staff at Billy’s school have been gradually narrowing and hardening the terms of pedagogical responsibility. Tolerance for students’ disruptive behavior is increasingly being defined in “zero” terms, with preferential attention being given to the more behaviorally compliant “academic challenge” students. In Billy’s case, the following scenario unfolded. The school principal and all teachers involved met to draw up a plan for solving Billy’s behavioral problems. It had to do with Billy reporting to his teacher at regular intervals during the day with a checklist of behavioral outcomes that he himself would check. Any lapses would

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result in a “White Slip” being sent home to his parents, who in turn could “work with” Billy to ensure his compliance. The plan was then presented to the parents “for their approval . . . and to clear up any confusions or concerns.” The interesting points about this little story for our current purposes include not just its testifying to the new forms of tension within the public school under political and financial pressures, which themselves can be traced to globalization developments; perhaps more important is the way that the school authorities chose to address Billy’s problems. Throughout the process there has been a singular absence of interest in dialogue between the teachers, Billy’s parents, and Billy himself about what the source of Billy’s problems might be in the Now. Instead, there has been a unilateral importation of externally derived behavior modification strategies designed to normalize Billy’s behavior according to predetermined criteria for future results. The normalization acts to install in the present a future that has already been defined, so that Billy now in fact has no future in any way that might be derived from a closer, more realistic assessment of his current situation. So also are his teachers deprived of an opportunity to learn from him in the Now, in two ways. Not only are they deprived of learning about how their practices may in fact be serving to undermine a seven-year-old’s future by, in these early years, naming him as a “problem” for which only they, as the alienated Other, hold the solution; but the teachers also seem to be depriving themselves of an opportunity for their own practices to be creatively refracted through a lens of failure. As one of the teacher aides confided after witnessing months of an evolving sadness in a child who once had a twinkle in his eye for everyone, but whose twinkle eventually became interpreted in conspiratorial terms as far as the school was concerned, “Why doesn’t anyone simply pay attention to Billy for himself? He’s only seven years old!” When it comes therefore to the question of how teaching must first and foremost involve the practice of truth dwelling in the Now, the following can be suggested, involving three aspects: personal truth, truth as shared, and finding truth as finding home. I will conclude this paper with a brief exploration of these themes in relation to teaching and globalization. 1. The recovery of personal truth: Our contemporary cultural reluctance, in the Western tradition at least, to speak of truth in any way other than through the privileged, though problematic, terms of science deprives us of the opportunity for appreciating how the very difficulty of truth dwelling is in fact part of its pedagogical genius. Truth calls me to human maturity all the while that I would play games to evade the challenge of its call, knowing that in responding I would have to give up the pretence of knowing its concreteness in advance of what confronts me in the Now. The ancient Greeks understood well the slippery character of truth when they assigned it a word with a double and contradictory meaning. Aletheia indicates both “unconcealment” and “concealment.” Just when I think I have discovered something to be true, unconcealed, revealed at last, for all time, something with which to secure myself into the future, suddenly it slips away into concealment, confusion, into the cloud of unknowing. Beware of the

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fulfillment of one’s dreams, truth seems to say, because in the very fulfillment, what has been realized will begin to slip away, to turn into something one could easily regret. In the face of this unexpected result, I must search again, both to find and to lose, and somewhere in the space between finding and losing, I find myself for what I am, someone who also is both here and not-here, and the truth of my being is not for me to know completely for myself, as a self-enclosed, selfrealizing entity. Rather, who and what I am appears and disappears both to myself and to others as “I” meet the world and others in a movement of perpetual intercourse. What does this mean, and how does it play out in the context of teaching? I may begin my teaching career with a very clear idea in mind of how I want to be as a teacher, how I want to present myself. Perhaps I want to model one of my own teachers whom I admired. Or perhaps my self-image is constructed out of a reaction against all the bad teachers I thought I had. Perhaps I am in love with the role of teacher, as I imagine it, relating to kids in a particular way, preparing and teaching lessons that I think are interesting and students will enjoy. These kinds of self-constructions can serve for a while, but eventually, left to themselves, they turn to dust. In North America the evidence on attrition suggests that 50% of teachers leave teaching after five years. This indicates, among other things, that there is a profound dissonance between what I think I want to find as a teacher and what confronts me in the teaching situation, so that I am faced with a particular challenge, which is the discovery that the true or final identity of the teacher does not rest with me and my self-understandings, but that somehow it must be worked out in relation to that which confronts me in the Now. Later we will explore how this illustrates the way that truth is alive in a classroom only to the degree to which it is truth-as-shared. But first let us briefly explore this conception of personal truth and its essential fluidity in the context of globalization issues. The recovery of a sense of personal truth is essential as a counter to the forces of delocalization and personal diminishment that are part of globalization’s imprint, an imprint first established by Kant’s splitting of reason from experience in 1759 (Schmidt, 1996) which became a key to the foundation of scientific rationalism in the modern era and in which both educational and economic theory find a common ancestry. In the contemporary context, however, teachers’ recovery of personal truth must be in a new way, not in the old way of celebrating personal autonomy and self-interest because those qualities remain as the anchor myths of the very logic that is part of the problem for educators. No, personal truth for teachers must now emerge from a careful attending to the experience of truth as it arises in experience, which is precisely the experience of its openness in the tension between concealment and unconcealment. Personal truth arises out of the experience that I can never know it completely but only live within the thresholds of human possibility defined by the limits of what I know and what I have yet to know, what I understand and what is yet to be revealed. So personal truth is not a commodifiable thing that can be applied through diligent training, but a way of living in the world that is attuned to the way of the world’s actual unfolding. It

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implies letting go as well as embracing; taking unto oneself responsibility for life with others even while accepting that life is always more than I can claim about it, and that living involves letting live. Loving the world, loving others, loving one’s students suggest standing in a relation to them that does not determine in advance what they shall be for me, but rather accepting them in such a way as to accept the limit of what we can be for each other and not just its imagined possibility. Only then can we arrive at truth as shared. Pedagogical care registers within a dynamic of both embracing and letting go, to find oneself again in a position of embracing and letting go; as both students and teacher we shepherd each other into maturity, each contributing our respective gifts in the Now, but never under the presumption of “forever” being a predeterminable construct. This kind of understanding has both epistemological and structural implications for teachers. Epistemologically, it attends to the essential fluidity of knowledge well articulated in the circulating discourses of constructivism, enactivism, and ecology. Structurally, it means that schools and classrooms are not things that can be clung to indefinitely in any kind of fixed form. The technological revolution has changed forever the conditions of both knowledge production and the pedagogical requirements for an educated citizenry. Today, the challenge of globalization for teachers is not really about education per se, but about the meaning of “public” in a world dominated by private enterprise and about how there can be any sense of community if self-interest is the defining public logic. The question, then, of how there might be community in a globalizing world that celebrates first and foremost the self-interested consumption of the other, often, but not only “Elsewhere” (the exotic, the exploitable Other, the far away), is too great a challenge for schools and classrooms alone. In the modern period the public school and the public classroom were created not just to serve the public, but also to “create a public,” as Neil Postman (1996) put it. Today, they cannot do it; they cannot carry the full social and cultural weight of globalization’s demands. They can, however, stand in witness to the fact that if there is to be truth in the world, it is because it is in the nature of truth that it be shared. Schools and classrooms can be places of citizenship and community in a globalizing world that is rapidly losing any comprehension of either quality even while new understandings may be emerging. Can the school be a place where these new understandings can be cultivated and learned? I suspect so, but it will require of teachers a disturbingly profound personal and public relinquishment of those fictions through which they may be unwitting partners in the very logics that are killing them. 2. Truth as shared: If the recovery of personal truth is a necessity in the age of globalization, so too is its possibility recoverable only in the context of relations. This may be the most important conceptual breakthrough of the postmodern revolution. Claim an Identity, whether racial, tribal, or gendered, and quickly it can be seen how it emerges through a web of relationships. Identity is never a standalone phenomenon; it is always constructed through the scaffolding of Others (for

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a good discussion of this, see Hershock, 1994). The Rational Autonomous Self is a mythical being only, the haunted and haunting ghost of Western modernity that relentlessly conspires to rob the world of real human fellowship. In actuality, Self implies Other. If there is to be truth in the world, it will be only truth as shared, something between us. Such is the foundation for ethics in the age of globalization. An understanding of truth-as-shared may not be unusually difficult in local situations where we rub shoulders with one another on a daily basis and have to continually face ourselves in each other. In the context of globalization issues, however, the work is more complicated, with deep implications for both curriculum and teaching. Most especially, there has to be a retelling of the historical tales such that the Others who have been silenced under the triumphant narratives of empire are given their just due and embraced as necessarily contributive to any future worth sharing. Aboriginals, women, landless peasants in Africa and Latin America, exploited workers in the New Economy⎯all these have something to bring to the truth that is yet to be revealed, and the revelation can be expedited most urgently through a showing of the real poverties of those hiding behind the gates of their own self-enclosure. The poverties arising through the logic of pure self-interest include addiction to private fantasy (such as the construction of recluse culture through Internet addiction), paranoia (turning the Other into enemy), false generosity (let me help you to be like me), condescension (your problems are because of your personal weakness), isolation (ultimately, I don’t care about you), and arrogance (claiming power for oneself without justification). These poverties are best addressed not simply through a blanket condemnation, a gesture that contraindicates the very qualities worthy of support; instead, in laboring for the recovery of the alienated binary, for that which has been pushed aside in order for present regime to claim itself, a new common space can be formed. Addiction to private fantasy is ameliorated by making public realms more hospitable. Paranoia dissolves through active friendship. Generosity is real if it is freely given without self-regard. Condescension is rendered impossible through empathy. The barricades of isolation fall to simple presence. The justifications of arrogance can be overcome by showing the face of a deeper, more comprehensive justice. Unfortunately, the historical record suggests that such changes are not easily wrought and that their delay is an invitation to violence for those who refuse to wait for a better day. Indeed, as the world groans under the forces of globalization, forces that are as irrevocable as they are complex and confusing, increased social, cultural, and political violence in the years ahead may be the only sure thing. Its prospect, however, provides no exoneration from laboring in the Now for truth-asshared. 3. Truth as home: If truth-as-shared is difficult, its inspiration arises from the realization that the practice of truth is nothing less than the practice of finding oneself at home in the world. This is not an exhortation to romantic notions of family values or home as idyll. Instead, it is an appeal to the kind of understanding expressed by the sage Hui Neng (1997): “The world could not be made more

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perfect” (p. 35). This is a comment on the perfect adequacy of the world with respect to the human prospect of finding itself at home in it; indirectly, it raises the question of why it is our sense of the world’s imperfections that seems to dominate our inclinations. The labor of finding truth as home is ultimately the labor of overcoming our primal sense of estrangement from the world. This is at once a religious task (< L. religere, to tie together again), which in the age of globalization means addressing the specifically religious roots of contemporary economic theory, as well as a pedagogical one, in the agogical sense of taking responsibility for guiding others (< L. agogos, guide). Teachers therefore have a two-fold responsibility: (a) to heal their own estrangements as the necessary qualification leading others home. The sense of human estrangement from the world takes many different forms, just as the work of reconciliation must have its own specific addresses. There are political estrangements, familial, tribal, sectarian, and so forth; but they find their genesis in the prereflective predisposition to see the other as that which constrains the projections of the Ego and turns the Other into something that must be overcome to protect the Ego’s self-constructed identity. Or efforts must be made to turn the Other into a mirror of one’s own identity as a way of securing oneself in the world. The kind of reconciliation that is being suggested here arises from an appreciation that the differences between us do not need to be arbitrated or overcome because they are reflective of the very condition by which any identity might be possible in the first place. That is to say, our differences are reflective of our common condition in the world, the acceptance of which is the necessary prefigurement to a world not at war with itself because there is nothing to fight against, only a deeper truth to be shown. In the pedagogical situation the discovery of truth as learning to be at home in the world is best understood through the practice of discipline, a word that in the contemporary context has taken on a pejorative meaning, but in actuality simply refers to the act of following a task to its true end, a kind of obedience to the call of truth as it speaks out to me from the task at hand. When I respond in a way true to the thing itself, I find my estrangement from it slowly melt away, so that I become one with it and it with me, and something new is brought into the world from out of us both. This is the experience to which true art bears witness; the thing produced transcends both the identity of the artist and the original material from which it is made. It is a testimony to the fruit of reconciliation between self and other, self and world. The act of composition brings a new composure, if one can follow the discipline of it. In the context of globalization discourses, the discipline of the new pedagogy will require this kind of attention to ‘the thing itself’; that is, to the requirement that the value of learning something cannot be attenuated by facile alliance with something other than itself, such as commercial venturing or the seduction of power. Learning truth-as-home means dwelling in the requirements that the world tells me are necessary for living creatively in it, and refusing any cheaper way.

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CHAPTER 2 CONCLUSION

This paper began with an exploration of how the current construction of globalization phenomena, in their various complexities, came about. Generally, they can be seen as an extension of the Western European development of empire, but now permutated with the identities and actions of others so that the older logics cannot contain or guide a sustainable way into the future. This situation poses a special challenge for teachers who are caught between the logics of the old order and the requirements of the new. It is contestation over what those requirements of the new might be that is defining the tensions not just within teachers’ lives, but also within the lives of ordinary citizens. The assumption of this paper has been that the central logic of contemporary globalization⎯that is, market logic⎯is not an adequate one for ensuring a future that is truly open and capable of sustaining human fellowship in any decent sense. It is a logic that requires a profound deconstruction, a task made all the more difficult for its being so deeply embedded in a religious eschatology that freezes a particular understanding of the future that prevents people from taking up an examination of their own lives and conditions from within their own experience in the Now. In the paper I attempt to examine the requirements for a renewed understanding of what it means to live Now, as an act of human healing and as a prospect for a world that is not afraid of itself.

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‘. . . THE FARTHEST WEST IS BUT THE FARTHEST EAST’: The Long Way of Oriental/Occidental Engagement

PREAMBLE

When the leaders of the contemporary Neoconservative movement in the United States were planning their takeover of the US government in the late 1990s, one of their primary fears was that “the idea of the West” was in serious jeopardy and in need of defense by any means necessary (Halper & Clarke, 2004, p. 94). Many factors undergirded this fear. The fall of the Berlin wall had been a powerful semiotic event, a moment when a visible border dividing East and West in Europe lay in ruins. Russia with its ancient mystical Byzantine traditions, deeply rooted in early Syrian and Persian spirituality, was now open to the West in new ways. The “stans” (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, etc.) of Central Asia, now unprotected by the dismantled Soviet Union, exposed the proximity of China to the new Europe as part of a single land mass. The gross inefficiencies of the US-Western European alliance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the Balkans war revealed the full difficulties of such an alliance ever operating as a unified entity. So if Europe and America could no longer define “the West” in the singular way they had, basically since the Columban landfall in 1492, then what remains of “the West” in the new global configuration of things? And if fear of the demise of the West is a preoccupation of Western political elites, what precisely is it that is feared? If it is “the East,” as the nemesis to the West’s hubris, then what is revealed in the current fear is the erosion of what historian John Hobson (2004) called “an iron logic of immanence” (p. 3) that inhabits the Western imagination through all of its historical, political, and cultural self-renderings. The logic of immanence is the logic that most of us in the Western tradition have been inducted into since we were children. In response to the basic question of how the West rose to a position of global power, the answer is given in selfcontained Eurocentric terms. The Euro-American nexus, we were/are told, is constructed through an autonomous genealogy according to which, as Eric Wolf (1982) described it: Ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry

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crossed with democracy in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (p. 5) As Wolf put it, echoing Hegel, this rendering turns the very idea of history into a “moral success story,” one in which “the virtuous (i.e., the West) win out over the bad guys (the East)” (p. 5). What is missing in such an account, of course, is the multiple ways that the very identity of “the West” is dependent for its construction on a vast history of relations with “the East”; that indeed there is no West without an East, and vice versa; and that the most fundamental requirement of a global age is a recognition of this fact so that a real conversation can begin about the necessary conditions of mutuality that will inevitably form part of all human futures. In what follows I try to trace many of the ways in which East-West engagement has been part of the human story since before the dawn of the first millennium of the Common Era. Largely, I limit the discussion to a kind of history of ideas, showing the deep inhabitation of the Western imaginary by oriental thought, sequent to the various forms of cultural exchange through trade and missionary endeavor. I do not engage the new scholarship that argues that indeed Asia was the center of the global economy until the 19th century (Frank, 1998; also, to a lesser degree, Abu-Lughod, 1989; Fernandez-Armesto, 1996); nor do I engage the kind of historical work undertaken by Hobson (2004) and others (Chaudhuri, 1990; Hodgson, 1993; etc.) who have detailed in unequivocal terms the multiple scientific and technological dependencies of the West on Muslim, Indian, and Chinese sources. All of this work, of course, will be of immense value in the future for teachers, teacher educators, and curriculum developers as a new kind of educational imagination comes into being as the result of it. Indeed, the last remark points in an important direction, through a question concerning the relevance of this entire discussion. As one of my most challenging graduate students is always asking me, “So what . . . ?” In response I say that the landscape through which the Western imagination has been shaped for the last 500 years is changing radically and inexorably. As Westerners, we need to “face our relations” much more than our exclusivist tradition has allowed us to do for the last 2,000 years, and this is not something to be feared. It is not to be feared because the Other is in us already, if only we could see it. Our received logics prevent this perception, so the pedagogical and curricular tasks must involve a critique of those same logics, with the very means for such a critique available precisely through what until now has been so aggressively silenced and repressed. May what follows mark a small contribution to a new kind of conversation regarding who we think we are as a species. DRAWING SOME CONTEXTS

The quoted fragment in the title is from Thoreau (as cited in Fields, 1981, p. xii) and it underscores how East and West are relative positional terms that eventually conjoin, given the circular, global nature of our planetary home. Similarly,

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whatever your site of origin on the planet, leave it, go in a single direction, and eventually you will end up where you started. These two observations—that the farthest east is but the farthest west and that to set out on a long journey can begin the process of coming home—these points in a very general way define what will be attempted in this chapter. I write as a Westerner, an academic formed in the traditions of European scholarship. But I was born in China, and over the past 15 years or so I have sought better comprehension of what a deeper appreciation of oriental traditions might mean for Euro-American self-understanding. This chapter is a product of that labor. As will be apparent, there is an emphasis on recovering the Eastern influences on the Western imagination, not so much the other way; that is, how the East has seen and responded to the West. For an interesting recent treatment of that side of things, see Guo (2002). If this is the age of globalization, not just in the somewhat parochial sense of global economic integration as in the perhaps more important sense of unprecedented cultural interfacings, then the question of what it means to ‘meet’ another assumes special relevance. My suggestion will be that to truly meet or encounter another, individually or collectively, is to meet and encounter oneself, individually and collectively. It is a kind of homecoming, which involves both pain and pleasure, loss with profit. Through every encounter we find ourselves to be different from what we were before the encounter. In a sense, the other is now ‘in’ me, and I ‘in’ him/her/them, and this mutual indwelling is not something that can ever be surgically rectified or purified out. Very profoundly, because we are always constituted through one another, so in a sense we are the other. There is an ancient Hindu saying in Sanskrit: Tuam sat asi, “That thou art.” To understand this can signal a foundation for ethics in global times. Of course it is a disturbing thought for the West, Self-built as an edifice of Difference to which all others are exhorted to aspire but not really. To avoid the pain of deep encounter, the exhortation is raised: “Our traditions of science, religion, philosophy and art have taught us what it means to be human, so if you want to be human, become like us. If you choose not to, then we have a right to destroy you, for the sake of our broader universal truth. And even if you do choose to be one of us, we still have the right to destroy you if we can. This is the law of life.” In its most current iteration, this is the Bush doctrine of the US administration, but the legacy goes back 2,000 years to Roman Emperor Theodorus who, reinventing earlier Jewish and Greek sentiments, declared that anyone who is not a Christian is a pagan; that is, heathen and unenlightened. Europe entered the Dark Ages as Christendom binarized truth from myth, faith became linked to empire, and a parochial history became mythologized as History (Harpur, 2004). To this day, people who stand outside what has become the Euro-American empire stand outside of History (Dussel, 1995, 1996; Wolf, 1982); and as we shall see, this is no small matter. Setting the stage in such stark terms may seem uncreatively exaggerated until one looks around at the contemporary global situation and sees how deeply divided it is along racial, cultural, and economic lines, with the West, now through the

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American empire, controlling everything. This is sometimes called “the 20/80 problem” (McMurtry 1998) that is, 20% of the world’s population controls, through various administrative, military, and financial mechanisms, the other 80%. This situation is about to pass, however, as all things must; an older order is dying, and a newer one coming into being. Asia, through India and China, is now assuming a more equal partnership in the global power nexus, ironically by occidentalizing their own economic policies; although, as we shall see, contemporary economic theory found some of its earliest basic assumptions in the orient, and until the 19th century Asia was still the center of the global economy (Frank, 1998). The point is, though, as historian Michel Beaud (2001) has said, today the world is suffering from “A-cracy: the inability of government to carry out effective action at the level demanded by the problems we are facing” (p. 330). As a species we are confronted with the question of how we shall proceed together as the master narrative of Western superiority gradually dissolves in the face of newly emerging processes of globalization. What shall be the basis of dialogue between the West and non-West, or, in the context of this chapter, between the orient and the occident? What way shall define our life together? How shall we search for it? These are some of the questions guiding the remarks that follow. That such a book as this one is now entering the occidental conversation surrounding education and curriculum theory is an interesting development in itself. It speaks of the emerging willingness of the Western academy to entertain ideas from outside its own historical traditions, not just as exotica but as part of a new serious interlocutionary partnership over matters essential to human survival. This is related, I suspect, to a certain dissatisfaction within the Western academy, and in the humanities especially. This dissatisfaction is not only a condition that is self-constructed through the self-enclosure of the humanities’ basic paradigmatic assumptions (see Dussel, 1995, 1996; Smith, 2003a, 2003b, 2005a, 2005b) but it is also a condition inflicted upon it by the new imperial money-circuited regimes of science and technology that are reducing the university to a tool of global capital (Slaughter & Leslie, 1999; Titley, 2005). That reduction assumes that science and technology are ‘value neutral’ and hence can be delinked from any necessary critical discussion about everything else that deeply matters to human beings— religion, spirituality, philosophy, sex—except as those aspects can be made accountable to a calculus of wealth creation. Under the new dispensation, everything is indeed just a ‘thing’ to be bought, used, or sold (Kuttner, 1999). Clearly, this is a completely inadequate axiological basis upon which any society or culture might meaningfully survive, and such current academic work as this represents at least one attempt to articulate alternatives that are more faithful to the full catholicity (< Gk. kata, ‘in respect of’ + holos, ‘whole’) of human experience. A good way to understand the problem of the limits of Western intellectual paradigms is to examine the relationship between underlying cultural assumptions and their embodiment in various forms of cultural pathology. All cultures suffer illness, but different cultures suffer different illnesses; as well, similar illnesses are ‘suffered’ differently in different places (Payer, 1988). In North America the most

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common diseases are heart attack, stroke, and cancer. Heart attack and stroke are the consequence of hypertension and stress (among other things); many cancers are the result of pollution of the food chain, for example, in turn a consequence of the corporate rationalization of agriculture. All of these have origins in assumptions about life. Primarily, life is seen as a matter of human control and domination, with the downside being an almost complete incapacity to ‘let go.’ If accumulation and consumption define The Good Life, it is understandable that security and storage services are the fastest growing industries in the United States (Chandler, 2002; Hays, 1997), and obesity has become a great social concern (Gard, 2005). Within all of these understandings there is no place for emptiness, which is ironic because many lives feel empty even though they are so full. What the turn to oriental thought represents, then, at a very profound level, is a search for a way to creatively empty out so much of the accumulated baggage cultivated through the West’s various philosophies of control. Related to the above point, as contemporary academics in the Western academy, we work out of the inheritance of Immanuel Kant and the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. This tradition privileges critical thinking in the name of Reason, and its aim is emancipation from unthinking bondage to received knowledge and tradition, and their institutional embodiments in the name of monarchy, ecclesia or, today, the state. The fruit is to be forms of knowledge that themselves are genuinely free of prejudice and self-will. The lived result, however, is a kind of ‘knowledge-ism’; that is to say, a way of knowing that implies no connection between knowledge and a knower. This is the logic of the “New Knowledge Economy” (Peters & Humes, 2003) and what Roszak (1994) called “the cult of information.” Knowledge now requires no embodiment; it just is, in itself, a kind of independent cultural currency. So the lived feeling of much academic work is that it is disconnected from any necessary connection to ‘my’ life and how I live. The emerging and thriving interest in Asian traditions in the West serves as a counterpoint to this tradition and its personally alienating qualities, because if Asian traditions have one thing in common, it is that they are concerned with the Way of life as a whole, not just its rationalizable aspects. To gain attunement to this Way, knowing the way of the Way, is not just emancipating in the Kantian sense, but is most profoundly a finding of Life; that is, the life that lives and breathes over, under, around, through, behind, above, and beyond anything we might say and do about it from our own inevitably limited perspectives of time and place. Of course, as will become clear, it is important not to romanticize Asian traditions or idealize them uncritically; it is valuable, however, to re-cognize them, to allow them to be seen and understood as relevant to the shared human situation. If living the Way, then, is not just the end-goal of seeking, but itself a manner of being in the present, this means that the end-goal of education can never be knowledge in some independent and discrete sense, something to be accumulated for an anterior purpose such as status and other forms of social capital. Instead, the purpose of education is to learn how to live well, to be free of delusion, and to be

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attuned to the deepest rhythms of Life so that one is living Life according to its fundamental nature. If this sounds like mysticism, indeed it is, and for this there should be no apology, because it simply means that there is an essential unity to the whole of life that cannot be violated by human thought or action and that, indeed, to act ‘on’ life as a projection of sheer will is a recipe for disaster on many levels. Hindu and Buddhist traditions are united in their understanding that the root of all human suffering is ignorance (Sk. avidya), and by this is meant not ‘lack of knowledge’ in the Western sense of ‘not having enough,’ but in the sense that any form of knowledge tied strictly to the phenomenal world, as the Western empirical traditions of science and technology are, misses a very essential point: that the phenomenal world is inextricably linked to the noumenal world; that is, to everything else. The visible and the invisible, the spoken and the silent, the implicate and the explicate, the latent and the manifest—all of these are always everywhere at work together, and to focus on only one at the expense of the others is to invite delusion, or ignorance of a most unhealthy kind. The point is, then, that the present turn in the Western academy to Eastern thought is not strictly an academic interest. It arises, I believe, from a desire to be healed, personally and collectively, from the delusions that have come to so narrowly define the work of scholarship in the contemporary academic context. As will become apparent in what follows, the turn of the West towards the East is also a form of homecoming that involves a recognition of the fact that some of the deepest roots of Western culture, even within Christianity itself, have early connections in the East, but that this has never been allowed to be acknowledged because of the exclusivism and philosophy of difference incipient in ancient Jewish and later Christian self-definitions of divine chosenness, and consolidated in Greek philosophy through such theories as Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction ( a cannot be a and b and still be a). Primarily though, as we shall see, it has been a political decision. Ironically, these constructs of uniqueness and difference are themselves relational in origin; that is, they depend for their self-identity on the existence of an Other to which they are inexorably tied, and in many instances the tie is to the orient. For example, Abraham, the original patriarch of all three of the world’s great monotheistic religions, has a name linkable to the Sanskrit, a-brahman, or not Brahman. In Hinduism, Brahman refers to “the Absolute”, so a-braham refers to what is not absolute, indeed a mere human (Riley, 2000). Indeed, for Western scholars today one of the great and necessary intellectual challenges is to recover the ‘lost’ dependencies of so much of our coveted traditions, because without such work we become forgetful of our deep and common human contingencies and end up behaving in ways that assume that Others don’t matter to who we think we are. That kind of assumption involves a hubris hiding from its nemesis, as 9/11 serves in reminder. How is it that today we speak of “East” and “West”? If those of us living in Europe and North America are “Westerners,” by what ‘orientation’ is this so?

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Well, there is the answer: We are “Western” in relation to the Orient, and this relation has a history of its own. For the last five 500 we have been living within what Samir Amin (2003) called “the 1492 World System.” 1492 marked the year of the Columban landfall in the Caribbean and the beginning of “Eurocentrism,” when, as a consequence of the massive fortunes accumulated through its ‘Latin’ American conquests, Spain and eventually most of Europe shifted the center of global power away from the eastern Mediterranean and central Asia, which had been under the control of Muslim caliphates for the previous 500 years. Before 1492, however, “ Europe” meant “West” of central Asia, which controlled the spice and silk routes from India and China, respectively. To this day China has never understood itself as “East.” Translated into English, the character, or ideograph, for China means “Middle Kingdom,” a self-definition that originally imagined all other peoples of the world as living in a condition of tribute to itself. THE LONG WAY OF ORIENTAL/OCCIDENTAL ENGAGEMENT

In the first part of this section I attempt to highlight some of the more profound points of engagement between West and East, starting from the ascendancy of Alexander (ca fourth century BCE) to the fourth century CE. My interest in this particular period is twofold. First, the time is pivotal for understanding how Europe became distinctively “Christian” in its self-understanding, setting up a political architecture of exclusion, so that the many Asian influences that were part of Europe’s early identity formation became almost entirely submerged, silenced even, under the weight of a homogenous orthodoxy that was a condition of the marriage of convenience between Roman imperial authorities and the Church in the fourth century. My second interest therefore is to resuscitate a sense of the ‘melting pot’ character of the middle east and central Asia during this period, which encompasses both the apex and the decline of the Roman empire. Not unlike today, it was a time of great multicultural interfusion, social experimentation, and religious pluralism. The early Christian church, which eventually became the sacral power of empire, was, in its origins a polyglot, a loose and multicultural network of communities each of which borrowed, from the social, linguistic, and intellectual milieus in which they found themselves, the requisite hermeneutic tools to describe what they were about (Harpur, 2004; Mack, 2001). The fact that the Christian canon, which was not fixed until the fourth century CE, identifies each of its apostolic accounts as being “according to” different people (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) signifies a recognition of the fact that the accounts themselves are highly interpretive and not definitive as later Protestant ascriptions would prefer to declare. It was not until the fourth century, when the Roman empire was falling apart, that ‘fundamentalism’ reared its head, and the political hammer came down on religious pluralism. One might speculate how contemporary critiques of multiculturalism, and the rise of fundamentalism, are related to a fear of loss of global position.

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It must be remembered that in the ancient world, the connection between religion and politics was intimate. Misfortunes on the battlefield, plagues, and scourges of any sort were blamed on the unhappiness of the various divinities that controlled human destiny. Appeasing the gods was an absolute requirement of responsible political leadership. A crumbling empire required religious unification as a condition of its survival and restoration. Hence in 365 CE Pope Damasus I and emperor Theodorus I made a pact to rehabilitate an earlier Temple-State system whereby the state would elevate and protect the Christian church as the sole mediator between divine and human realms, and the church would ensure the ethical purity of the state in the work of divine appeasement. Such a condition required the centralization of doctrine, the granting of all interpretive authority to ecclesial authority (the bishops), and the closing of the door to all religious competition. The critical blow fell when, under papal order, the world’s largest library, in Alexandria Egypt, was burned to the ground by a Christian mob incited by Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, in 400 CE (Harpur, 2004, pp. 61-62). The library had been the special pride of Alexander and placed under the supervision of one of his boyhood friends and foremost generals, Ptolemy I. Its policy was to house a copy of every single book that had ever been published, every significant manuscript and papyrus. In his journeys into Persia, Afghanistan, and India, Alexander, who once aspired to be “King of Asia” (Hammond, 2003, pp. 136-147), had encountered not just the many astrological sciences and mystery religions that were part of the lands he invaded, but also the teachings of Buddhism and Hinduism. Alexandria then became, for example, the center of Buddhist studies for the Mediterranean region, with the library housing one of the largest collections of manuscripts outside of India. Strongly contributive to this were Buddhist missionaries inspired by the Indian King Ashoka, who in the third century BCE attempted to establish a “reign of Dharma” after being revolted by the widespread human slaughter of his own military campaign in the Indian province of Kalinga (Fischer-Schreiber, 1989, pp. 19-20). (Dharma is a comprehensive term referring to the basic law of life; literally in Sanskrit, it means “holding, carrying,” denoting that which sustains or holds us as human beings). Galilee, the province in which Jesus was born, was on the trade routes between the Afghanistan/China/India nexus and the Mediterranean, and there is some speculation (Amore, 1985) that during his so-called “lost years” between 13 and 30 Jesus may have lived in Egypt and been subject to Buddhist influence. One tradition, recorded in the gospel of Matthew, insisted that the messiah had to “come out of Egypt” (Matt. 2-15) as a replay of the original story of Moses leading his people out of slavery in Egypt to the promised land of freedom and prosperity. Many aspects of the gospel narratives resonate with themes that have no precedent in Greek, Roman, or Jewish culture, but do have strong precedents in Asian traditions. The birth narratives of Jesus provide a most obvious example. That “wise men from the East” should come to pay homage to the “young child” (Matt. 2-1) is a restatement of the traditional manner in which incarnate Buddhas are recognized, a tradition practiced even to this day. That such men should claim

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that “we have seen his star” (Matt. 2-2) echoes Zoroastrian astrological belief from Persia that a divine birth is signaled by a special star. For Jesus to describe himself, or, more accurately, to be described by gospel writers, in such terms as “the Way” (John 14-06) is interesting too. To say, for example, “I am the Way” is to declare that the Way is not to be found in following a set of formal prescriptions, but as a manner of being that is consistent with the deepest resonances and rhythms of life. Asian biblical translators translate this as Tao, with Jesus as exemplar of Tao, or Way. It is interesting that the early church’s foremost theologian, Paul, had almost nothing to say in all of his writings about what Jesus specifically said or taught. Instead, his instruction is saturated with language about Jesus as “the Christ,” claimed to have existed since before the foundation of the world. Even though the term the Christ (Christos) is from the Greek khrio, meaning “anoint,” and is a translation of the Hebrew masiah, messiah, which also means “anoint,” as a theological formulation, Christos itself stands in the Indian tradition of avatars (Skt. avatara, descent) who incarnate divine consciousness on earth to “establish new pathways for religious realization” (Friedrichs; as cited in Schuhmacher & Woerner 1989, p. 25). There is a link here with Krishna in Hinduism. In the classical Indian epic Mahabharata, Lord Krishna was referred to as “the supreme, universal consciousness, as divine yet present, . . . as unborn yet omnipresent.” (Friedrichs; as cited in Schuhmacher & Woerner 1989, p. 185). In Greek, Krishna is always translated as Christos. S. Radhakrishnan’s (1939/1989) Eastern Religions and Western Thought is probably the foremost authority on the matter of cultural interfusions (especially in religion and philosophy) between East and West in the ancient world, although other works by other researchers are important too, such as Rawlinson (1992) and Basham (2000). All of this work is replete with examples of parallels, common sources, and lines of influence in the development of Western philosophical and religious formulations. And although Radhakrishnan warns against any simple theory of “borrowing,” as in a took from b to embellish its ideas about c, the work serves in excellent reminder that until the fourth century CE, movement back and forth between the Greek and Roman worlds and the various emissaries of trade (spiritual and intellectual as well as material) from Asia was widespread. Roman historian Pliny referred to an Indian embassy that arrived in Rome during the reign of Claudius. The names of various imported products—camphor, sulphur, beryl, opal, and so on—show the linguistic influence of India. Such theological constructs as “deification in Christ,” which even today is the goal of Greek Orthodox practice, works from the ancient Hindu idea that the human soul is on a journey to direct union with the divine. Similarly, the Greek Orthodox hesychiastic tradition (< Gk hesychia, stillness) emphasizing the achievement of tranquility and silence as the best means for realizing ultimate truth clearly has a basis in the meditative traditions so common throughout Asia well before their appearance in the Mediterranean region.

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The point is—and to state it here is to repeat it from before—all of this kind of cultural interfusion came to an end with the symbolic act of burning the Alexandrian library in 400 CE. Henceforth, the religion of Europe fell under the banner of “Christ,” but in that act, the nature of the Christ became sealed within a limited envelope of political culture. Even more unfortunate, that same limited envelope now took upon itself the claim to universality. The doctrine that “there is no salvation outside of the Church” was pronounced by the church’s foremost theologian of the time, Augustine, and this inevitably came to mean that there is so salvation outside of Rome. Recognition of Christianity’s deep roots from Asia became disallowed under a monolithic order of doctrine and practice sought for the consolidation, restoration, and sanctification of empire. Asia became the mystical Other to Rome’s self-defined position of preeminence in the realm of divine understanding. As late as the 19th century, Europe’s foremost philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, could announce, “[With Europe] the idea of Christianity has reached its full realization. . . . Europe is absolutely the center and end of universal history. . . . [Europeans] are the carriers of the world spirit, and against that absolute right, the spirit of other peoples has no right” (as cited in Dussel, 1995, pp. 20-42). It is not difficult to show how such ideas underwrote the European drive for global empire in the 19th century. In contemporary Western academies and departments of religious studies, all other religions are ‘isms’ (Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, etc.), whereas Christianity provides for itself, in the very term, a privileged status. Later I will trace out some of the ways that the West has in fact writhed under the burden of its own self-enclosure, with the East as Other providing relief for dedicated sojourners who have sought answers to European questions not resolvable from within the grammar of received tradition. Be it noted that such attempts at serious interlocution with Asian wisdom have often met with derision, even today (Cole, 2004; Zizek, 2001). In the meantime I wish here to digress briefly to reexamine the history of EastWest relations through the lens of new archeological evidence currently accumulating on a significant scale to suggest that the first ‘discoverers’ of the American (north and south) land mass, as well as of major landfalls such as Australia and New Zealand, were not in fact Europeans, but Chinese. A few quick examples from the 1421 (n.d.) website: (a) According to geneticists Gabriel and Corina Novick, the only people whose DNA appears on both sides of the Pacific, in the South American Incas and in the Maori of New Zealand, are the Chinese; (b) the first Europeans to reach South America by rounding Cape Horn found wrecked Chinese junks; (c) Father Antonio del Calancha, one of the first priests to arrive in South America found native paintings of Chinese cavalry; (d) explorer Vasquez de Coronado found Chinese junks with gilded sterns off the coast of Peru; (e) Professor Tulio Arends has analyzed blood samples from the Yupa Indians of Western Venezuela to find elements found only in Chinese; (f) Cedric Bell of New Zealand has discovered remains of a massive Chinese smelter operation on South Island, dating from the Song dynasty of the 10th century CE. Maori DNA from North Island shows that female (mitochondrial) DNA was Chinese from Taiwan,

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whereas male (Y-chromosome) was Polynesian. This corroborates longstanding Maori stories that about 1600 CE Polynesians from North Island invaded the south, murdered “the Waitaha [Chinese] men” and took their women. This new research also supports that conducted in the 19th century that claimed that Buddhist monks traveled to the Americas as early as the 5th century CE, that America is the land called Fusang in ancient Chinese texts, and that there are deep linguistic connections, such as in the name of the Maya people, after Queen Maya, the mother of Shakyamuni Buddha (Vining, 1885). Other work on this general theme can be found in Leland (1875), Mertz (1972), Bruer (1972), and, most recently, Hobson (2004). What is important about this research concerns the difference that it makes to know it, and the answer has something to do with the imagination, especially for those of us enculturated within the Euro-American imaginary. Most fundamentally, this information disrupts the assumption of there being an evolutionary progression of European expansion throughout the world, a heraldic line from an Old World to a New World, and, in the context of contemporary American foreign policy, from a New World to a universalized American World. Instead of Europe being the bearer of civilization to the world, the new evidence underscores the reality of the world always having been inhabited by concurrent civilizations. This in turn invites a reconsideration of how the human world might now be imagined. No longer is the world simply a collection of lesser mortals awaiting Europe’s truth—the logic of ‘development’ still operating in all of the world’s major development agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Instead, the world can be imagined as a cast of peoples of different traditions and experience, all of whom possess civilizational practices of one kind or another, characterizable by greater or lesser degrees of success or failure, and who always participate within a global community in which every member can be held to a certain ethical accountability in relation to every other member. In a sense, such a view is resonant with the Buddhist understanding of interdependent co-arising or “interorigination” (Hanh, 1988, p. 88). That is, whatever arises does so through a dense network of relations with others who simultaneously are being co-produced through that same network. More on this later; for now, it is on the point of ethics that it is instructive to examine the influence on European political philosophy of a Chinese figure such as Confucius. The 16th through 18th centuries in Europe were tumultuous because of the religious wars of the Reformation. The Peace of Westphalia in 1649 marked the beginning of efforts to think about arrangements of social and political life in terms other than through the theological and monarchial referents that had determined things to that date and had been responsible for so much human slaughter in the previous half century. Euphoric dreams of a new Europe united around principles of rationality and secular morality were widespread, particularly through the writings of the French philosophes such as Montaigne and Voltaire and the emerging movement later known as the Enlightenment. One of the most important yet conventionally unrecognized figures in all of this was the ancient Chinese sage

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Confucius (551-479 BCE) and the school of Confucianism developed through his disciples such as Mencius and Hsun-Tzu. Confucian ideas had begun circulating in European intellectual circles through the diaries of Jesuit missionaries such as Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and Francis Xavier (1506-1552), who in turn had traveled and labored in China, and India and Japan, respectively. The philosophes engaged Confucian ideas with great sympathy, and Confucius became known as “the Patron Saint of the Enlightenment” (Clarke, 1997, p. 42). The debates between Matteo Ricci and the Confucian philosophers of his time (see Chidester, 2000, pp. 434-440) are interesting and currently relevant because they reveal, even at this early stage of serious East-West conversation, some of the stark differences in basic operating assumptions between Chinese philosophy and the European mind. Ricci presented himself not as a man of religion, but of letters, to engage the Chinese literati on their own philosophical ground especially regarding questions of morality. He mastered the Chinese language and memorized the Confucian classics while working to replace the “natural religion” of China with the “revealed religion” of Christianity, through his book The True Meaning of the Doctrine of the Master of Heaven. Ricci had high regard for Confucian ideas (“Of all the pagan nations that are known to our Europe, I know of none which has made fewer errors contrary to the things of Religion that the nation of china in its early Antiquity” [as cited in Chidester, 2000, p. 435). The stumbling blocks emerged for Confucian philosophers through Ricci’s doctrine of Paradise and Hell and his emphasis on the right of the Master of Heaven to determine who would go to one place or the other. Said Xu Dashou: The books of the Barbarians say: if you have done good throughout your life but have not made yourself agreeable to the Master of Heaven, all your goodness will have been in vain. If you have done evil all your life but for one single instant did make yourself agreeable to the Master of Heaven, all the evil you have done will immediately be absolved. . . . The Master of Heaven is just a rogue . . . inciting people to flatter him. (as cited in Chidester, 2000, p. 438) Such flattery was seen ultimately as a form of self-interest, which contradicted the Confucian emphasis on controlling personal desires to obey the principle of universal order, or li, harmony with which must be maintained by observing ritual performances, and moral propriety through filial piety and civic responsibility. For the Confucian philosophers, the basic problem with the European manner of reasoning is that it is constructed through various forms of binary thinking. Ricci’s Aristotelianism, with its distinctions between substance and accidents, cause and effect, the physical and the spiritual—all of these kinds of categorizations were judged to get in the way of a more complex, organic, fluid, and interwoven understanding of the universe. After 1620, Chinese scholars generally lost interest in Ricci, perceiving him as having distorted the traditional connection between personal morality and universal

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harmony. The Christian view was interpreted as disruptive of the social fabric, with faith in the absolute right of the divine over the human leading to political instability, as when people refuse to give absolute priority to the demands of the state. It can be argued that this is the point on which Confucian philosophy produces conservative culture. Historically in China and Japan, except for minor episodes, Christianity has never been supported by the state precisely because of its insurrectionary potential. The leading European Sinophile of the 17th century was undoubtedly Voltaire (1694-1778). He used the “natural philosophy” of Confucianism to challenge the authority and social control of the Catholic Church, which he argued ruled through superstition, flamboyant ritual, and institutions inherently corruptible because of their claim of divine appointment, positioning themselves beyond criticism. This interest in “natural philosophy” over the “revealed religion” of Europe became the cornerstone of the new rationalism that was spreading under the influence of the French Encyclopedistes, and also especially the German philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716). Leibniz’s concept of the complementarity of opposites and his theory of monads in which all aspects of the universe mirror all others and act together harmoniously by nature clearly parallel the Chinese system of “correlative thinking” (Clarke, 1997, p. 47), with roots in not just Confucianism but also Taoism and Buddhism. Leibniz was also part of a larger movement in Europe that sought the solution to religious and political strife in the possibility of a new universal language. Part of this effort involved seeking the first “pre-Babel” language, and because of its ideographic writing, Chinese was thought to be closer to nature than the original Hebrew of the biblical account, and hence closer to the first language, even that of Adam. Early scientists such as Francis Bacon and John Webb (1668; as cited in Clarke, 1997, p. 47) in fact fully worked out their case in a book entitled An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language. Part of the requirement of a new universal language was for a new universal system of knowledge, or science, and here Leibniz was profoundly influenced by the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching, which described precise methods for understanding human action based on a complementary binary symbolism derived from broken and unbroken lines. From this, Leibniz developed a binary number system that in the 20th century became the template language of most computer operations and that, following Leibniz’s dream, has indeed become a kind of universal language, although not an unproblematic one. Leibniz’s work was not translated into English until 1977, and this reflects a condition lamented by historian N. P. Jacobson: “[Leibniz] remains what history books in philosophy have chosen to ignore, the chief transmitter of Asian ideas into seventeenth century Europe” (as cited in Clarke, 1997, p. 48). His indirect influence through the philosopher Christian Wolff on Immanuel Kant and the establishment of Reason as the foundation of a new secular Europe in the 18th century, including the theory of

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separation of Church and State that came to define the new America, cannot be underestimated. A final note about the sinophilia of 17th century Europe can be directed to the work of the physiocrats, and especially the economist Francois Quesnay (16941774). Physiocracy means “government according to the natural order” (Thompson, 1995, p. 1030) from the Greek phusis, nature. In keeping with the spirit of his time, Quesnay developed his economic theory on the oriental principle of “natural philosophy” that we have been discussing (see Clarke 1997, p. 49). Against the mercantilists of his time, who believed that money (in the form of gold and silver) was the source of wealth, Quesnay argued that a nation’s wealth came ultimately from the land and agriculture and that full realization of this wealth depended upon the freeing of producers from government interference so that the ‘natural laws’ of commerce could operate freely. This idea of course became the foundation of Adam Smith’s theory of laissez faire market economics, published at the end of the American War of Independence (1775), whose influence is still dominant in the economic theory of the present time, especially its neoliberalist versions. Again, the oriental origins of this theory are ironic, given the current ascendancy of China to global economic power (Frank, 1998). For various reasons, Europe’s love affair with China had eroded by the end of the 18th century, based as such an affair was on second-hand accounts only, and documentary evidence rather than actual experience of China. When this was coupled with the emerging spirit of democracy in Europe that celebrated the power of the common people to challenge despotic religious and political authority, well, China’s reputation simply could not withstand the recognition of its own comparable corruption through the abuses of Confucianism and the oppression of the average person under strict codes of obedient behavior. Europe thus instead turned to the concept of the Noble Savage for its ideal, and the Romantic movement of Rousseau. In the 19th century, reaction against the excessive rationalism of the Enlightenment found inspiration no longer in China but rather in India, precipitated by the arrival in Europe, as a consequence of British and French commercial venturing on the Indian subcontinent, of ancient Sanskrit texts such as the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. The term oriental renaissance was coined in 1803 by German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel. Along with other Romantics, Schlegel was concerned with finding an alternative to European obsessions with rational progress and technocratic science. As historian Raymond Schwab (1984) has suggested, the coincidental arising of romanticism and the orientalism in the 19th century was not just coincidence, nor was it unique historically. In fact, the coincidence reflects a pattern notable throughout European history, whenever ‘technical rationality’ (for want of a better term), with its preoccupations with management and control, has assumed inordinate cultural dominance. As early as the second century CE, “the vogue of oriental prophets” (Jean Filliozat; as cited in Schwab, 1984, p. 254) arose to support the mystical knowledge of gnosticism against Greek rationalism, and then more recent eruptions of interest in the East have occurred in the West in the

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1920s, the 1960s and now today as a reaction against the hypermaterialism that technical rationality produces especially through its face of economism. Schwab suggested that this pattern reflects “an oriental irruption of the intellect” (p. 248); in contemporary parlance, a refusal of the right brain to be severed from the left. Following Rousseau’s quest for the Noble Savage, that is, for an earlier form of humanity unpolluted by what the European imagination had conceived it to be, the 19th century orientalists became convinced that India contained the secret of an original, universal religion that could unify and save humankind. In texts such as The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, N. A. Notovitch (1834/1990) claimed that Christianity originated in India, with Jesus mentored there by Brahmins and Buddhist monks before beginning his own teaching career. Sir Edwin Arnold’s (1884) The Light of Asia, a Romantic retelling of the life of Gautama, was instrumental in the creation of British Victorian manners and the character of the ideal gentleman as detached but benevolent, upright, truthful, and replete with manly fortitude. Linguistically, the discovery and recognition of the common roots of Indian and European languages severely undermined the myth of Europe’s origins being in Greece, Rome, and Palestine. Under the influence of a certain Comte de Gobineau (see Batchelor, 1994, pp. 266-267), the search for a pure origin in India also led to the philosophy of Aryanism (< Skt. arya, noble), named after a prehistoric people who had settled in Iran and northern India, and regarded by Gobineau as responsible for all the progress of humankind. Gobineau defined Aryans as people who spoke Indo-European languages, who were morally superior to “Semites,” “yellows,” and “blacks,” and regarded the Nordic or Germanic peoples as the purest Aryans. The 20th-century horrors inspired by this idea need no elaboration here. The point is that the 19th century saw the beginning of the collapse of the sense of univocal uniqueness, indeed supremacy, of the Eurocentric self-definition that had been in place and protected against ‘Others’ since the fourth century. Indeed, it can be said that the ‘postmodern’ imagination comes into being, not in the late 20th century, but the early 19th. As Buddhist historian Stephen Batchelor (1994) put it: “For the first time in its history, Europe ignored the Greek prohibition against barbarism and overcame the Christian fear of idolatry to discover that there were other civilizations that had the power to question her” (pp. 252-253). The 19th century also produced an interesting cast of European characters and visionaries whose work, imbued with Romantic orientalist sensibilities, established much of the psychic and cognitive infrastructure for the occidental imagination of the 20th century. The Theosophists, formed by American Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and the Russian noblewoman Helena Blavatsky, claimed to have discovered in a secret location in Tibet (one of the few remaining countries at the time still unexplored by Europeans) an ancient tradition of wisdom underlying all religious manifestations throughout the world. Their goal of establishing a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity foreshadowed later secular universalist organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh was deeply inspired by the woodblock prints of Japanese Zen artist Hokusai:

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“We see a man . . . who spends his time doing what? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying Bismarck’s policy? No. He studies a blade of grass” (as cited in Batchelor, 1994, p. 262). This marks an appreciation of what can be identified as a new kind of ‘meditative sensibility’ that found later expression, for example, in Dutch phenomenology. Of special relevance for the 20th century is the work of philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer’s importance lies in his acknowledgement of the Buddhist influences in the work of his philosophical forebear Immanuel Kant, still the most influential shadow in contemporary philosophy. On his study desk was a bust of Kant and a statue of the Buddha. Kant’s (1781/1999) Critique of Pure Reason was seen to contain the Buddhist insight that reasoning alone, as a kind of pure analytic logic in the Greek sense, was futile for arriving at truth. Instead, what was necessary was linking the structures of consciousness, through perception, with the structures of the external world. That is, how I think is identical with how the world is already structured; and the aim of thinking, or reason, is to reveal that co-extension and live on the basis of it. Of course, contemporary philosophers such as Enrique Dussel (1995, 1996) have shown how this philosophy is exactly what produces and sustains empire, because there is a conflation of my own thinking about the world with its fuller (and hence largely unknowable) nature. This issue has been a persistent problem for Buddhism, in, for example, the appropriation of Zen meditation by imperial Samurai culture in Japan. In such a system, meditation aids my ability to kill more effortlessly because my killing procedures are co-extensive with the way life itself proceeds (see King, 1993; Loy, 2003; Victoria, 1997). Kantianism, as a distortion of deeper Buddhist realizations, is also a problem inherent in various contemporary philosophies of ecology whereby my own self-understandings are conflated with a projected understanding of the natural world: I am like the world; therefore the world is like me. Such a view easily evolves into a failing appreciation of the complexity of the Other and others’ lives and the production of a highly selective form of consciousness. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer (1818/1966) sought to advance the Kantian position by again invoking a Buddhist argument, this time from the philosopher Shantideva of the eighth century CE Appropriating the Buddhist concept of Dharma, a comprehensive term describing that which sustains our essential being (< Skt.; lit., carrying, holding), Schopenhauer suggested that life is driven by a blind and aimless energy that he called Will. Because this Will is unknowable as a thing in itself, but only through the phenomenon that it brought into being, people often confuse the phenomenon in its temporal and spatial manifestations with what it “represents.” This results in endless striving for goals that are inherently unattainable. If I fall completely in love with this person, place, or thing, I am doomed to disappointment as the deep energy (Will) of life produces infinite change and transience. Striving, or, in Buddhist language, desire, is therefore a form of delusion which, Schopenhauer suggested, is remediable only through contemplation of music and art and, ultimately, mystical intuition. The fact

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that Schopenhauer would not sit in silent meditation but only listening to music signifies the way that his own philosophical project was profoundly constrained within his own cultural ambience, for as ethnomusicologist Stephen Feld (1990) has shown, sound structure is always related to social structure. Nietzsche is important as both a prophet and a philosophical prefigure of much of what has transpired in the 20th century. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Nietzsche (1895/1968) was convinced that deep within the psychic habit of Christianity was “an overwhelming desire to do harm, to discharge an inner tension in hostile actions and ideas” (p. 142). Like others of his time, he turned to Buddhism as a means of discrediting his inherited religion. Especially valued was Buddhism’s refusal of the God-concept: “[In Buddhism] the concept ‘God’ is already abolished by the time it arrives” (p. 139). Furthermore, declared Nietzsche, “Buddhism is a religion for the end and fatigue of a civilization” (p. 142). Unfortunately, such views were also linked to the incipient nihilism of Nietzsche’s interpretation of the European tradition. At the age of 21 Nietzsche read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, and although he agreed with the idea of the primacy of the Will, he extended this to mean the will to power, an idea originally articulated in the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, and which also became “the evolutionary drive behind Darwin’s survival of the fittest.” (Batchelor 1994, p. 264). The theory of the will to power allowed Nietzsche to project his work beyond the sentimental nostalgia of Romantic orientalism onto the prospect of a new kind of future super human being, or Ubermensch. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche contributed to, again unfortunately for the tradition of Buddhism that they selectively drew upon, the rising cause of German nationalism in the 20th century. As Stephen Batchelor (1994) expressed it, their work, along with that of the orientalist Romantics such as Schlegel, “gave the Germans an opportunity to counter the Latin bias of the Renaissance by claiming as their own an even earlier antiquity than that of Greece and Rome” (pp. 266267). When this was allied to the new ‘Aryan philosophy,’ the conceptual stage was set for “an unprecedented eruption of violence from within the European psyche” (p. 267). The convening of the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 marked the first time in the human story of an attempt by leaders of all of the world’s religious traditions, East and West, to address each other. It signified an extension of the earlier Romantic hope for some form of universal human understanding now to be informed by better appreciation of religious experience and meaning. The parliament still continues to meet, most lately in Barcelona in 2004. Of course it was, and continues to be, an effort underwritten by certain largely Western prejudices, such as the very desirability of such a conversation (to know the Other more deeply also enables better ‘management’ of the human space) or even its necessity (which assumes that nondialogic religion, or fundamentalism, is an impediment to ‘progress’), as well as its very possibility under the auspices of some theory of universal communication, which is the

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prejudice of Western science. Of course, as we have seen, even this prejudice of science owes more than a little something to Asia and the tradition of natural law extending from Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian insights. What may be the most significant development of all in the contemporary context is a new convergence of Western science and Eastern religion. This convergence may mark what was identified at the opening of this chapter as a completing of a circle in the Western imaginary, a kind of homecoming. The convergence is articulated in what is sometimes described as the New Physics (Capra, 2000, 2004), or post-Einsteinian quantum theory (Bohm, 1989; Heisenberg, 1938), as well as in the philosophy of Deep Ecology (Devall, 1985; Naess, 1990) and the new ecology-based theories of human cognition (Bateson, 2000; Maturana & Varela 1991, Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1992) and economics (Schumacher, 1989). All of this science either parallels or explicitly draws upon insights central to Asian wisdom. Specifically, there is (a) a refusal of the Aristotelian basis of Western knowledge whereby things are known best through their separateness from other things, an assumption that inspires the Western theory of identity. Instead everything is accepted as being inseparable from, interconnected with, and hence implicated in everything else; (b) an abandonment of the (Newtonian) 17th-century understanding of the universe as operating according to principles of mechanics, and an appreciation of life as being in a constant state of flux and ultimately therefore indeterminate, knowable only as Now rather than future or past; (c) an acceptance that all of Life is a unitary condition, in which human beings are fully participant in spite of any selfconscious presumption otherwise. The conventional Western dualism of world-asobject to human-as-subject is taken as impossible as well as delusional; and (d) a belief that everything in life is self-organizing and co-constructive—that is, everything is constructed through every other thing, and what happens to one somehow influences what happens to everything else in a movement of constant adaptation and change. It can be easily noted that much of what is discussed in this new scientific literature has its analogs in formal philosophical work in the late 20th century, especially that of postmodern theory and deconstructionism. Derrida’s (1980) understanding of identity as always arising through a relation of deferral and difference is a case in point, as is the insight that every form of presence contains an absence, and every absence a presence. What is interesting about much of the negative response to this work in the West (e.g., Groothuis, 2000) is its seeming inhabitation by a (Greek) sense of the tragic, or of loss; a painful difficulty in accepting that an earlier innocence about what it means to be human is gone forever, or, more accurately, now increasingly invisible and submerged by a newer understanding of reality. Of course, in the new paradigm nothing is actually ‘gone forever,’ for there is no exteriority to which it could be banished and literally extinguished and forgotten. No, everything is always everywhere already present, but whether or not it is in evidence is a matter of mind and perception conditioned by culture and politics.

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In closing this section, I simply note that other work examining specifically Asian influences, parallels, and points of engagement in contemporary philosophy has been well supported through the efforts of the Institute for East/West Studies in Hawaii and its journal Philosophy East and West. David Loy (2002, 2003) is a preeminent scholar who has linked Buddhist and contemporary Western philosophy. ISSUES AND PROSPECTS FOR EAST-WEST ENGAGEMENT AND EDUCATIONAL THEORY

The brief narrative history above suffers from the same limitation of all narratives, which is that in the name of clarifying a subject through a tidy rendering, the real messiness and complexity of life become obscured. Also, there is the issue of inclusion/exclusion, of why this was included and not that, which is largely a question of a narrative writer’s own fundamental predispositions and background assumptions. In my own case a number of factors are involved. The most important is probably the fact stated at the outset that I was born in China. But I also grew up in central Africa before coming to the West (Canada) as a teenager. So my deepest sensibilities are inevitably tuned to efforts of integrating the tensions of cultural differences in the unity of my own person. I don’t want to have to choose between China, Africa, and Canada: These are all ‘in’ me already, and to try to define any one as more choosable over the other diminishes my own lived sense of value of each. Any effort to define which tradition might be best over all others can only be a political move, surely, and contrary to the real needs of the times. Another important influence is the work of Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel (1995, 1996), now exiled in Mexico, whose powerful deconstruction of Western modernity (Euro-America since 1492) reveals the multiple ways that the basic operating paradigms of the Western tradition act according to a two-sided myth. The surface side is the myth of emancipative reason qua Kant paraphraseable as “Through our constructs of Reason, we are the carriers and defenders of liberty for the world”, whereas the underside is the myth of sacrifice paraphraseable as “All those who do not comply with our myth of liberty, underwritten by reason, we have the right to destroy, either directly through military and colonial conquest, or through strategies of exclusion, silencing and denial”. Dussel argued that in the contemporary context, it is the voices from the second myth that need to be brought to the table of deliberation regarding human futures; hence my interest in showing the interlocutionary character of East-West engagement from Europe’s early beginnings. The third factor pertains to the issue identified in the first section of the chapter, the deep phenomenology of exclusion in the heart of the Euro-American tradition, linked to its Christian roots, even as they have been expressed most recently in the preliminary draft of the new Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (2003) wherein Europe was self-described as a “Christian civilization” (Preamble), a thinly veiled caveat to Turkey, perhaps, now seeking entrance to the union. (This

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was later edited to read that Europe “brought forth civilization”). In the United States, the recent powerful resurgence of conservative Christian evangelicalism as a political force denying the ultimate validity of all other forms of religious expression is also a case in point. Recent biblical scholarship, however (Borg, 2002; Crossan, 1994; Harpur, 2004; Mack, 2001), has suggested that the politics of exclusion were precisely not what defined the earliest Christian communities, that instead they were characterized by what Crossan called open commensality, or open sharing of meals and community life with strangers and others outside of their received tradition. This means that the politics of exclusion in the Western tradition needs to be carefully reexamined. Also, it should be recognized that an Asian interpretation would not render the full meaning of openness through a binary, such as closedness or exclusivity, because openness also means being open to the necessity at times for boundaries. This question is too big to consider in depth here, except to say that the meaning of openness is a critical one for an interlocutionary age. What I have attempted to do in the brief foregoing narrative is to show that in spite of the exclusionary disposition of Euro-American sensibility, an engagement between East and West has always already been in effect for over 2,000 years, that most of the operating assumptions of the West are already inhabited by Asian influences, and that those who persistently criticize occidental interest in things oriental merely contribute to a logic of denial that itself is a denial of the West’s own history. It needs to be recognized that such criticisms continue to be loud, frequent, and vociferous. Christian theologian Harvey Cox (1977) has argued that the East is nothing but a “myth that resides in the head of Westerners, . . . a convenient screen on which the West projects reverse images of its own deficiencies” (p. 149). Philosopher C. S. Peirce (as cited in Clarke, 1997) once referred to “the monstrous mysticism of the East” (p. 197). Writer Arthur Koestler (1960) in The Lotus and the Robot discussed the “logical monstrosities” of India, with its “indifference to contradiction” (pp. 49-50) Further, “India, with all its saintly longings for samadhi, has no spiritual cure to offer for the needs of Western civilization” (p. 162). Contemporary philosopher S. Zizek (2001) has criticized Western interests in Buddhism as a symptom of late capitalism, with Buddhism offering both a palliative for and means of denial of the reality of the current crises within capitalism. British Marxist educator Mike Cole (2004) called recent efforts at articulating the relevance of Buddhist insights for educators “hopelessly romantic” (p. 640). Again, such comments reveal an ignorance of intellectual and cultural ancestry and constitute a denial of the ghosts in the collective unconscious. Still, in terms of prospects for what Pasha and Samatar (1996) called “intercivilizational dialogue” (p. 200) between East and West, huge issues remain to be addressed, and here I name only a few. One concerns the sheer immensity of what is involved in even naming East and West as traditions, and facile use of the terms does disservice to the deep complexity of each. Even to call the West Christian deflects attention from the multidimensionality of what this might mean in actual practice, to say nothing of the multiple ways in which the world is now

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largely a ‘post-Christendom’ phenomenon, American Protestant evangelicalism notwithstanding. The enormous complexity and diversity of religious traditions in Asia needs no further enunciation here either. In the event of educators’ and curriculum developers’ wish to engage the EastWest conversation as part of the consideration for “teaching in global times” (Smith, 2003), a serious question is “Where to begin?” A visit to any bookstore will quickly reveal a dizzying array of titles on hosts of different topics in the field, many from a comparative religion perspective, others proselytizing in nature, some offered as forms of psychotherapeutics, along with many translations of ancient texts. A key point is that none of this should be taken as an invitation to conversion, as if one could simply abandon one’s own tradition and take up another, like a new coat or pair of shoes. As S. Radhakrishnan (1939/1989) suggested, conversion is a form of suicide (p. 149), a kind of psychological switchflipping that can have devastating consequences both for the converter and for his or her abandoned and found communities. Besides, the issue today is not simply a matter of making pure choices for one tradition over another, which is psychologically and conceptually impossible anyway, given that there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ tradition. The real challenge is to face the truth that no one tradition can say everything that needs to be said about the full expression of human experience in the world and that what the global community requires more than anything else is mutual recognition of the various poverties of every tradition, now revealed by globalization in unprecedented ways and in new degrees. The search to cure the poverty of one’s own tradition clearly works in all directions at once. Students in Asia look to the West, often romantically and idealistically, to cure the pain of the lack of basic freedoms they may perceive that they suffer in their homelands. Western young people find in the Asian traditions of inner cultivation and meditative sensibility deep relief from the hyperactivism and personal striving that are celebrated as virtues within capitalist culture. None of these moves requires conversion in the usual sense, but instead a simple new openness to that which lies beyond one’s current understanding of things and then taking up the work of integrating it creatively into one’s prior practice. Once this journey has begun, then the work of deepening understanding of Others can follow, with reading and study producing not repudiation, but wisdom. In the entire discussion of East-West engagement, it is important to acknowledge that vastly different axiological assumptions lie at the heart of it and that these differences cannot simply be woven into some new tapestry of globalized consensus. Neither, on the other hand, in a globalizing world is it enough simply to ‘let differences be,’ as if there could never be any points of address between them. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, if globalization means anything beyond the parochial Euro-American vision of economic integration, it has something to do with unprecedented experiences of human ‘encounter’ and the great possibilities that these hold for an emerging sense of globalized community no longer binarized by those policies of inclusion/exclusion that continue to control the minds of those controlling the systems of global power.

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To illustrate an example of ‘difference’ that cannot be easily entertained in the Western imaginary, followed by an example of how a new hermeneutic of understanding might ensue, I offer the following statement from a contemporary Vedantist philosopher in India, Swami Atmaswarupananda (2001): The scriptures and the great spiritual masters tell us that our central problem is desire. So, if we are still trying to attain something new, even if it is Godrealization, we are not changing our desire nature at all. The true purpose of the spiritual life is a dropping away of that which constantly wants something new, something else. It is not bringing something new into our consciousness that we need, as much as getting down to the root of it (p. 3). Clearly, this indictment of desire so central to both Hindu and Buddhist understanding runs counter to almost every intuition and virtue that Western ‘civilization’ might ascribe to itself. In the West the very desire to fulfill desire is the inspiration for art, is the muse of love, represents the anticipation of heaven, and is the foundation of enterprise. Without desire, and the anticipation of its future fulfillment, can life be said to be ‘worth’ living at all? How can poverty in Africa be overcome without the creation of desire? neoliberal economists would argue, of course without being willing to put up for challenge their own interpretation of what people actually need to live well, nor being willing to face the fact that it has been precisely Euro-American economic policies based on desire that have created poverty in Africa since the beginning of the colonial period in the 16th century (Rodney, 1981). What is interesting about Swami Atmaswarupananda concerns his original name and the fact that his statement above has a story behind it that is relevant to the full discussion of this chapter, and indeed the entire book.1 Swami’s original name was Bill Winford (a pseudonym here), and for 20 years he worked as an investment advisor for one of Canada’s most prestigious brokerage houses. A devout Christian, in his 40s he had to have two thirds of his stomach removed because of chronic ulceration caused by stress and worry. One day during lunch break at a large downtown hotel in Vancouver, he noticed that a certain Swami Provenanda (another pseudonym) from India was giving a series of evening lectures at the hotel on the subject of mind and consciousness. Bill Winford attended the lectures, and he and the swami became friends. After a year of study, Bill W. moved to the swami’s ashram in northern India, where he has lived for the last 40 years and is now a teacher. Two things about his writing oeuvre are interesting. One is that, probably in spite of himself, his hermeneutic of the Vedantic tradition is still imbued with an elemental Christian consciousness, giving evidence of Radhakrishnan’s (1939/1989) theory about the improbabilities of conversion, and the more healthy labor of constantly reworking one’s own tradition in the light of new evidence and experience. The second thing relates to the quotation on desire above, now understandable as written by a person who had spent a career managing desire, not just his own, but also that of others, and now, after 40 years, has come to see its

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futility as a raw form. Of course, in terms of Vedanta theology, as well as Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, to desire to put an end to desire only extends desire and thus is not the point. Instead, the challenge is to see desire for what it is, a product of mind susceptible to infinite chains of suggestibility that need to be carefully deconstructed and monitored so that one does not spend one’s life chasing phantasms that are incapable of being realized (made real) in any meaningful sense. To be free of desire therefore is not to eliminate it (which is impossible), but to no longer be enslaved by it. There is a time for desire and a time to put desire to rest, and to know the difference is the basis of wisdom and true freedom. It is not difficult to see how such an understanding contradicts the fundamental requirements of consumerist cultures, thereby also announcing that wisdom traditions are inexorably political. Getting down to “the root of consciousness,” as Atmaswarupananda (2001) suggested, has its own requirements, the most important being the cultivation of what can be termed meditative sensibility, and it is on this point that I believe the most profound point of convergence in East-West engagement can be achieved. Meditation is not only a central practice—perhaps the central practice—within Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and, indirectly, Confucianism; in various ways it also is central especially in the mystical traditions of the great monotheistic expressions of religious experience. Of course, as we have seen, it can suffer abuses, particularly when used as a technique to perfect psychological readiness in the service of limited nationalistic or other political goals. This, however, has little to do with meditation’s primary purpose, which the great Thai teacher Ajahn Chah (1982) articulated some years ago: “Meditation is the way of developing the mind so that it may be a base for the arising of wisdom” (p. 20). Notice that the purpose of cultivating the mind is not to produce yet more knowledge—for example, to feed the insatiable demands of “the New Knowledge Economy” (Peters & Humes 2003)—but precisely to produce the capacity to discern and judge the true nature of that economy within the real economy of actual human requirements. Such is the practice of wisdom, and any suggestion that meditation is a flight from the real world has already lost sight of what a fuller notion of the real might actually involve. For a concrete example of how teaching might be explored as a practice of wisdom, I refer to a graduate seminar I currently conduct at the University of Alberta titled “Teaching as the Practice of Wisdom.” The course is organized around the theme of “Encounter”—seeing the practice of teaching as a constant and unfolding series of encounters that invite consideration of one’s own and one’s students’ assumptions about how life is best lived, a kind of call to wisdom and maturity. This is true whether the encounter is with a formal curricular text or with another person, in the classroom, the hallway, the staff room, or the playground. Explorations of examples of daily encounters are refracted through weekly readings of Taoist, Buddhist, Confucian, Sufi, and Aboriginal literature, as well as the Sapiential literature from the Bible (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes). Every class begins with simply sitting together in silence for 10 minutes, itself a practice that

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nicely interrupts the hyperverbalism so characteristic of graduate seminars in Western academies. One overwhelming result of these practices, and especially the practice of silence, is the emerging awareness that so many of the pedagogical problems that preoccupy us as teachers can be, and in fact need to be, reinterpreted. Meditation makes possible the ability to ‘see’ so many of the problems for what they are—struggles for power; defense of my own predetermined teacherly identity; students’ agony over the endless hours, indeed years, spent fulfilling other people’s requirements; symptomatic of our mutual and sublimated addiction to consumerist fantasies that can never be satisfied, producing all those unconscious forms of self-hatred well understood within the symptomatology of addiction, and so on. In short, meditation affords the possibility of seeing and naming what is going on in the pedagogical situation for what it is, not for what it is supposed to be according to the hyperbolized prescriptions of state and nation, or even according to the prescriptions and registers of psychology and formal philosophy. This gaining of the freedom to see the world as it actually is, is the deepest meaning of wisdom, such that the gaining of wisdom is in fact the mark of true liberty (Trungpa, 1988). Of course, as Confucius might have said, “‘Anyone who thinks they are wise, isn’t’” (Lau, 1998, p. 21) a reminder that wisdom is not simply a skill or a commodity to be acquired for an anterior purpose so that one can self-consciously declaim it. Instead, wisdom is known chiefly through its most mature characteristics, which are compassion and generosity, and which arise consistently through the emerging awareness of one’s own mortality and the endless revelation of one’s own laughable propensity for human foolishness. In closing, I turn again to a claim made at the beginning of this chapter that to begin a journey can mark the beginning of a homecoming. This can now be read in reference to John Hobson’s (2004) earlier suggestion that the Western tradition is inhabited by a “logic of immanence” (p. 3). Hobson meant to address the sense of self-containment by which the West has perpetually kept at bay its debts to all those traditions through which it has constructed itself. May this chapter serve the purpose of revealing another other meaning of immanence, which relates to the manner of mutual “indwelling” (Thompson, 1995, p. 678) now better understandable as characterizing virtually everything we do and say as human beings. Whether we live or whether we die as a species, we live or die together.

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TROUBLES WITH THE SACRED CANOPY: Global Citizenship in a Season of Great Untruth

(I)

When the new Constitution for Europe was first drafted, the Preamble noted that Europe is a “Christian” civilization. It was quickly recognized with some embarrassment that such a claim might be inappropriate in today’s multicultural world, especially given Turkey’s overtures to gain admission to the union. The opening sentence of the Preamble was thus recast to read: “Conscious that Europe is a continent that has brought forth civilisation” (Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, 2003). Although the line’s immodesty is transparent to any non-European, what is striking is how the awareness of the immodesty still seems lacking in European “conscious(ness)” itself. This self-appointment has a long history, however, a burden carried under implicitly theological auspices through a God = Christ = Europe equivalencing that extends from 380 CE when Pope Damasus I formed an alliance with Roman emperor Theodosius I. That alliance rehabilitated an earlier temple-state system of the ancient Near East whereby the temple, now controlled by the Christian church, would guarantee the ethical purity of the state, and the state would secure protection of the church in terms of freedom of worship and the right of its bishops to control doctrine (Mack, 2001). The decree that “there is no salvation outside of the Church” was consolidated at this time, and Europe henceforth assumed its right to define all other peoples in the world as dependent for their salvation on terms that Europe defined for them. Lest these remarks seem extreme and unwarranted, let us recall the words of Europe’s preeminent philosopher of the 19th century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (as cited in Dussel, 1995): The idea of Christianity has reached its full realization. . . . Europe is absolutely the center and end of universal history. . . . [Europeans] are the carriers of the world spirit, and against that absolute right, the spirit of others people’s has no right. (pp. 20-24) Such ideas became the foundation for Europe’s colonization of the entire world in the 19th century, and they underwrite the racial profile of global power to this day. In this paper I would like to examine in more detail the sacred canopy under which social and political theory (including educational theory) in the Western

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tradition has operated for the last two millennia. This is in light of recent biblical scholarship that has revealed in fairly clear detail how by the 4th century CE the Christian myth had become historicized (i.e., turned into a definitive history), and hence how, in a strategy of inversion, a particular parochial history became mythologized as a form of universal truth against which all others should be both measured and conditioned. This mythologization of a particular history installed in the world the very definitions of what it means to be human. The unique problem for today turns on the way that the process of mythologization rendered as taboo any deep critical investigation of the history itself, especially its “underside” (Dussel, 1995, 1996) characterized by mass murder and genocide. This underside is hidden deep within a theology of sacrifice and redemptive suffering, and precisely because it is a theology is it so difficult to question. Yet in the contemporary context the implications of not doing so are profound, dangerous even, and inevitably contributive to unprecedented global instability. What follows here, then, also provides a basis for considering the conditions of citizenship in global times. One key relation is important to acknowledge right at the beginning. Europe also means America, insofar as the legacies of America’s social and political infrastructure owe more to Europe than to any other set of traditions.2 Of course there are differences, some of them profound, having to do with the unique nature of American history since the 17th century. Especially relevant is the fact that America is basically Protestant in its Christian predisposition, meaning that for most Americans the Bible is the definer of religious truth rather than the culture and tradition of the Catholic Church. The burden of truth therefore is a matter of individual responsibility, personally achieved through a private hermeneutic of scripture. What is important to recognize, however, is the irony that this privatization mentality now expresses the collective will, such that the American people can become united behind not only patriotic myths that enshrine individual liberty, but also political and military pogroms against the liberty of those outside their own regime of truth. Again, this irony has biblical and religious roots that need further investigation. American biblicism has enabled new forms of political and social theory organized around tropes of apocalypticism and eschatology, which are what makes current times increasingly ominous at the level of everyday awareness. Apocalypticism and eschatology also provide the justification for new forms of military aggression in American foreign policy and special self-granted license to engage in acts that in any other context would be considered criminal. One of the central tasks of scholarship today, therefore, must be to de-historicize the Western myth of divine appointment so that the Euro-American nexus can simply assume its place among equals at the table of globalization’s deliberations. This is particularly a requirement of Jews and Christians, whose shared tradition of divine chosenness, although pivotal for their respective self-identities, is also deeply problematic, historically speaking; that is, many of the claims about, say, right of land ownership cannot be verified through concrete historical research (Cantor, 1995; Harpur, 2004), but only declared as pronouncements of belief.

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Much of what has been said above is not new. What may be new, or at least crystallized in starker terms than previously, is that Europe’s sole remaining child superpower, the United States (the Soviet Union was the other child superpower of Europe) has embarked on a program of preemptive warfare against all those peoples, nations, and cultures of the world who refuse to ally themselves in favor of what America desires. This is now carried out behind a rhetorical mask that bespeaks the virtues of peace, freedom, and democracy, and a demonization of all naysayers as betrayers of universal truth. The consequence is an inversion of language such that for American foreign policy, peace seeking means warmongering, freedom means enslavement to puerile notions of greed and undisciplined power, democracy means unfettered electoral fraud and manipulation in the service of predetermined outcomes, and evil is embodied most especially by those who declaim it as the special character of Others. Under such conditions, what is a teacher supposed to tell her students about citizenship in today’s world? In a season of great untruth, is there a theory of human nature that can survive such butchering of relations between word and deed? If there is, surely every child has a right to be nurtured by it, for the sake of a more hopeful future. In case there remains today anyone who actually believes that the political and military maneuvering behind American domestic and foreign policy has humanity’s best interests at heart, it is important to reiterate in the clearest terms possible the basic objectives of the Grand Game in play (Brzezinski, 1997; Chossudovsky, 2002). There is only one interest at work really, which is the complete domination of contemporary global order, the chief means to which at the moment is a securing of gas and oil resources around the world as the absolute, nonnegotiable condition upon which the future of America, at least as it knows itself to be in the present, depends (see Yergin, 1992). All other public pronouncements and rhetorical embellishments about freedom and democracy are simply a mask of this basic truth. The right to rule is taken as a divine right, secularized through logics of individual liberty and the right to private property. In the meantime, war in the Middle East is designed to secure the huge resources there. The invasion of Afghanistan is a pretext for securing a pipeline from the Caucasus through to the Arabian Sea. Financing the Chechen rebels is a way to keep Russia from securing the huge resources of the Baku region of the Caspian sea; ditto for financing the election of Yushchenko in the Ukraine. Establishing military bases throughout Central Asia, along with sending in evangelical Christian missionaries, is the strategy for keeping China out of the region. Befriending Pakistan is the way to contain India. Issuing warnings to North Korea is, among other things, a pretext for keeping military bases in South Korea. Organizing street opposition among the middle classes to democratically elected Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is an attempt to secure the huge Maracaibo reserves. Similar efforts routinely take place in West Africa—Liberia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and so on—and many other parts of the world, such as the Philippines. Nor is the US terrorism at work in all of these projects reserved for Other peoples alone. One day the truth of 9/11 may finally be made more transparently

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public.3 Currently, the structures of psychological denial are too firmly in place, and the truth is too horrendous to contemplate for most people who still cling to a fantasy of political integrity. The facts are that, like Roosevelt at the time of Pearl Harbor, the Bush Administration knew months, even years, in advance of 9/11 that an attack was imminent. The strategy became to ‘play along,’ even paving the way with ease of passport use, enabling the use of flight schools, and demanding a “stand down” of military defense aircraft on the fateful morning—all for the purpose of ensuring the success of the mission. The Trade Center towers had already been wired for a controlled detonation so that during the collapse there would be minimal collateral damage. As with Pearl Harbor, a powerful symbolic act of destruction from an enemy was needed to legitimize and mobilize support for what had already been long planned, which were the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were/are simply semiotic necessities. Most disturbing perhaps is the mendacity surrounding the language and practice of democracy. The support of dictatorships around the world that serve corporate American interests has been recognized for over 100 years. In the current context, the Bush administration has corrupted the processes of democracy within America itself to win its election not only in 2000 (Moore, 2001), but also in 2004. According to a notarized affidavit signed by computer programmer Clint Curtis, he was solicited by Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney to write a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touchscreen voting machines. Curtis complied and delivered the program to Feeney. The program was designed to be “undetectable” and fully capable of “delivering the vote to George” (Madsen, 2004, n.p.). Ray C. Lemme, a senior investigator with the Florida Department of Transport Inspector General’s Office, traced out the intricate connections between Feeney and the Florida Governor’s office of Jeb Bush. Lemme then provided details to the Daytona Beach News Journal on how Jeb Bush himself attempted to halt his investigation. On Sunday, June 29, 2003, Lemme was found dead in a Georgia motel room. Elsewhere (Chapter 1) I have outlined the contents of a document titled National Security Strategy for the United States of America ([NSSUSA] that detailed American global strategy for the Bush administration. The report begins with an announcement that the 20th century has brought forth a “single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise,” a model to be protected “across the globe and across the ages” (as cited in Research Unit for Political Economy 2003 [hereafter RUPE], p. 68). Particularly striking are recommendations regarding weapons by means of which the new imperial war can be waged. The National Security Agency insisted that “we must make use of every tool in our arsenal” (as cited in RUPE, p. 74). What do these include? Weapons of mass destruction are on the list, particularly “low-yield” nuclear weapons and the use of depleted uranium. Biological weapons programs have been updated “to produce systems that will degrade the war fighting capabilities of potential adversaries” (as cited in RUPE, p. 75). The generic language deliberately leaves

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open the possibility of bioterrorist attacks on civilian populations to disable national economies, qua SARS, Mad Cow, and Hoof and Mouth disease. Of particular concern today, not mentioned in the NSSUSA report (National Security Agency, 2002) are weapons capable of mass destruction under the banner of Nature, or natural disaster. This banner provides perfect cover from any public exposure of the destruction’s origins. The HAARP weapon, funded largely by big oil companies such as Vice President Cheney’s Halliburton Corporation, is capable of controlling environmental conditions on the earth, as well as causing earthquakes anywhere in the world (Chossudovsky, 2000; Solomatin, 2004). HAARP is the acronym for High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. High-frequency transmitter facilities can heat the earth environment up to the state of plasma by means of pumping ions into the atmosphere, then redirecting them to specific targets back on earth. As described by Yuru Solomatin, Deputy Secretary of the Ukrainian Committee for Economic Policy, Nature Management, and for the Liquidation of Chernobyl Consequences: the owners of this weapon are able to program floods, twisters and storms, even earthquakes in any region of the planet. It is also possible to paralyse civil and military surveillance systems, and even to affect the mentality of whole nations. (n.p.) According to Greg Mallo (2005), the US is now also fielding a new tactical and strategic nuclear military capability described as an “earth-penetrating” nuclear device. Deployed and developed in secret, without public or congressional debate, the blast energy of the weapon is capable of producing huge shock waves in the earth’s deep crust that can destabilize the fault lines of the tectonic plates on which visible earth structures and the nations and peoples of the world reside. Interestingly enough, the three largest earthquakes of the last several years have been in Islamic countries (Iran, Indonesia) that control huge petroleum deposits or, like Turkey, control key venues of petroleum transportation. These efforts are being conducted under a deliberate campaign of “information warfare” involving the deliberate spread of falsehoods as a weapon of war. As the Research Unit for Political Economy ([RUPE] 2003, p. 77) of Delhi, India, reported, a secret army has been established to unite the CIA, covert military action, and specialists in information deception. (II)

What I would like to do in this section of the paper is discuss how such a malignant state of affairs could possibly have come into being and how it could be enacted by its players with such an air of innocence and seeming lack of guilt. I have already alluded briefly to the theological infrastructure that scaffolds the particular form of consciousness whereby mass murder and deception can be conducted in the name of Truth. But this needs further elaboration, and here I wish to draw on the work of two sources: (a) Argentine philosopher, now living in exile

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in Mexico, Enrique Dussel; and (b) theological literature on the role of sacrifice in the creation of culture, especially the work of Uta Ranke-Heinemann (1994), Burton Mack (2001), and Walter Burkert, Rene Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith (as cited in Hamerton-Kelly, 1987). The ascendance of America to the role of solo global superpower represents the final point in the long trajectory of European modernity that began with the Columban landfall in the Caribbean in 1492. This was the moment when the center of global power began to shift to Europe (henceforth now “West” relative to “East”) from the Middle East and Central Asia, which had been under control of the Muslim caliphates for the previous 800 years and which had controlled the wealth feeding Europe through the silk-and-spice routes. The system of global power that evolved sequent to Columbus has been named by numerous scholars (Amin, 2001; Wallerstein, 1997; etc.) as “the 1492 World System,” and basically it has lasted until the present time, although as America self-destructs, the global patterns are shifting (see Amin, 2001), but such is the topic for a later discussion. As Dussel (1995) describes it, the 1492 World System is underwritten by a twofold logic. On the surface, the logic is that of “emancipative reason,” which found its clearest articulation in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. To be human, said Kant, is to choose freedom. To refuse to choose freedom is to remain in “perpetual immaturity.” Dussel began his philosophical explorations with the Spanish conquests of “Latin” America, when the Catholic Church legitimized the slaughter of Aztec, Inca, and Maya civilizations on the basis of their refusal of Christian freedom,4 but this dream of freedom is a central motif within the most ancient Jewish and Christian visions, from the Abramic myth of leaving the constraints of home and family for the land of promise through the Mosaic exodus of emancipation from Egypt to the land of milk and honey, to the earliest Christian call to live under immediate the Reign of God and the “glorious freedom of the gospel” (Romans 8:21). If freedom is the surface myth of Christo-European modernity, it is Dussel’s contribution to identify its underside, which is the myth of sacrifice, operating as a silenced, not-to-be-spoken-in-public shadow of the myth of emancipative reason. Again, Dussel took the sacrifice of Amerindian populations as paradigmatic, but the same dynamic is already apparent in the earliest Judeo-Christian mythic accounts. Entering the Promised Land under the military leadership of Joshua (Joshua 1:24) requires the crushing of an enemy and a massive land grab in the name of divine intention. The sacrifice of the Other is simply a necessity in service of a greater self-defined truth. Under Jeshua (Jesus), Christians take up residence in the new kingdom of God, leaving (sacrificing) family and friends for membership in the new divinely appointed family, forever defining themselves against the kingdoms of this world (John 18:36). In the Abramic myth, the willingness to sacrifice even one’s own children (the story of Isaac) is taken as a test of faith in the promise of the freedom of God. This theme of infanticide is taken to the fullest extreme in the Christian myth. As a sign of his love for the world, God sacrifices his only son, with the promise that whoever believes in the

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son, so sacrificed, and therefore by implication whoever also is willing to sacrifice themselves in such a way, or their children, will have found the way to live forever (John 3:16). German psychotherapist Tilman Moser (as cited in Ranke-Heinemann, 1994, p. 281) has written of how the logic of sacrifice installs in the Western imaginary a neurotic crisis that is incapable of being healed from within itself. If the logic is, basically, “Because I love you I have to kill you,” or “If you really love me, then you will understand/accept my killing of you,” then certain other dynamics also come into play. On a personal level, I am reduced to self-hatred when I find myself unwilling to pay the price of full self-sacrifice or I am unwilling to accept your love if it requires my death. This results in an aggressive inversion whereby selfhatred gets turned back on the perpetrator, and the Other becomes the object of my own terror, which I must destroy if I am to survive. On a collective and political level, the lessons are obvious. Contemporary American domestic and foreign policy issues form this deep neurosis. At home, the poor, the homeless, the disenfranchised, and the young are filled with self-loathing because what is offered in solution to their difficulties is so impossible. Hence they await sacrifice in the name of God, or Truth whose contemporary secular name is The Market (Loy, 2002). If those ripe for sacrifice could only choose their freedom, they could live forever. Their failure to choose (think Choice Theory in education) is itself a choice—of consequences that may be regrettable in some sentimental sense, but not to be regretted in the larger scheme of things. Indeed, sacrifice of the nonchoosers of freedom is taken as a moral necessity for the future of the species. In terms of foreign policy, George W. Bush was perfectly clear in his second inaugural speech: If you desire freedom, America will help you. If you don’t, America will destroy you. Such is the condition of our time. The sacred canopy has broken open to reveal its insanity. (III)

Any discussion about global citizenship today must come to terms with the kinds of conditions I have laid out above. These conditions have to do with one nation state being determined to control the terms of citizenship itself. The conditions are inhabited by logics and rituals of the sacred that place a taboo over deep critical analysis, and are underwritten by a mythical structure that ensures into perpetuity the second-class status of all Others within a global community. Even in terms of economic development, peoples who do show obeisance to The Market find themselves working against a paradigm within which they have no hope of parity (Chang, 2002). This is because the laws and enactments of The Market are predetermined according to the logics and rituals of the sacred that have just been outlined: Play the game our way; but then if you are too successful, well, we have the right to secure ourselves. Or: We love you; therefore become like us, but then we may have to kill you.

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In this section of the chapter I would like to consider what citizenship education might look like given the global conditions as outlined. I take this up as a curricular question, but it has its pedagogical aspect in the sense that pedagogy involves introducing students to ‘the story of life,’ a narrative work. From the perspective of this chapter, the central narrative of European “Christian” civilization needs a basic revisitation, particularly from the perspective of those living outside of its power base. One proposal is that discussions about citizenship and citizenship education today must be cast through what can be termed a Comparative Discourse of Empire. To learn to see Europe/America as only one empire, and only the latest within the world’s long experience with many, has a number of important virtues. For one thing, it becomes possible to understand the empire as an “parenthesis” (Amin, 2001, p. 3) within the human story, not a final triumph announcing the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992,). This in turn allows a more self-conscious fracturing of the sacred canopy so that the underlying assumptions of the empire can be jarred loose for a more profound critical investigation than has hitherto been possible. This is not to say that the West does not have a “critical” tradition (qua Kant); indeed, possessing it is a point of hubris. But that is also the point: The hubris is blind to its nemesis. As Enrique Dussel (1995; 1996) has argued so strenuously, the paradigmatics of Western consciousness are completely self-enclosed, blind, and deaf to all voices outside of their own logics and self-understandings. Again, this is because of the self-definition of divine appointment. So understanding the empire as an episode within a Comparative Discourse of Empire grants a new kind of status to the empire’s nemesis. The nemesis becomes the Voice from the Outside, refusing the Empire’s universal authority and demanding a new kind of partnership within a newly emerging global community. Dussel addressed this as attending to “the underside of modernity” It can also be spoken of in terms of listening to those “outside of History,” taking the modern notion of History as inexorably Eurocentric in its basic formulation. A key aspect of attending to the underside of modernity requires that the undiluted suffering of those making the ‘freedom’ of Europe/America possible has to be brought into the center of deliberations regarding human futures. Furthermore, this suffering has to be brought to consciousness in stark and vivid terms. The slaughter of 500,000 Iraqi children since 1990 (McMurtry, 1998) as a result of aerial bombardment and devastation of social infrastructures (water, sanitation, health care, etc.) somehow has to register deeply within the dream structure of Washington policy wonks and war gamers. The screams; the pleadings; the endless crying; the vacant stares of trauma; the open, bleeding, pusfilled wounds; the limbless corpses; the orphaned masses: the napalmed faces: Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolfowitz, please take a seat. Witness these things, smell them, think of your own children, then think of a better justification than Madeleine Albright provided when queried on the matter: “We think the price

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was worth it” (McMurtry, 2002, p. 68). Rest assured, humanity will not stand for this kind of delusion much longer. If this is your god, we want no more of ‘him.’ Iraq, of course, is only the latest in a long line of Others whose suffering has been silenced in the name of Freedom. Also to be heard from are the ghosts of Latin America of the last 500 years (Galeano, 1997). Let us hear from those whose lives purchased Europe’s ‘theory’ of liberty: from the Aztecs whose blood flowed ankle deep down the streets of Tenochtitlan while Cortez watched with a priest by his side, from the tin miners still coughing blood in their Bolivian graves, and from African slaves whipped into submission by their luxuriating plantation owners. Let us hear the real story from the Hutus and the Tutsis of Central Africa: where they got their guns and machetes and why. And let us hear why it is so important for American and European companies to sustain such perpetual massacres for the sake of titanium, bauxite, diamonds, tungsten, molybdenum, and oil. Then let us decide whether these things are really what is needed to live decent human lives. Let us hear from the ghosts of Geronimo, and the Blackfoot Confederacy, and Batoche, not because the horrors of the past can ever be fully redressed, but because unless the ghosts are heard from, the horrors will go on being repeated. A Comparative Discourse of Empire, then, allows the possibility of seeing through the delusion whereby a particular logic of freedom is purchased through a particular logic of sacrifice, and under which murder and genocide carried on in the name of those logics cannot be named as such. Murder and genocide is what Other people engage in: Judeo-Christian acts of murder and genocide are inexorably self-defined as necessary acts of redemption. There is a related matter as well: It is precisely because a particular logic of freedom is purchased through a particular logic of sacrifice that the nature of the particular freedom in question cannot be interrogated, because those who could do so are silenced or dead. Without understanding the sources and origins of their particular freedom, those who possess it are henceforth conditioned to be deluded about its essential qualities. Indeed, the very rhetoric of democracy and free elections is now used as an instrument of Empire itself. Democracy no longer requires real terms; it can be fully manufactured and manipulated at the whim of the new Caesars as a requirement of the predetermined order. Within the logic of the current Empire, the freedom/sacrifice linkage is also what allows an amnesia regarding the historically constructed religion/Market conflation, and then in turn the role that The Market plays in the construction of the logics of freedom. As Dussel (1996) clearly outlined, it was the extraordinary wealth that flowed into Europe sequent to the Spanish conquest of Latin America that afforded the luxury of the personal logics of liberty. “Freedom” as a defining trope of European modernity cannot be traced to intellectual or religious traditions primarily; instead, its very source is money. In America, freedom (and democracy) were never originally conceived by the writers of the Constitution as being for all, but only for property owners, who themselves were the new bourgeoisie from the new mercantile classes of 17th-century Europe. Hence today a critique of the logics of freedom determining the shape of global order must inevitably involve a critique

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of the circulating logic of money (McMurtry, 2002), a link well understood by the attackers of the World Trade Center, the quintessential symbol of American wealth/empire. This analysis brings to the fore a realization that, more than anything, what is needed in the world today is a new logic of freedom. The imperial logic has finally exposed itself as a death-trap except for the increasingly few who can afford its purchase through the sacrifice of Others. At home, one of the conditions of that sacrifice is an ensuring that people remain enslaved to the very logic of freedom that is killing them. Media control is a preeminent imperial requirement. For educators this raises the question of where sources may be found for a new kind of public knowledge that can genuinely provide insight into the operations of the imperial order, so that a new curricular narrative may be woven that is more inclusive and just, and free of the neurotic circuits that currently inhabit public education by virtue of its conditioning within the freedom/sacrifice nexus.5 Pedagogically, it means that we must learn to love our children simply for themselves and be willing to give up the fantasy that by killing them we will make the gods happy and hence secure our future. A primary requirement for a new logic of freedom is to break the particular connection between freedom and sacrifice that the current imperial logic espouses. At the moment, my freedom requires your death, and if to be free means to be free like me, then ultimately there will be only one person remaining at the end of Armageddon, and that person will die of loneliness because the god in whose name the apocalypse was invoked will turn out to be none other than an extension of one’s own Self. No, an understanding of freedom appropriate to global times requires not your death, but mine; that is, the death of a particular concept of identity, whereby identity is assumed to be secured only through the abolition of its alterity. Putting it in Christian language, and to bring the matter back to the original problematic of Christocentric Europeanism, what is required involves “loving your enemies.” Fully understood, this is not a uniquely Christian injunction. The psychological dynamics are very well understood in Buddhism and other Asian Wisdom traditions such as Taoism. As well, it is central in Jungian psychoanalysis of the “Shadow” in human experience (Zweig & Abram, 1991). Basically, it is not so much a moral injunction as a recognition that who or what I think is my enemy is actually a deep and inseparable part of myself. In Hinduism, this is expressed in the Sanskrit words tuam asi sat—that you are, or you are that. Identity is not to be understood dualistically, even as an I-Thou proposition such as that of Buber or Levinas. Instead, there is an acceptance that whenever I think of myself, I at the same time think of you, because you are part of me and vice versa. To love my enemies is to love myself in a more full way; it is also to refuse the paranoia that inevitably arises through a dualistic understanding of identity. What I think I hate is actually what I need to understand myself in a more fully human way. Clinging to my hatred marks a refusal to grow up. Buddhist social theorist David Loy (2003) has written eloquently of “loving the world as one’s own body” (p. 171) which draws attention to the ecological and

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political implications of a nondualistic theory of persons. In terms of contemporary global realities, as America self-destructs as a global power because of its imperial venturing, citizenship education can begin formulating notions of human community based on the profound interdependence of human requirements and of human-earth relations. Already there are signs of this in the new Constitution for Europe, with its emphasis on “unity in diversity.” Pedagogically, one can think of education no longer in terms of training for the requirements of The Market, but more in terms of realizing the gifts of the young, so that together we may journey more creatively into the future. Within the comparative discourse of empire, two features typically mark an empire in decline, what Paul Kennedy (1989) named “imperial overstretch” and Walden Bello (2002) “a loss of the moral right to rule” Today it is appropriate to ponder these words relative to our shared global circumstances.

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NOT ROCKET SCIENCE: On the Limits of Conservative Pedagogy

Not long ago I visited a friend living in an upper middle class neighborhood in my city. There, the houses are all well maintained, the streets are wide and clean, and in the warmer months Filipina nannies can be seen strolling the young of many of the two-income families of the area. The local elementary and junior high schools have a reputation for attracting the best teachers in the city, and many students from across town are bussed or driven by their parents to take advantage of these schools that repeatedly do well on provincial achievement tests. On the day of my visit, the weather being fine, after lunch I went for a walk. Very soon two women of 30-something age were seen approaching. It seemed that they too were on a walk after taking their children back for the afternoon school session. As they passed, I overheard one say to the other: “I don’t care if my kid is a rocket scientist or not. I just want him to be able to deal with whatever comes to meet him in life.” What I would like to do in this paper is to undertake a kind of meditation on this conversational fragment, unwrapping it carefully to show its multidimensionality, and to show how, in its very simplicity perhaps, it is implicated in some of the deepest difficulties we face as teachers in a globalizing world. On the surface the remark seems fine, quite ordinary, and indeed good on several levels. There is the attempt to be realistic for one’s child in terms of future career. Of course, the desire to prepare children for life is a cornerstone of modern education. Who could argue? These are ‘motherhood’ issues, which this particular mother rearticulated in her own way very well. So what is the difficulty? I want to ask the hermeneutic question, “What does it mean ‘to be able to deal with whatever comes to meet one in life?’” What understanding of “life” is involved in such a claim? For one thing, to claim success, the full register of life’s offerings would have to be known in advance so that success could be checked off. But under such circumstances, what happens when an encounter with life shatters the register itself? Or, in the pedagogical situation, what becomes of experience, and experiencing, if the appropriate response to every situation is already claimed, even, say, the situation of openness and ambiguity? (“Okay, Jason, here’s how to handle ambiguity!”) Surely in the long run this is a recipe for despair in young people. If the future is not open, why should I go on? The key difficulty in the mother’s assumption, then, is its one-sidedness. That is, it assumes the possibility of full understanding before an encounter with the

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“coming” of life such that, in the face of an encounter with another (an Other), the Other can be dealt with only in a way that leaves the dealing Self intact. At the conclusion of the encounter, the dealing Self can claim, “I have dealt with it.” The consequences for the Other of the encounter are not really of particular concern; what matters most is that I have dealt with them according to the logics of my own self-sufficiency. I am still alive. I did not suffer a death of any sort, whether existential, emotional, material, or spiritual. It may be suggested that indeed “dealing with what comes to meet me in life” in fact presumes the possibility of my own transformation, but if that is so, then it is more the case that life has dealt with me, rather than the other way around. This is a theme that I will take up in more detail later. For now, I wish to suggest that cultivating the capacity to deal with whatever comes to meet one in life is essentially a conservative value, based on the desire to conserve oneself, one’s life, one’s value system at all costs. It is to define for oneself, for one’s group, one’s neighborhood the conditions by which any encounter might be judged a success, in advance of the encounter itself. Thus it is a value system that is inherently violent against the Other, and this violence can take many forms. Relatively benign forms include practices such as simple neglect, fake interest, or willful ignorance; more horrific is the case of contemporary American foreign policy; that is, “Become like us, or we will destroy you. But then if you become too much like us, we will destroy you as well” (McMurtry 2002, paraphrase) Basically, this approach amounts to a refusal to see life as pedagogical, as always everywhere bearing a message from beyond the contours of one’s own experience, a form of invitation to an ever-deepening human maturity. In directly pedagogical terms, violence against children arises from a fear of their social otherness, in which case the function of education is to train children into obedience to given norms. This presumption has a long history in Western societies since the Renaissance, and the eventual emergence of Child Study as a scientific discipline in the 19th century (Kessen, 1965). Essentially it means, “Kids, this is the game we are playing; if you fail, it is because there is something wrong with you, not the game itself.” Culturally speaking, for the young it means alienation from the broader life-stream of human experience, arising from an adult refusal to see children as “coming” from any order different from what is already known. For us as adults it means giving up on the means of our own rejuvenation, literally on the possibility of remaining young in heart, mind, and spirit (< L. re + juvenis, young) through an embracing engagement with what at first we do not understand. Later I will consider how pedagogy might be oriented (interesting word) less violently and more centrally concerned for our common health as a species. In the meantime, let us turn to a term constituting the other half of the conversation fragment of our neighborhood mother; namely, rocket science. Rocket science has entered the English vernacular to express a pinnacle of human achievement, with the rocket scientist ascribed ultrahigh status within the pantheon of desirable professions. The phrase “One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that . . .” is a negative qualifier attached to offering an opinion

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under the double strategy of indirectly linking one’s opinion to the exceptional intelligence of a rocket scientist while modestly deferring one’s authority in making claims for oneself. This doubling is apparent in our mother’s conversational fragment. My son might become a rocket scientist (which of course would secretly please me greatly), or might not, which I can accept too. But the point is, rocket science has become a standard against which other kinds of performance can be measured. What is rocket science?6 From its very beginnings in China in the 13th century, when Chinese soldiers fought off Mongol invaders with “arrows of fire” powered by “the black powder” now known as gunpowder, rocket science has been a centerpiece primarily of military research and development. Today it is also associated with space exploration, but even this is driven by military imperatives, as space surveillance satellites feed the information systems necessary for global military superiority. Even domestically, all television signals used in the world today are controlled by a relatively few satellites put into place through rocket science, which ensures that virtually all contemporary television programming must now pass through the filter of military intelligence and the corporate money chains that support it (Ford, GE, Exxon, the Carlyle Group, etc.). Since the 1960s the government of the United States has fought vigorously to control satellite activity in outer space. The recent explosions of both Brazilian and Japanese rockets during the attempted launch of their respective research and communications satellites are not mysterious when considered in the light of the US government’s global imperial aims (Ikenberry, 2002). For the United States, the rockets’ “red glare” and the “bombs bursting in air” are taken as signs of national survival, “proof through the night that our flag was still there.” Under this imaginary, rocket science is the means for keeping at bay those deep anxieties that the current world order may be crumbling. More on that later. There are several aspects of rocket science that are worth noting here. According to military science writers Fought and Quilmartin (2002), what distinguishes rocket propulsion from other propulsion systems is that “the thrust produced is independent of the medium through which the vehicle travels” (n.p.). Propulsion engines such as turbo-jets or even gas combustion engines all require intake of oxygen during travel, such that sensitivity to the surrounding environment during the journey is a key aspect of any journey’s success. Rockets, on the other hand, travel independently of their traversing environment. The full stock of fuel must be on board the rocket at commencement, after which nothing further is required. This condition underscores how in rocket science all calculations for success must be determined in advance of the journey so that the target can be reached predictably. The journey itself, the Way of it, is important only insofar as a calculus of it can be predetermined to avoid failure of reaching the desired destination. The mediating environment is something that must be ‘dealt with’ so that the aim, target, or endpoint can be reached without interference. In this sense, then, we can see that there is a connection between rocket science

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and our mother’s appeal to it as a register for her son’s ability to succeed in dealing with life in advance of a real encounter. Second, rockets are missiles and hence are linked linguistically both to missives and missions (< L. miss-, send). Rockets are part of a larger cultural repertoire of activities involved in the sending of messages, conveying to others the intentions of the sender. Missives have the status of “official letter” (Thompson, 1995, p. 871) carrying the full authority of the sender so that the receiver is left in no doubt regarding the seriousness of the message conveyed. Missions are delegations of religious authority whose purpose is to lead the other into the mission’s Truth hermeneutic. That military operations are often described as missions points to the link, in the Western tradition at least, between religion and militarism. In the 500year trajectory of Western imperialism from 1492, the cross and the sword traveled together as symbolic companions (Galeano, 1998). In Anglo-American military operations, the explosive charges that rockets carry are called ordnance, which is a term originating in the Middle English ordinance, meaning not just an “authoritative order or decree” but also, significantly, “a religious rite” (Thompson, 1995, p. 960): bombing as a worship ritual. What I am trying to do here is to take the remark of our neighborhood mother as a kind of cultural artifact within which are compressed various cognitive, historical, epistemological, and existential linkages. Such linkages typically lie beyond or below the purview of direct consciousness, but their sedimentation within active, living, day-to-day language speaks of their ongoing presence, both within structures of understanding and, more important, within the structures of life practice itself. Remember the context: upper middle class, everything under control, neat and tidy. Okay, kid, maybe not rocket science (although that would be nice), but dammit, we’ll make sure you can deal with whatever comes to meet you. Our future is at stake, and any decent future should look like the present, thank you very much. I have been told that when this suburban subdivision was first built in the 1960s, a sign graced the entry to the neighborhood with the words, “A community for normal people like you.” Of course the valorization of normalcy was normal in early 1960s North America. The Bell curve ruled just about everything. This was before cracks began to appear in the edifice of (North) American global power (Vietnam War, OPEC oil crisis, etc.); that is, before knocks began to be heard from outside the door of domestic serenity, before any registration on the collective unconscious that the Good Life was actually sustained through a whole series of economic and political dependencies elsewhere that rendered (and continue to render) that Life highly problematic and vulnerable. The Good Life is problematic and vulnerable precisely because of its entrapment within a logic of selfsufficiency and its blindness to the suffering of global others, a blindness that makes the delusion of self-sufficiency possible. This is deep stuff and hard to face for ordinary, decent citizens like our two mothers who are simply trying to do the best they can for their children within the horizons of their own self-understanding. To make matters worse, the money

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chains that support global media systems work tirelessly to ensure that the average citizen living within the Anglo-American power nexus is completely shielded from the realities that call into question the foundations of everyday life. The academy (universities and colleges) is completely complicit in this delusional game too, because the epistemic infrastructure of most academic disciplines is itself built on principles of cognitive self-enclosure that deprive the knowing self of the benefit of encounter with what lies beyond the contours of its own imagination. These are strident claims that demand clarification, a work to which attention will be given in what follows. The implications for our understanding of pedagogy will also be considered. What is the logic of self-enclosure, and how has it arisen? The first thing to say is that self-enclosure is not a universal human disposition, by any means. East Indian political psychologist Ashis Nandy (1988) has noted, for example, that one reason the British were able to dominate a continent of hundreds of millions with a cadre of expatriate colonial administrators whose number never exceeded 50,000 is that, within Hindu Vedantic understanding, the Sanskrit phrase tuam sat asi— ”That thou art”—means that You and I share a single reality. That is to say, the Western Self/Other binary formulation is belied on close investigation. As humans, we are all part of the same reality, even though we may share various and different characteristics at any given time and place. Difference is not a problem to be ‘solved,’ with the Other regarded as grist for the mill of predetermined understanding. So the arrival of the British in India (after the Portuguese, who came after the Muslims, who came after the Mongols, who came after the Greeks of Alexander the Great in 2 BCE) was not an arrival of total strangers, monsters from beyond, but simply another manifestation of reality, not something to be fought against per se. To the British it was said, in effect, Your arrival here is not a problem for us. This experience had its parallel with the arrival of the earliest European settlers in Canada who could never have survived without the open generosity of the Indigenous population (Weatherford, 1990). Of course, such arrivals become a problem later, when it is reluctantly comprehended that those who have arrived bring with them a form of philosophy or self-understanding that is preclusive; that is, it precludes the possibility that you, as Other, could have any value beyond what I could assess for you. In other words, you have value only insofar as you are of value to me. You have no intrinsic value of your own, or even if you do, that is your own private affair, which has relevance only insofar as it threatens my own self-understanding, in which case I have the means to destroy you. The contemporary philosopher who has most poignantly tracked the origin and trajectory of the form of self-understanding that has characterized the imperium of Western culture for over 500 years is Enrique Dussel, an Argentine now living in exile in Mexico. According to Dussel (1995, 1996) the Western episteme consolidated its imperialistic character about half a century after Cristobel Colon (< Eng. colony) first landed in the Caribbean in 1492. The subsequent plunder of

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‘Latin’ America by Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors required a theological justification, and this was worked out in a debate in 1550 between Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolome de las Casas in Valladolid, Spain.7 de las Casas had been a soldier in the first wave of conquest, but was so appalled by the slaughter that on returning to Spain he became a priest with the intention of ministering among the Aztecs, employing the means that had marked the early Church at its inception in the gentile world of the first century. This involved ‘living among’ people and reworking one’s own self-understanding through the conceptual and cultural understandings of the people with whom one lived.8 de Sepulveda, on the other hand, was the theologian of the Catholic establishment. His argument, which won the day, was based on the premise that because European civilization is superior to all others in every way, Spain is justified in its slaughter of Indigenous peoples as part of a ‘Christian’ strategy of civilizing. de Sepulveda appealed to the New Testament story of the lord who invited friends to a sumptuous banquet (Luke 14:14-24). When all invitees came up with excuses for not being able to attend, in fury, the lord charged his son to go into the city streets and “invite” the poor to come in. When there was still space left over, he insisted that roads and fields be scoured and that all those found should be “compelled” to come in. At this point de Sepulveda invoked a logical turn first proposed by the theologian Augustine in the fourth century. Human conversion to civilization may contain two stages: first, invitation; second, compulsion. Argued de Sepulveda: I maintain that we are not only permitted to invite these barbarians, violators of nature, blasphemers, and idolators. . . . But we may also compel them, so that under the bondage of Christian rule they might hear the apostles who announce the gospel to them. (as cited in Dussel 1995, p. 67) Under this rubric, the anguish of the Other is justified as the “necessary price” of its civilization, and expiation for its “culpable immaturity.” (p. 66) Here can be witnessed what Dussel (1995) called the “gigantic inversion” of European modernity: “The innocent victim becomes culpable and the culpable victimizer becomes innocent” (p. 67). Most relevant to our discussion here is the way that the de las Casas/de Sepulveda debate announces the unique strategy of empire to arise out of the mindset that was clearly evolving by the 15th century. This mindset we now understand and name as Eurocentrism (Amin, 1989) and more than any other social or political movement of the last 500 years, it has defined, at least for itself, but also indirectly everyone else, the basic structure of geopolitical affairs. Its end-game is rocket science; its pedagogy begins with invitation but ends in compulsion. Critique of Eurocentrism has been a staple of humanities departments in most universities since the arrival of “post” theory (poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, etc.) in the 1960s. What has been lacking in this work, however, is a depth of understanding of how Europe came to understand itself as the center

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of global affairs. Hence the forgotten partners lie silenced on the periphery, fully aware not only that the center holds its position precisely at their expense, in a relation of inverse dependency, but also that this current set of historically constituted arrangements is and can be challenged and changed. The extraordinary precariousness of this situation has been brought ‘home’ to the Euro-American nexus by the events of September 11, 2001. It is Enrique Dussel’s contribution to reveal how Europe became “the center” in its own global imaginary with the discovery and conquest of “Latin” America. By the 16th century, Africa, Asia, and indeed America had become established in the European mind as peripheries. By the 18th century the philosopher Hegel had consolidated these circumstances into a philosophico-theological ideology in the concept of Occidental Europe: “Asia is the part of the world where the beginning is verified as such. . . . But Europe is absolutely the center and the end (das Zentrum und das Ende) of the ancient world and the Occident; Asia is the absolute Orient” (as cited in Dussel, 1995, p. 22). Asia in this instance is Asia Minor, constituted by the Muslim empires evolved since the seventh century, as well as the continent from the Sea of the Arabs (Arabian Sea) to the Sea of the South (the Pacific), now named as the Orient. In Europe, “the Christian principle has passed through the formidable discipline of culture, . . . and therefore the End of Days has arrived; the idea of Christianity has reached its full realization” (pp. 23-24). Embodying the spirit of Christian liberty, Europe is now “the flag of the world” and from it, “universal principles of reason have developed. . . . Custom and tradition are no longer of value” (pp. 23-24). The circumstances through which “North” America and other countries such as Australia and New Zealand come to fall under the name of Europe need not concern us here. The point is that all are inhabited by the spirit of Self centeredness; that is, the spirit that names its own terrain as the center around which all other identities circulate as peripheries and against which those identities are compelled to define themselves. Not only that, but this set of arrangements bears the marks of sacralization. Christ = God = Europe (including Europe’s children in North America and elsewhere). Of course, today the Occident has been secularized, but its cultural interstices are saturated mnemonically with its theological origins. What remains now is to work out the implications of demythologizing Eurocentrism and to bring that work back to a consideration of how pedagogy might proceed without the violence inherent in its contemporary presuppositions. Every mother’s child deserves not to be trapped within the cage of his or her own subjectivity, given what is happening in the world today. More than anything else, what is required for species survival, not just ethnic, tribal, national, or sectarian survival, are new forms of openness to one another, personally and collectively as well as a conjoint approaching of the table of deliberation regarding the shared human future. The boundaries and constraints that we typically draw around ourselves as forms of self-security and self-protection need to be shown for what they really are, which is always and everywhere inevitably permeable and always

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and everywhere “hinging” ( i.e., like a hinge, to use a metaphor from Freire) on the reality of others. Pure seclusion behind constructions of identity is a delusional idea, as the Great Wall of China attests. A monumental and extraordinarily majestic work of engineering certainly, designed to keep out the hoards of Mongol invaders of the late Middle Ages (to borrow a Eurocentric time frame), but ultimately the wall was a failure, a tragic hymn to paranoia that has equally monumental and equally futile contemporary exemplifications, pace homeland security policies sequent to 9/11. What the age of globalization demands is a consideration of how, and in what ways, persons may live with the inevitable fluid contingency of every identity. Indeed, among other things, identity itself is a mask (< L. persona, mask) that can be used to hide the fear of one’s own insignificance, or indeed mortality (Becker, 1975; Loy, 2003). The timeliness of Dussel’s deconstructions becomes apparent in considering the multiple ways the Euro-American empire is currently in a state of chronic devolution (Bello, 2001; 2002, Gray, 1998; McMurtry, 2002) Massive financial indebtedness, increasing moral illegitimacy in the international sphere, the collapse of social infrastructures within home territories, rising expectations from that 80% of the world’s people who live externally to the Euro-American power nexus—all this plus the intimately intersected nature of today’s global economy conspire to evacuate the means by which the empire can sustain itself. Eurocentrism is finished, in reality though not yet in imagination, as the words of our neighborhood mother serve in reminder. It is to this imaginal context that I wish to turn in examining the challenges to pedagogy that the end of ‘Europe,’ and now the end of ‘America’ as the inheritor of Europe’s imaginary, brings forward. Subjectivity is the marker of the Age of Europe, suggests Dussel, and it is tied to the condition of wealth accumulation spawned by the almost unimaginable riches that flowed to Europe from Latin America beginning with the first Spanish conquests, and then from Africa and Asia. Euro-American wealth from the petroleum of the Middle East in this century is only the latest in a long genealogy of resource conquests throughout the world: the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq part of an intended extension of this conquest into Central Asia (Brzezinski, 1997). Material wealth is the condition under which theories of the Self flourish most vigorously. After all, if I am rich, I must be doing something right, at least by my own calculations. More broadly, this basic association is what enabled Europe to articulate and nurture its multiple forms of Self aggrandizement as theoretical and philosophical possibilities, beginning, say, with Descartes (1596-1650); consolidating with Kant (1724-1804), Hegel (1770-1831), and even Adam Smith (1723-1790); and culminating with Darwin (1809-1882). Indeed, the philosophical infrastructure of the Western imaginary is largely defined by these gentlemen even today, and their habitation extends deep into the webs of the pedagogical theory being pronounced daily in faculties of education the world over as forms of universal truth. The reign of Europe is through its intellectual traditions as much as through its more naked aggressions. Descartes’ cogito provides the assurance that I can think myself into a security of being (“Okay, kids, THINK!! [Otherwise you

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don’t exist; you’re a nobody]”). From Kant I gain confidence that the way I reason is the same everywhere and that all reasonable people are just like me. If they are not, then they are not human; it’s as simple as that (“Boys! Stop fighting and be REASONABLE like proper gentlemen!”). Hegel? We heard from him earlier in this chapter (“Now children, Jesus can help you overcome ALL your difficulties, because he has overcome everything already, as our wonderful life attests!”). For Adam Smith, self-interest is the deepest character trait of a human being (“Dear Graduating Class: Take care of yourselves, and the world will be taken care of”). Darwin gave us the White European Man as the pinnacle of human evolution, an evolution solidified pedagogically through Piaget and child development theory that announces logico-mathematical thinking as the climax beyond which any form of human cognition is impossible. The mother was right after all: Rocket science rocks, man. Five hundred thousand Iraqi children dead from US/NATO bombing since 1992 is “worth it,” according to President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (Research Unit for Political Economy, 2003, p. 47). In teacher education, and many Euro-American graduate programs in education, these multiple forms of subjectivity theory have coalesced into multiple ways of celebrating individual expressivity and self-claiming, whether as narrative research, storytelling, phenomenology, or features such as “expressive objectives” in curriculum. Actually, there is nothing at all wrong with these per se. Indeed they still have an important place within the canons of teaching and teacher education. The central problem is that they are based upon an incomplete equation: My Experience = My Experience. Within Dussel’s understanding, a fuller equation would read, My Experience = My Accounts of My Experience + Everything Else. Of course, to be meaningful Everything Else needs concrete elaboration, although even without such elaboration it can serve as a place-holding reminder that my experience is never just my experience; it always borders on that of others who are or have been impacted by it and whose interpretations of what I say about myself could be at variance with my own. Perhaps even more important, Everything Else stands for what in the new ecology theory is called “the implicate order” (Griffiths, 1989)—the whole of planetary and cosmological life that is implied in every single life. Within this imaginary, at the very least, I must give my own accounts of experience always with the greatest modesty and humility, never as triumphalist tales with my Self as inexorably the hero. In a more tragic sense, what have been lost in the blind celebration of Subjectivity within modernity are the historical reasons that Subjectivity should come to be celebrated as such. That is, celebrating Subjectivity is a pushing off from something, indeed from historical conditions in which persons were persecuted and oppressed by hierarchical religion, monarchies, and, more lately, industrial culture. Subjectivity therefore marks a refusal of individual helplessness, an announcement of my significance, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. This surely is a positive accomplishment, but it is only so as long as the broader sociocultural and historical circumstances remain part of the equation. When or if those drop off, then Subjectivity becomes, as Max Weber said, “a cage” (as cited in

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Baum, 1976, p. 43). The Self, as my identity, becomes frozen within a static interpretive frame that ensures my own infantilization as historical processes move beyond me. When I forget the historical forces that contributed to bringing my own sense of Self into being, so do I also forget that Others are coming into being as a result of their own circumstances. Indeed it is this forgetfulness of Others, especially suffering Others and my forgetfulness of being ‘implicated’ in that suffering, that constitutes the central problematic of the Eurocentric imagination. Yawning selfsufficiency carries the seeds of its own demise. For teaching and teacher education, what needs to be recovered more than anything else is a broader sense of World that can free young people from the cage of subjectivity that their own more immediate environments (including class, tribe, or nation) have constructed for them. Inevitably, this will result in clashes with the forces that would banish all Difference under the privilege of the Same; that is, forces that would attempt to make all Others like Me personally and collectively. Most radical, educating children and young people to be able to “deal with whatever comes to meet them in life” must, to be honest, prepare them for death, without which life has no meaning. Here, death does not mean a morbid tragedy without solace, but an acceptance of the fact that for life to have a chance, certain things have to die, and usually this means the things that I hold most dear as a way of securing myself in my own imagination or within my inherited group. How to do this requires attention to those who carry about them a spirit of human wisdom in its deepest senses—wisdom born of great loss, great suffering—and who bear witness to the multiple ways the mighty always fall on the sword of their own selfsufficiency. Without learning to ‘let go,’ a hand cannot grasp what is extended to it from beyond itself as the possibility of a new beginning. As Enrique Dussel (1999) has said, “The problem today is the exhaustion of a ‘civilizing’ system that has come to an end” (p. 19). What is next? To begin an answer, let us first consider what is being forgotten.

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GLOBALIZATION AND CURRICULUM STUDIES

Globalization is a term now circulating frequently both in popular media and in formal academic disciplines. It has many meanings, some of which are contestable, others more simply descriptive. This chapter attempts to lay out the general parameters of the term as it has evolved historically, and in the process explore some implications of globalization for the field of curriculum studies. Basically, my argument will be that there are three forms of globalization operating in the world today, named here as Globalization One, Two, and Three. Globalization One is the dominant form arising from what can broadly be called the revival of radical liberalism, or neoliberalism, dating back to the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Globalization Two represents the various ways that people around the world are responding to Globalization One, through acts of accommodation or resistance. Globalization Three speaks to the conditions that may be emerging for a new kind of global dialogue regarding sustainable human futures. It is in this last context that I will address remarks to the realm of curriculum and pedagogy. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (Thompson, 1995) contains no elaborated definition of globalization, but notes it only as a noun drawn from the adjective global, meaning worldwide. This speaks to how the density of the term as now used is a relatively recent phenomenon, signifying the coalescence of a number of important developments within the political economy of world affairs. The late semantic arrival also speaks of how globalization does not refer simply to such things as trade between peoples and groups, or other kinds of intercultural exchange, because these have been part of human experience from the earliest of times. Instead, globalization has specific reference to fairly recent developments that may in turn be acting to form a new kind of imaginal understanding within human consciousness itself. As a species, we may be imagining ourselves in new ways, especially with respect to issues of identity and citizenship. To say this, of course, displays in itself a certain intellectual conceit, with its own history. After all, who has the right to speak for the world, for others? In terms of raw numbers, most people in the world have never heard of globalization and maybe never will. Those who participate in its discussions do so out of privileged access to communications, travel, and information technologies that themselves are tied to various politics of representation, with legacies from the period of EuroAmerican colonialism extending from the 15th century to the present. So today, although the technologies may be new, their production and use still reflect nonresolutions inherent within those legacy relationships. Eighty-five percent of all

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information about Africa, for example, lies in US and European data banks (DeKerkhove, 1997). In a way, then, contemporary globalization is an old phenomenon in a new guise. Globalization may especially refer to a particular kind of tension in the world, arising from what Arnove and Torres (1999) have called “the glocal” (p. 14). Human self-understanding is now increasingly lived out in a tension between the local and the global, between my understanding of myself as a person of this place and my emerging yet profound awareness that this place participates in a reality heavily influenced by, and implicated in, larger pictures. This calls forth from me not just a new sense of place, but also a new kind of response to the world. It is a response I may feel uneasy about making, given that so much about what seems to be going on is experienced preconceptually precisely because no one, no authority can tell me exactly what is happening. And so it is that globalization is fraught with various new kinds of identity crises, ranging from eroding senses of national identity to unprecedented losses of indigenous languages and cultures under the homogenizing pressures of global capital. Within these crises of identity lie conundrums especially relevant for curriculum studies, difficult questions about epistemological authority; about how knowledge is produced, represented, and circulated; and perhaps especially about the very auspices of curriculum work itself. Within the dominant mode of globalization theory, neoliberal market theory, Herbert Spencer’s classic question in the 19th century about what knowledge is of most worth has been replaced by another: How much is knowledge worth? In turn, another question is begged: Is knowledge to be the ultimate arbiter of worth? A final introductory remark is needed on the importance of positionality as a marker within globalization debates. What Marshall McLuhan (as cited in Benedetti & DeHart, 1996, p. 151) once said of technology may also be true of globalization; whether it is good or bad in some philosophical sense may be beside the point. The real point is to carefully examine its effects within the life-structure of human experience. Doing this, it can be easily seen that what is happening today in the name of globalization is benefiting certain rather small groups enormously, whereas for others the influence may be nothing short of catastrophic. In between are the many people simply trying to make a life together in new kinds of conditions. Within all of this is woven a form of economic theory that, in the words of political philosopher John McMurtry (1998), is embedded in “an acculturated metaphysic that has lost touch with the real world outside of its value program” (p. 136). The most important challenge for curriculum work in the new millennium may be to develop the ability to deconstruct precisely as theory the unquestioned assumptions underwriting regnant forms of global economic procedure. Without this, curriculum work, even in the name of justice and equity, will be hitting its head against a wall. The key will be to find a way through the wall in order to change the thinking that constructs it. As economic historian Karl Polanyi (1944/1989) said earlier in this century, this is the age of Homo Oeconomicus, economic man (sic). At least for those in power, everything has

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come to be defined in economic terms (Kuttner, 1999), even the most intimate aspects of human experience (Hochschild, 2003). Conflicts over globalization in the contemporary world may be driven by nothing less than the determination to put Homo Oeconomicus in his place. All these and other issues will be taken up later. First though, attention will be given to how “globalization” has arisen as a defining trope, not just for curriculum studies, but for everyone concerned about the future of the Blue Planet. GLOBALIZATION ONE

To think about the future, it is best to work backwards, tracing trajectories to the present moment, carefully working out the lineages that have brought current conditions into being.9 Only then can thoughts of “what is to be done” be meaningful. Most immediately, the language of globalization began to emerge in the late 1980s with the collapse of the binary logic of the Cold War, a political dualism that had defined the international balance of power since the end of World War II. If in the mouths of its espousers the language of globalization is today aggressively triumphalist in tone, this is because a moral and intellectual victory has been claimed, a certain right to speak and act in a way deemed vindicated by current events. This of course is very short sighted, because the situation is not so simple. Especially dangerous is the historical amnesia suffered by those claiming “the road ahead” to be clear (Gates, 1996), or that history has come to an “end” (Fukuyama, 1993), or that “there is no alternative” (Thatcher, 1995). The Cold War itself was a legacy of a particular struggle within the EuroAmerican empire dating from the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. Contrary to popular opinion, constructed through Western media, the West did not ‘win’ the Cold War. Its conclusion was much more a compromise settlement to discontinue counterproductive policies that were draining the economies of both sides. The Eastern bloc had begun to suffer seriously from one form of implosion, the West from another. For the East, state control of a planned economy had produced high employment but limited innovation and stagnation of markets, with a consequent rise in social anomie ameliorated only by mythic patriotism and escalating militarization. For the West, self-confidence was eroded by a number of converging factors: the failure to sustain public support for colonial venturing (Vietnam War); the determination of Middle Eastern states to assume greater control over their petroleum resources (OPEC oil crisis of 1971); the emerging economies of Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc.) being able to produce goods for US and European markets well below the cost of those produced at home; the computer and technology revolutions that essentially gutted the middle-class-running paperdriven ships of state and Fordist manufacturing systems since WWII; and the emergence of “post” theory (poststructuralism, postcolonialism, etc.) that served to threaten both the autonomy and the authority of the entire narrative underlying Western ‘civilization’ itself.

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The end of global binary logic made possible in the minds of some a vision of opening markets worldwide within a new borderless world guided not by states and nations per se, but by the newer institutions of global reach such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, along with the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This vision, which was the foundation of both the Reagan and the Thatcher administrations of the US and UK, respectively, during the early 1980s, became the lynchpin of the economic theory now known as neoliberalism. Based on the ideas of Milton Friedman and Fredrick von Hayek, neoliberalism redefined the rules of obligation between governments and peoples to privilege the free operation of a global market system over the state as the primary means for solving social problems. This policy turn provided the basis for an assault on public services, especially in those countries falling under the orbit of Anglo-American influence (the UK and the US themselves, along with New Zealand, Canada, and Australia), with the application of business principles to most sectors of the public domain. Privatization of public services was emphasized, along with the cultivation of “enterprise culture” (Keat & Abercrombie, 1990). For education the application of neoliberalist principles has resulted in a host of actions designed to change both the nature and the delivery of educational work. Some of the more important features can be noted as follows:10 vigorous attempts to delegitimize public education through documents such as A Nation at Risk and The Holmes Report, highlighting the failures of public schools rather than their successes; treating education itself as a business with aggressive attempts to commercialize the school environment as well as to make it responsible to outcomes or “product”-based measures; emphasizing performance and achievement indicators as a way of cultivating competitiveness between schools and districts; privileging privatization initiatives through strategies of school “choice” and voucher systems; giving strict financial accounting procedures precedence over actual pedagogical need; assaulting teacher unions to deregulate teacher labor to make it more competitive; downloading educational management to local board authorities (site-based management) while retaining curricular and policy authority within state (hence now Market) hands; tying the financing of education to target projects such as the technologization of instruction and the privileging of science and technology subjects in schools and universities to serve the needs of global industrial competitiveness; adopting a human capital resource model for education, whereby curriculum and instruction work should be directed at producing workers for the new globalizing market system; invoking the language of lifelong learning to abate concerns about the end of career labor (expect to lose your job frequently, and reskill, as companies need to perpetually “restructure” to remain globally competitive); aggressively generating curriculum and educational policies by noneducation groups such as the Business Council on National Issues (Canada), the Business Roundtable (US), the Trilateral Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank (thereby accelerating efforts to “harmonize” curricula across nations and states to enhance

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the mobility of workers and bring more states into the globalizing web of the new economy); separating debate and discussion of pedagogical issues such as how children best learn and how teachers can best teach humanely from issues of educational management; and, finally, pressuring governments around the world into accepting these actions as a condition for joining the new international trade cartels such as the World Trade Organization. During the Cold War, curriculum work was ideologically and rhetorically linked to the effort of producing citizens who would support one path over another. International aid programs in education were couched in the language of “development” and were thinly veiled attempts to win ideological loyalty within a dichotomous structuration of global power. It may well be asked, What shall be the organizing principle for curriculum work today? Many writers (Greene, Giroux, McLaren, Apple, etc.) have spoken to the need for more widespread vigilance in the protection of democratic principles, calling for increased participation of all the world’s people in the decision-making processes that ultimately affect them. It is precisely on this point, however, that neoliberalism, as the rallying call for global market liberalization (Globalization One), runs into difficulty. Usually market liberalization is linked in a semantic pair with democracy, but in actual practice the two terms are contraindicative. Consider for example the installation of the various free trade agreements in the Americas since the late 1980s (the Free Trade Agreement⎯FTA; the North American Free Trade Agreement⎯NAFTA), in which education was linked to the language of tradable goods and services. These agreements were both negotiated and implemented largely without public debate, and certainly without due popular consent (McMurtry 1998). Indeed, various writers have suggested that democracy is a problem for market liberalization because democratic process impedes the speed of decision-making necessary for gaining and maintaining commercial advantage. Ian Angel (as cited in Gwyn, 1996), Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics, said recently that “[because] the disposable income of the majority is being reduced, the big question of the coming decades is how to find an acceptable means of scaling back democracy” (p. 2). The Friedman-von Hayek argument that freedom of the market means freedom of persons is questionable on numerous grounds, not least of which is the way true freedom of thought is compromised when the results of thinking are judged by assumptions that are themselves deemed to be beyond the scrutiny of thinking. Under such a condition, the end always justifies the means. Tight media control of information, subjugation of alternative knowledges, to say nothing of electoral fraud within constitutional democracies themselves to produce desired results⎯all of these are symptoms of the contemporary crisis of democracy under the reigning dispensation of neoliberalism.11 According to British writer John Gray (1998), it is important to see the neoliberalist version of globalization as essentially an Anglo-American vision that is attempting to haul the rest of the world into its rules of operation. Historically, it is linked to the history of the European Enlightenment (“The US is the world’s last

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great Enlightenment regime,” p. 27) in which it was assumed that (a) because the operation of human reason is the same everywhere, therefore (b) all reasonable people will abide by the version of reality that reason draws and maps for them. According to Immanuel Kant, the chief proponent of this view in the 18th century, any other response, such as that based on emotion, intuition, or deference to convention or other authority, is a sign of “self-incurred immaturity” (Schmidt, 1996, p. 58). Historically, it can be argued that the dream of the universality of a single logic (the Enlightenment ideal) is primarily a religious conception tied to monotheism, and in the European context, to Christianity and the vision of a unified Christendom that guided Europe from the days of Roman emperor Constantine in the 4th century CE (after his conversion to Christianity) to the breakdown of Christendom under scientific secularism in the 20th century. What we are left with today under Globalization One is a secular residue of the Christendom ideal, with economic theory providing a “theological” (Loy, 1998) justification for the new universal operation of The Market as God (Cox, 1999). It is by this logic that a fundamental bifurcation is occurring within the global imaginary. Within the agenda of Globalization One, anything that does not fit the formula of its operations is described as an “externality” (McMurtry, 1998), an anomaly that will eventually just disappear through atrophy or irrelevance, but never to be addressed as bearing any pedagogical news, so to speak, something that could/should be engaged creatively. One can think, for example, of neoliberalism’s appropriation of the postmodern emphasis on the ambiguity of language and the dynamic pluralism inherent in the human condition. Within the operation of neoliberalism, ambiguity and pluralism get folded into another fetish of commodification whereby the play of meaning becomes a rationale for the endless display of semiotic referentiality under the code of commercial innovation. This is instead of a more profound exploration of the way postmodernism opens the possibility of deconstructing economic theory itself to show, not just how it subjugates alternative knowledges and ways of being, but also that its survival depends on the continuance of such subjugation. The agenda of Globalization One has had a number of interlocking results that continue to reshape the landscape of both local communities and international human understanding. Control of the international economy is increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands through the operation of giant multinational firms such as General Electric, IBM, Ford Motor Company, and Royal Dutch Shell. The largest 300 multinational corporations control 25% of all the world’s productive assets, 70% of all international trade, and 99% of all direct foreign investment (see Clarke, 1997, chapter 2). The loyalty of these huge firms is less to the country of their national origin than to new virtual communities of international stockholders. The result is a diminishment of the tax bases that national governments are able to wrest from commercial ventures, which in turn affects the quality of social programs that local communities can offer citizens.

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The competitiveness of international enterprise also means that firms move frequently to take advantage of labor market conditions, regardless of the politics of local regions, so that in the name of market freedom and democracy, the corruption of local political regimes is often ignored.12 Firms now enter into joint venture contracts with countries whose policies only 20 years ago would have been regarded as abhorrent. This has led critic William Greider (1997) to ask: What was the Cold War really all about? Was it about securing freedom for enslaved peoples, as every patriot believed, or was it about securing free markets for capitalism, as Marxist critics often argued? The goal of human rights that leading governments once described as universal has (now) been diluted by a new form of commercial relativism. (p. 37). The technological innovation that has been pivotal in the development of globalization processes carries with it new kinds of moral consideration that especially arise when the impact of technology on struggling economies is revealed (Rifkin, 1996, p. 115). For example, the islands of Madagascar, Reunion, and Comoros had until recently used vanilla production as their export ticket to the global economy. From the tropical climbing orchid, they produced 98% of the world’s vanilla, selling it on global markets for US $1200 per pound. By 1996, Escagenetics Co. of America was able to produce vanilla genetically for US $25 per pound. The economies of three Indian Ocean Islands have thus been completely undermined. The most important influence of the new technologies of information has been the virtualization of international finance, or the development of the new globalized “Casino Economy” (Clarke, 1997). Today, financial transactions of more than US $3 trillion are conducted daily by banks, financial service institutions, and speculative market funds. The operation of the international economy is now profoundly disembodied. Entire countries such as Brazil, Thailand, and Mexico have been bankrupted in a matter of days though the virtual flight of financial speculators, and although regulations are now in place to prevent the kinds of global collapse that seemed imminent in the mid 1990s, the vulnerability of the new international virtualized market system cannot be underestimated. Again, virtualization means neglect of the needs of concrete existence at the local level. Other impacts of Globalization One that cannot be elaborated upon here include the new feminization of labor through global electronics and garment industries, and women’s politicization in developing countries (Sassen, 1998) population migrations by political refugees, migrant workers, and postsecondary students who are changing the ethnic composition of Euro-American communities (e.g., in England, English is no longer the native tongue of the numerical majority (Pennycook 1996); and the emerging importance of global cities involving the transformation of traditional urban-rural linkages (Sassen, 1998). Finally, brief but important mention needs to be made of the influence of the new information technologies as vehicles for the production and dissemination of

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knowledge under Globalization One. The Internet is a product of Euro-American technical development, and it is rapidly transforming traditional understandings of knowledge and pedagogy. Access to information (at least certain kinds of information) may be becoming more democratized at the same time as the Web is becoming a place of alternative kinds of community building and personal networking.13 The long-range impact of these developments on curriculum and policy is difficult to assess at the present time, except to say that by and large teachers are intimidated by the new technologies, and the costs of maintaining the technical infrastructure of Web-based instruction are proving prohibitive for local schools. If the 20th century was predicted by late-19th and early-20th century social planners to be “The Century of the School” (Tomkins, 1976), it may be safely predicted today that what survives of the school into the 21st century will be quite different from what currently prevails. GLOBALIZATION TWO

If a radicalized interpretation of Market Logic is now providing the theoretical underpinning for social development of all kinds around the world, it is important to register that this interpretation is not univocally or unproblematically accepted.14 Media control as a deliberate strategy of Globalization One (McChesney, 2004; Schiller, 1989) has meant that citizens within the Anglo-American nexus especially have to a large extent been shielded from facing the true complexities, contradictions, and contestations that are at work within the actual unfolding of globalization processes. This is partly because the orthodoxies of Globalization One rest upon one very important and troublesome assumption to which allusion has already been made, which is the belief that because history has been transcended by a new universal logic, history should be forgotten or rendered irrelevant to the true requirements of the contemporary situation. This is a problem that is endemic to the logic of power: Once power has been achieved, the process of getting there suffers amnesiation. Slavery; subordination of women, gays, lesbians, and people of color; colonial history; genocide of Aboriginal groups; environmental degradation⎯all these remain as mnemonic ghosts within the imperial tale, either waiting in the wings for their own moment of truth, or pushing hard against the grain of dominant interpretive frames. In terms of economic theory alone, there are in fact many different models at work in the world today, each connected to long traditions of civic obligation. Each plays into the emerging system of Globalization One, but on its own terms, fighting to protect the rights of its citizens against the assumptions of radical monetarism. For example (see Broadbent, 2001), for most countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), technical innovation and globalization forces have produced ever-widening gaps in income between social classes and regions. Anglo-American governments have allowed the disparities to deepen and become even more entrenched. Continental governments such as Sweden, France, and Germany, on the other hand, have taken

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steps to remain internationally competitive while maintaining strong social charters. In Canada today, child poverty levels stand at 25%; in Sweden, only 2.5% of children live in poverty. Whereas the government of Ontario in Canada embarks on a program of and the Netherlands have increased spending to enhance already fine public education systems. Asian countries such as Japan, China, and Korea have strong Confucian traditions that make loyalty to family and state virtually coterminous in such a way that the state economy holds strongly to its social obligations (Gray, 1998). Full employment is more important than high GNP, even if much employment is menial and could easily be replaced by technology, such as the operation of department store elevators. In terms of curriculum policy, Singapore provides the example of preparing citizens who can work for the new multinational corporations that have set up in the country (Spring, 1998). Emphasis is on learning new international languages (English, German, etc.), but also on social attitudes of tolerance and harmony arising from Confucian values. As a reward for citizens, the government has eliminated all individual taxes. In the new South Africa, the path taken by the government for economic regeneration has meant forced compliance with educational and social policies dictated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, emphasizing an open-door policy to educational institutions from overseas countries, especially England and the United States. The University of Lancashire, for example, now offers degree programs in different parts of the country. This creates new kinds of tensions for South Africans. As one teacher reported recently (Nwedamutswu, 2001), “We have only just won the war against the colonial oppression of apartheid. Now almost immediately our ability to produce and teach our own knowledge is being taken away from us again”. This was not meant as a repudiation of globalization processes per se, but as a request that sensitivity be shown to the specific histories of people and that concern for ownership of the means of knowledge production not be separated from those histories. Japan, long admired in the West for an educational model based on a strict examination system that produces high results on international math and science tests, has now acknowledged the human cost of such a system (Asanuma, 2000). Lack of creativity, severance of learning from learning to live, and the production of debilitating stress among students are all products of the old educational priorities. Today, a reform movement is afoot to make learning more relevant to learning to live⎯to live healthily, with respect for nature, and within a more harmonious rhythm that balances intellectual and social needs. A New Course of Studies has been developed, in which students learn how to grow their own vegetables, cook and sew, visit with the elderly and handicapped, and practice other basic life skills as part of a curriculum designed to foster a more wellrounded understanding of citizenship. In Latin America and the Caribbean, under the Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) of the IMF and World Bank (Globalization One), spending on education in

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the poorest 37 countries declined 25% between 1984 and 1994. Costa Rica, for example, once had the highest literacy rate in the Caribbean, largely because of a public education drive between 1950 and 1980. In 1981 the government was given an IMF loan on condition that education expenditures be cut. Mexico once had a public education system that safeguarded equality of access for all students and was staffed by teachers who had one of the strongest unions in the hemisphere. Most teachers were of peasant origin and very committed to land reform and other attempts to democratize Mexican life. In return for debt relief, Mexico was one of the first to inaugurate social reforms under the mandate and surveillance of the World Bank and the IMF. Teachers’ salaries, already low, were cut by 50%. The public education system began to be dismantled, with industryschool partnerships put in place to transform education to serve the needs of industry (Barlow & Robertson, 1994, pp. 170-172). Resistances are now growing against these kinds of Globalization One developments (Lemus, 1999). The Trinational Coalition (Canada, US, and Mexico) in Defense of Public Education was formed to lobby governments to protect public education as a social right. The Coalition participated in the civil unrest surrounding the meetings of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 2000. Of particular concern was the potential under Globalization One practices for control of education to be taken over by foreign “educational services” companies, ostensibly to assist in building up “the knowledge economy” that globalization processes are thought to require. What happens, then, to national identity when non-nationals take charge of education? As John McMurtry (1998) has suggested, the “knowledge-based economy” might better be termed “the ignorance-based economy,” because under it, rationality and knowledge become “absurd expressions” (p. 187). What genuine knowledge development requires quintessentially are conditions of “impartiality” and “wider comprehension” These, a commercially based education system cannot provide, because the first canon of such a “knowledge economy” is that “what does not sell [directly or indirectly] corporate profits is refused communication” (p. 181). “As public education is increasingly stripped of its resources and bent to the demands of the global market, the only remaining institutional ground of human intelligence and reason is undercut” (p. 192). The Pembina Institute of Canada (2000) has undertaken work to show that neither of the standard measures of prosperity used by governments as yardsticks of civil progress⎯the Gross National Product (GNP) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP)⎯actually provides a realistic measure of the overall health of a population. For example, for both GNP and GDP, marriage breakdown is a positive contributor to the economy. Many sectors of society benefit economically from divorce⎯counseling services, legal professions, furniture companies, automobile companies, the real estate industry, and so on. All of these stand to gain from the troubles of family breakdown. But what is the human cost of such troubles, even into the second and third generations, as capacities for trust and commitment are imperiled by experiences of betrayal and the breaking of faith between persons?

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The Pembina Institute has developed what is called the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which attempts to balance more realistically the social gains and losses from the different economic policies that governments put into effect. Richard Sennett’s (1998) excellent study of the effects of the new workplace under Globalization One (“Just in Time” production processes; the need for a highly mobile contract-based labor force instead of career-based labor; the need for constant reskilling as technology changes, etc.) illustrates that the most fundamental change in human experience currently underway may concern the experience of time. As Sennett expressed it, “The conditions of time in the new capitalism have created a conflict between character and experience, the experience of disjointed time threatening the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives” (p. 31). What is created is a new kind of character that is “both successful and confused” (p. 31)⎯monetarily successful perhaps, but highly confused over the question of what it means to live well with others. The idea of “lasting values” that can sustain a character over time remains nothing but an “idea”⎯something to discuss with vigor and passion, but also something completely disconnected from personal experience. It is on this question of values that the enduring issues of globalization will be worked out. If Homo Oeconomicus is just one homo amongst many, and one whose values are increasingly seen as problematic, what shall be the source and nature of alternative values? This is a matter of central preoccupation for writers in the field of globalization studies. Burbules and Torres (2000) have linked this to “the question of governability in the face of increasing diversity” (p. 22). Responses to the issues surrounding governability and values vary. Huntington (1998) has suggested that uncertainty inherent in the current situation may lead to “a clash of civilizations” as global power blocs fight for dominance in a time when no one bloc seems capable of maintaining control over the totality. Another response is to retreat into the perceived security of past responses, what may be named the response of fundamentalism (Marty & Appleby, 1994). Fundamentalism today takes many forms, from religious fundamentalism to neotribalism to a dogmatic entrenchment in the realm of pedagogy of such notions as “back to the basics” and “tough love.” Fundamentalism always thrives in times of cultural confusion, offering clear and simple answers to questions that are difficult and long-range in implication. In the next section, under Globalization Three, I will make some suggestions on how the future may best be engaged during this time of permeable borders, increased worldwide mobility, and media and technology that are changing the shape and character of human self-understanding. I will organize and sketch out my remarks specifically around issues of curriculum and pedagogy and provide some personal examples.

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In the 1980s East Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy (1988) undertook a study of assumptions about childhood that can be perceived in various global contexts. He then developed a taxonomy for those assumptions, a heuristic that can be useful in exploring directions for curriculum and pedagogy in the age of globalization. According to Nandy, children and the young around the world are typically used and abused in four different ways: – when they are used as “projection” targets for unresolved adult desires and conflicts; that is, when parents, teachers, and significant adults use children to complete their own personal senses of lack; – when childhood is used in a semantics of dystopia against the utopian logic of development. In such a case, terms such as childish, infantile, and immature are used against an idealized and mythical binary of adult maturity as a way both to discipline the young and to protect adulthood within a static and contained selfdefinition. This was/is a primary strategy of colonial domination, in which the colonized were/are infantilized within the power logic of the adult colonizer; – when children and childhood are used as “the battleground of cultures.” A key example of this is school curricula that are written specifically to induct the young into a particular ideological viewpoint or historical perspective. For example, as part of its new neoliberal agenda, the Grade 3 social studies curriculum for Alberta, Canada, has defined community as “a place where people trade in goods and services”. Current Palestinian textbooks do not depict Israel on maps of the Middle East as a way of teaching that the Middle East is an Arab-Muslim world (Steinitz, 2001). Until recently, Japanese textbooks legitimized Japanese imperial invasions of Asia during World War II as acts of liberation against Western domination; and – when, especially in technical/rational cultures such as the West, the “idea of childhood” takes precedence over “the real child.” Here, a number of things can happen. For example, children become isolated as a sociological variable that can then be used by social engineers within a calculus of social and capital development. Within this set of assumptions, children have no interlocutionary power within the overall social framework. Also under this assumption, the specific flesh-and-blood needs of specific children can be ignored under generalized theories of childhood, perhaps the most insidious being the romanticization of the young, which leaves them abandoned to the cage of their own subjectivity. As a political psychologist, Nandy (1988) suggested that instead of using children as projection targets, as a model of dystopia against adult maturity, as ideological puppets, or as the object of scientific research and management, adults and children best live together in a “condition of mutuality”. It is in recognition of this condition of mutuality between adults and children that may lie the unique contribution of the field of pedagogy to discussions of globalization and curriculum.

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Donald Tapscott (1998), an influential writer about the Digital Age, suggested that if schools are to survive at all, they will be places not of teaching and pedagogy in the usual senses, but gathering places for people who want both information and a place where information can be shared and deliberated: Teaching is becoming a less unidirectional process and much more collaborative and heuristic. . . . I’ve heard many tales of students and teachers working together to implement technology in the classroom and more important new models of learning. All this gives evidence to the view that one of the most powerful forces to change the schools is the students themselves. (pp. ix-x) Indeed, one of Tapscott’s main arguments is that it is the Net Generation of young people who are leading the way in globalization’s techne. From this viewpoint, globalization is a generational issue. Here we see an inversion of the orthodox understanding of pedagogy as being of necessity always adult-driven. Instead, there is a recognition of the young as partners in the journey toward a mutual maturity. This does not mean elders’ relinquishment of responsibility for the young, but that one of the key responsibilities is to try to genuinely hear the young, to engage them conversationally about the affairs of life, in order that the world between them might be a truly shared one. This can be suggested in response to the findings of a recent documentary film team of the Public Broadcasting System (2001) on the program Frontline. The film, Lost Childhood, documents the youth culture of a suburban Georgia community in the United States (see www.pbs.org for details), ironically, just prior to a shooting incident at the school that received international attention. One of the most outstanding features of the culture was the apparent abandonment of the young by the adult community under a logic of self-interest. Each person, adult and youth, is given “the right” to follow his or her own interests, but the human consequences are astonishingly somber. There seems to be no basis for an ethic of mutual caring under a rubric of radical autonomy. No common meals; pick up your food and go to your own private bedroom to watch your own private TV. In this condition, both adults and children lost to each other. Adultomorphism, as David Kennedy (1983) described it (endeavoring to turn children into replications of the adult self to serve the needs of that self), is a foundational strategy of conservative culture, whether that culture be religious, ethnic, economic, or pedagogical. The most notable characteristic of all educational reform prescriptions coming from Globalization One institutes and think tanks is indeed their adultomorphic nature: They show virtually no interest whatever in the impact of their formulations on the lives of children and youth. Nor do they show any interest in what possible contribution the young might make to any shared future, other than the future imagined within the neoliberal agenda. It is on this point that further work is needed; the point of mediation between old and young with respect to how to proceed together, how to share a life. It is a point on

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which experienced teachers may have some important things to say. Here, two aspects will be noted, then elaborated, as examples. First, in any condition of healthy living together, humanly speaking, there must be a sharing of the horizons of understanding between the people involved. Second, the subjects of study and the practices of study must be taken not as inert and self-contained (e.g., commodifiable), but as always and inherently conversational, open ended, and teleologically oriented to overcoming the alienation between human beings and between humans and the larger world (the sense of Self as different from Other and from World). Successful study, in other words, is oriented to peace, to say which is not to prescribe a suffocating absence of conflict, but to acknowledge that all learning involves resolving the resistances that demarcate the line between what is known and what is yet-to-be-known. True learning means breaking the barriers and chains of ignorance and entering a new world in such a way that I and the Other become understood as One, as participating in a reality whose commonness transcends us both. In this case, Other can be understood as curriculum, as other person, as tradition, even as enemy. Learning to share a life together involves acknowledging and accepting that the work of this sharing, and the labor of coming to a mutual understanding of it, is never over, always ongoing, and sustainable only under the shadow of love. These points can be elaborated as follows: 1. Curriculum and pedagogy as a sharing of the horizons of understanding: As a teacher, I enter the pedagogical relationship through my own biography, which includes my formative experiences in the world, my training, and my aspirations for both myself and my students. So too does each of my students enter the pedagogical relationship in such a way. Unless there can be a sharing of these stories as a condition of our coming together, there can be no basis for our mutual advancement because it remains perpetually impossible to know ‘who is talking’; and without such knowledge, what is present to be learned can only remain detached and alienated from those involved. Biographical stories do not need to be shared all at once, but their presentation within the ongoing work of the pedagogical journey is what makes the difference between a pedagogy of domination/subordination and one based on a relation of trust and mutual engagement. In the Advanced Curriculum Research course for doctoral students at the University of Alberta, for example, both students and professor participate in the WITOR (Who Is the One Researching?) project. Members work together to clarify the relations between their own biographies and the respective research projects that hold their interest. The effect of such efforts is twofold. On the one hand, actually hearing the stories of others becomes a liminal reminder of the impossibility of corralling all of these stories into one conceptual or interpretive schema, except, of course, the schema of difference. Ironically, however, and on the other hand, it is precisely the schema of difference that brings people to an awareness of the need for deep tolerance and acceptance, the very qualities without which there can be no community, no sense of common belonging. Sometimes the conundrum inspired

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by the irony is the site of provocation, itself a prelude to hermeneutic breakthrough. This was the case, for example, in another class discussing an article on gay and lesbian experience. Students from China reacted in horror to the possible social and cultural acceptance of gays and lesbians, and related stories from their own cultures of how such people are treated. Facing a lesbian student in the class⎯someone who had already gained their respect and trust before ‘coming out’⎯induced a genuine sense of bewilderment and puzzlement, a new genuine openness to learning, and a reciprocal sharing of assumptions and understandings about sexuality generally. The sharing of horizons can easily become stuck in a kind of self-aggrandizing narcissism if an effort is not vigilantly made to show how the dynamic at work in the pedagogical situation has reference in the broader world. That is, the sharing of horizons points to the way that my horizon is never just ‘my’ horizon, but one that opens out on to that of another, and as such is in a condition of perpetual revision toward a more comprehensive understanding and appreciation of the broader world. In this instance is gained the appreciation that no one story can tell the whole story and that hermeneutic suspicion is best directed at pretensions to the same, pretensions to a univocal and monological theory of globalization, for example. The economistic determinism at the heart of the neoliberal agenda of Globalization One must be exposed for the way it limits other ways of human expression and common living; for example, through aesthetics, spirituality, and altruism. The sharing of horizons within communities of difference helps to break down the dichotomy between the private and public spheres and may serve as a kind of prelude to a theory of justice that honors difference while holding every difference accountable to its influence in the broader public realm. It is one thing to hold private views and to honor the right to privacy for those views. But in the age of globalization, when persons and groups now rub shoulders in new and unforeseen ways, the time may soon be when more open expression of personal convictions is necessitated by the requirement to understand more fully and more publicly the lived-out implications of privately held (including privately held by groups and communities) beliefs. In my graduate seminar on religious and moral education, for example, I encourage each person to publicly articulate the convictions of his or her own faith community regarding other faith communities. This becomes a means of ‘facing’ difference, lifting it out of the realm of abstraction and conceptualization, and embodying it in relations between persons. It is one thing for a Seventh Day Adventist student to state as an abstract principle of theology for his faith community that “the Pope is the Antichrist”; it is quite another to state it while directly facing a Roman Catholic friend and colleague in the class, surrounded by others now deeply invested in the outcome of such facing. These others are invested partly because the future of the class⎯its tone, its pedagogical receptiveness, its future possibilities as a place of secure freedom⎯depends on it. They are also invested because they recognize in such a confrontation an exemplification of their own relations of difference, so that the outcome of this

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specific case becomes prototypical for the resolution of their own personal challenges. This kind of ‘outing’ of difference also assists in helping students to understand better the way that their assumptions about others are historically constructed, and as such they must be reexamined and reinterrogated for their time-boundedness. Of course, historicization as a strategy for opening dialogue contains its own theory of history, and it must be recognized that it does not work well within and amongst communities where history is taught as a rigid anamnesis, a memorization of how we got to this point as a way legitimizing why at this point we should never change. Resolving that difficulty must be reserved for another day; here the pedagogical assumption is that history is open, or better, that the future is always open, and that an orientation in the present to an open future is an absolutely necessary precondition, not only for a world more fair and just, but also for one that may be inspired by hope. One of the conditions, then, that the sharing of horizons brings into the classroom can be called the condition of mnemonic reparation, and it has special relevance for curriculum in the age of globalization. Nigerian playwright, essayist, novelist, and poet Wole Soyinka (2000) has called for an international movement to make possible a new kind of reparation in the world for past wrongs, past injustices. This new kind of reparation would not be monetary (“Reparation is not monetary recompense” (p. 31), but a recovery and making public of the subjugated memories of oppressed peoples. For an example, Soyinka pointed to the UNESCO commitment to the preservation of the slave routes in West Africa, establishing a scientific committee to document, preserve, and open up the landmarks of the slave routes for posterity. In such a way, Africans around the world can better concretize their history to turn it into a living voice within the emerging global community. Also, such mnemonic acts reveal the interdependent nature of every identity. 2. Curriculum and pedagogy as being orientated to peace: The best way of understanding this is perhaps through a kind of phenomenology of learning, which may be exemplified through attending closely to the learning act itself. Good examples can be found especially in the practice of learning to play a musical instrument. Contrary to conventional Western theories of musical practice, which are oriented by the desire for personal pleasure, for performance, or even for aesthetic achievement narrowly understood, the Confucian tradition of ancient China always taught music as a way of shaping character, of helping students understand something important about relations in the world. In Confucianism and in Chinese, wen denotes “the arts of peace” (Waley, 1992, p. 39), and they include music, dance, and literature. How is learning to play a musical instrument an art of peace or an act of peacemaking? One does not need to be an expert to come to appreciate this; every diligent student has moments of realizing what is happening through good practice. To every student, beginner or experienced, come occasional moments of sensing deeply that what is at work in the playing can be ascribed to neither the instrument nor the practitioner nor the musical score alone. Instead, a mysterious unity has

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been achieved when all three seem to participate in a reality, a truth even, that transcends any of the individual aspects. And it truly is a moment of peace, a moment of letting go⎯of ego, of culture, or worry or otherness; it becomes an entry into quiet wonder, a sense that as a human being one participates in a most amazing and wonderful mystery. In piano playing, sometimes simply striking a single note and listening deeply and carefully to its reverberation into the broader world can produce a sense of participating in something that is very large and beyond easy conceptual rationalization. In flute playing, there come moments when the breath seems to lose all resistance to the instrument, so that breathing into the instrument becomes the perfect extension of breathing naturally. It is an experience of amazing freedom, in which as player one feels completely in communion with the instrument, and the air seems purer, cleaner, cool, and fresh. Other examples are easy to find. Suddenly discovering the sheer beauty of a Wordsworth poem, or the elegance of a quadratic equation, or the wonderful variegation of wood grain in a shop class⎯all of these experiences constitute a new kind of reconciliation with the world. The finding of the poem not to be brute and inert perhaps as expected, the equation not to be simply a mad random puzzle, and the wood to speak its own story⎯this kind of finding is a form of self-finding, a finding of oneself in the things of the world; indeed, a finding of the world to be a place where I can find myself to be truly at home. This is what is meant in saying that genuine learning is oriented to peace. Such learning, however, has its own requirements, and it is precisely these that find little support in a view of education driven solely by commercial or economic interests. For one thing, such learning requires the nurturing of sustained attention. Staying with the subject or object of study until it begins to reveal itself to you so that you may engage it requires discipline (< L. discere, ‘learn’), which also means the ability to follow something to its true end; that is, to the end of its revelation. In this sense, true learning is a life’s work. Margaret Atwood, one of Canada’s leading novelists and writers, recalled once being at a cocktail party talking with a famous heart surgeon, who proclaimed, “When I retire, I’m going to write a novel.” To which Atwood replied, “When I retire I’m going to perform heart surgery!” Real learning can never be fickle or supercilious; it involves deep attunement to the Way of life. Commercial culture is built on a phenomenology of distraction, and children who are raised in it lose the capacity for sustained attention. The principle of lifelong learning that undergirds the new economy depends upon keeping people off balance, ready to move at a moment’s notice, ready to leave one job to take another, to reskill for this, then that. What is undercut is the capacity for a job to be not just a job, but a life—a place to grow, to develop character, to learn about living, to share relations with others deeply, complexly. ‘Having a job’ without being able to ‘make a living’ is a recipe for social disaster, the manifestations of which first present themselves in the lives of children and youth. For the classroom to be a place of peace seeking and peace finding, privilege must be given to its being a place where people can find themselves through their

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enquiries and through their relations with one another. Above all, it must be a place of care, with its own requirements. There needs to be an adequate material base; the size of the group must not be allowed to intrude on the possibility of forming healthy relations; the teacher must be possessed of true hermeneutic skill to show the essential openness of life and its conversational character; there must be a balance of relations between speech and silence; the curriculum must address real human issues and problems connected hermeneutically to the lives of the students; and the teleological purpose of learning must not be determined in advance of its creative engagement, or at least its given auspices must be held up for regular reexamination. Perhaps above all, pedagogical living in the classroom oriented to peace operates in the tension between completion and incompletion, between knowing and what is yet-to-be-revealed. Such is the foundation of hope. CONCLUSION

It is in the nature of such a broad discussion of globalization and curriculum that “conclusion” is a misnomer. Yet what may be said by way of drawing things to an informal summation? Perhaps the most relevant thing to say about globalization in the contemporary context is to note it as a topic of widespread discussion. Indeed, the fact that, increasingly, people are everywhere using the term as a new kind of backdrop to discussions about a multitude of different issues may signify a new kind of awareness about the underlying singular comprehensiveness of the human condition, a condition in which, to paraphrase a principle from the field of ecology, each one of us is connected irreducibly to every other one. This may be taken as a new foundation for ethical relation in a human world increasingly aware of itself as sharing a common home on the earth, and any efforts to regress into older, more parochial visions must be noted with alarm.

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A FEW MODEST PROPHECIES: The WTO, Globalization, and the Future of Reason

Witnessing Charlene Barshevsky berate delegates at one of the plenary sessions of the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle was enough to send a chill down the spine of any person burdened with a sense of history. As Chief US Trade Representative to the talks, and host convenor, Ms. Barshevsky chastised members for their inability to arrive at a consensus on any of the major issues before them. In a menacing tone, she declared that, as program convenor, she had the right, “and I will use that right,” to alter the decision-making process to make it “smaller, more efficient, more exclusive” (CNN, 1999). That same day, the Organization of African Unity threatened to walk out, protesting, “There is no transparency in the proceedings and African countries are being marginalized and generally excluded on issues of vital importance” (Morton, 1999, p. A12). The Seattle meeting had been proclaimed as an opportunity to plan the globalization agenda for the next millennium. Elimination of trade barriers between nations and states was identified as the top priority to enable the free flow of goods and services in a way that would ensure the prosperity of all the world’s people. Everything from biotechnology to financial services, from clothing manufacture to postgraduate education, was to be subject to negotiation under new liberalized trade rules designed to provide the least impediment to social, cultural, and capital flows. The collapse of the talks, at least on their public face, may point to the essential futility of such a vision and may also mark a fundamental turning point in the rhetoric of globalization that has been in the air for the last 10 years or so. As John Gray (1998) of the London School of Economics has pointed out, the contemporary globalization vision represented by the WTO is primarily an American inspiration and is a remnant of the 18th-century Enlightenment ideal of universal reason, transposed to economic theory. According to this view, reason is a universal quality, and instilling it everywhere, or better, uncovering it everywhere, allowing it to flourish freely without restraint, will result in universal concord and human happiness. In Gray’s words, the United States is “the world’s last great Enlightenment regime” (p. 2). Unfortunately, or fortunately, too much has happened since the 18th century to support this utopian dream any longer. All evidence suggests that reason cannot be ripped out of its social, cultural, and political contexts and that although reason, as the capacity to think and make sense of life, may indeed be a universal quality,

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people and cultures make sense in their own ways according to the circumstances that life has laid before them. Unless this situated character of reason is acknowledged, totalitarianism can be the result, as the second last great Enlightenment regime, the Soviet Union, amply demonstrated: Ownership of the technical and political means to control the manifest rules of reason comes to rule the game. Henceforth, everyone else can be labeled unreasonable, unstable, wild, underdeveloped, feminine, weak, niggardly, primitive, childish, immature, and ideological. The mantra of globalization that has enchanted conservative economists since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher may be, instead of a celebration of enlightenment, a sign of a supernova, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (Thompson, 1995), is “a star that suddenly increases very greatly in brightness because of an explosion ejecting most of its mass” (p. 1399). In other words, we may be witnessing, if only in its early stages, the burning out of a 200year-old vision. Look at what has happened in Britain and New Zealand since the proponents of American-style free trade engineered their social and political designs in the name of global competitiveness. The examples are instructive for Canadians, given the way that the governments of Alberta and Ontario have taken them as worthy of imitation. Not only have the original political proponents of neoliberal economics been voted out of office in both Britain and New Zealand, but they have also left in their wake radically reordered societies that now bear the seeds of increased social anarchy because of intensified inequities, the loss of the middle class, and people’s widespread feeling of being shut out of due political process. In Britain, “labor market mobility” became one of the keynote terms of Thatcherite reform. Essentially, it was a gloss to cover a plethora of reconfigurations in the relation of labor to production. To be competitive globally, companies needed to be more efficient, which meant dismantling the ability of labor unions to define the conditions of work. Work now tended to be contract based, “just-in-time,” without health or pension benefits. The day of career labor with one or two firms had ended. The instability and insecurity that these reforms inaugurated was reflected most clearly in the quality of family life, once regarded as the mainstay of a healthy British culture. In a recent study Matthew D’Ancona (1997) showed the strong connection between a deregulated labor market and family breakdown. If families have to constantly move to where the jobs are and accept increasingly lower wages, what is disrupted is the capacity of family members to bond with one another and with members of their surrounding communities. By 1991 Britain had the highest divorce rate of any country in the European Union (EU), comparable only to that of the United States. Another striking feature in Britain was the unexpected creation of a large underclass of workless people. Gray (1998, p. 237) cited a study in the Observer (January 10, 1997, p. 10) by Paul Gregg and Jonathon Wadsworth of the London School of Economics that showed that from 1975 to 1994 the percentage of

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nonpensioner households in which not a single person was working rose from 6.5% to 19.1%. In Britain today, about one in five households (not counting pensioners) has no active income earner. This represents a magnitude of social disenfranchisement unknown in any other EU country. One of the chief factors in the emergence of the underclass was the Thatcherite move to privatize all municipal housing, which ironically tended to create a new form of dependency culture. If you have no place to live, you have no place to prepare and nurture yourself for work. Then if you do find work, you cannot afford any available housing, so work itself becomes counterproductive. One of the most compelling contradictions of current free-market reform is that it works to weaken all of the traditional social institutions on which it has depended in the past. In Britain the disintegration of public education is clearly linkable to the decline of simple civility and a sense of the common good. The shift in educational policy making from pedagogically oriented thinking to marketoriented thinking, driven by concern for knowledge and skills acquisition over character formation and civic responsibility, has produced an “enterprise culture” that is hyper-competitive and socially divisive (Morris, 1994, p. 21). In 1997 the Conservative Party lost to a new Labour Party that now has as its mandate the rebuilding of social-democratic values in the context of a society in which the historic institutions and policies of social democracy have been almost completely eroded. As John Gray (1998, pp. 22-54) has pointed out, neoliberal, free-market globalization is essentially, deep in its inherent nature, antidemocratic and thereby contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. If the link between politics and economics is elided so that economic theory holds no accountability to the peoples and places in which it is enacted, social anarchy and violence can be virtually assured, as people’s need for a sense of participation in the work of life-making begins to come into play. Given that much of the political and economic leadership in Canada in recent years has taken its lead from the neoliberal, free-trade globalization agenda of New Zealand (which took its cue from Margaret Thatcher), it is instructive to examine the social effects of those policies, especially now that the successive political parties that brought them into being were thrown out of office in November 1999. The most profound change in moving New Zealand from a social democratic state to a state with its eyes on the new globalization agenda was to open the economy to unregulated capital flows, which in turn conferred on transnational capital an effective veto over public policy. As Jane Kelsey (1995, p. 5) described it, within a period of 10 years, virtually all aspects of public service had been converted to a free-market model. Public hospitals were changed to commercial enterprises and compelled to compete with private suppliers of medical care. Education was restructured, with responsibility for the delivery of educational services devolved to local school boards. Schools levied fees for their services and were required to supplement their budgets by commercial activities. Entitlement to welfare benefits was severely cut. Economic and political power shifted outside the rule of the central state into a kind of privatization of power.

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By 1991 almost 20% of the New Zealand population lived below the poverty line, and as Kelsey (1995) noted, the only areas of growth in the public sector were police, courts, and prisons. This turn to a preoccupation with public security is characteristic of all societies that have ridden the free-market globalization agenda since the 1980s under the guidance of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the predecessor of the WTO. According to John Gray (1998), “The principal cost of New Zealand’s experiment has been a loss of social cohesion. Its political aftershock has been a meltdown in which the electoral system was repudiated and all the major parties have been fragmented” (p. 44). In drawing attention to these examples, the point is not to launch into a nostalgic drive for a return to an earlier day. Not only is that impossible, but it also ignores the fundamental changes that have taken place in the world picture, especially since the 1970s. Contemporary globalization theory came into being largely as a consequence of two factors, the computer technology revolution, which brought into being profound changes in the way business could be conducted, and, later, the end of the Cold War. By the late 1970s Euro-American firms began to move off shore to capitalize on cheap labor in new hi-tech production plants. The “Asian Miracle” nations were able to produce goods more efficiently and cheaply than their American counterparts could. And computers made possible the virtualization of international finance, so that national and state governments became unprecedentedly vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of money markets. There is absolutely no possibility of going back to life BC (Before Computers). If the demonstrations on the streets of Seattle against the WTO mean one thing, it may be that ordinary citizens have begun to declare that globalization theory needs to be publicly demystified. The calls for greater transparency in the operations of the WTO, such as that of the Organization of African Unity, speak of the way that more and more people feel that they are being excluded from decisions that will ultimately and deeply affect their lives in terms of fundamental issues such as security of place, working conditions, and the possibility of holding on to a future dream for themselves, their families, their tribe, or their nation. What will be revealed through the work of demystification, however, is a sleeping giant contradiction that at present no one seems happily inclined to awaken, which is why the times are very dangerous and why violence and anarchy may be the dominant realities of the next 20 years or so. The contradiction resides in the fact that democracy and radical free-market globalization are completely incompatible entities. This has been true historically since the very beginning of the internationalization of markets in their current form in the 19th century. The tension within the contradiction will become even more pronounced in the Western industrialized world, because there, the illusion of the link between freedom of markets and freedom of persons has been consistently taught as common sense, even while market freedom wrought social and cultural havoc everywhere else in the world. So people in the West, and maybe especially young people, are now gradually waking up to the fact that for generations they have been lied to⎯lied to by their elders, by their teachers, and by their politicians. There may be no more

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shattering experience than the experience of betrayal, and its byproducts are rage, paranoia, the desire for vengeance, and various forms of vigilantism as individuals and groups struggle to take control of their lives after the loss of trust. Teachers and others actively involved in public education may have an important and even unique role to play in the future as it unfolds. This role can be said to emerge straight from the heart of teaching itself. It has something to do with what seasoned, mature, and successful teachers begin to understand after years of experience living and working with young people and standing in witness to human life as it opens out in everyone’s mutual presence, and that is that a “good life” together has certain normative requirements, certain essential necessities, without which those more cynical students will charge their failing teacher to “Get a life!” What are those normative requirements? In brief, it can be claimed with some certainty that a successful classroom is a place where each student feels that indeed he or she has a place, a place, over time, where relationships can be trusted; where inner dreams as well as demons can be shared without ridicule by both teachers and students alike; where individual differences of color, creed, and origin are seen as contributive to a shared future whose final character is not for anyone in the present to know completely, except as a foretaste, yet the quality of which will depend on how those differences are negotiated in the “now” of everyday experience. The foundational ethic of those negotiations will arise from a deep awareness that the myth of the rational autonomous self, which has anchored the self-identity of Western civilization for the last 300 years or so, from Protestant individualism through Enlightenment rationalism, is indeed a myth, not a fact, and that a far more profound truth may be that there is no Self without Others, no Me without You. Instead of Descartes’ private-enterprise model of epistemological and ontological certainty, “I think; therefore I am,” today it may be more appropriate to say, “We are; therefore I am.” I am always born into a community, a tradition, and a way of life that are always already present before me, and without which my life could not be possible. Of course I can, indeed must, work to change the conditions into which I am born, if they seem unfair, cruel, dull, lifeless; but I cannot begin without reference to them, so that it is always work with others. Without communities, individuals die, from loneliness, from an alienated relation to something larger than themselves, or from the most common disease of private enterprise culture; namely, the delusion of self-enclosure. Teachers in public education today are caught in the centre of a social, political, and cultural whirlwind, as broader forces contend for the right to interpret the world to the young, and it is not clear what the outcome of the contentions will be. Much of what is falling away in public education had to fall away, such as teacherdominated instruction and the excessive specialization of teacher discourse in the name of professionalism, which only served to alienate teachers from common sense and from the ordinary people they are called to serve. The central crisis of identity for teachers today, however, and in the near future, will reside in the

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question of whether or not they can find a creative way through the dominant conceit of their received tradition, which is the very same conceit that drives the globalization agenda of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and which is currently destroying not just public education, but also the very idea of a public. And that is the conceit of Western culture’s specific form of reason being translated into specific institutional forms (such as the public school and the globalized financial system) in the name of universal reason. What makes the times so precarious is the increasingly recognized untenability of the Western conceit even while there is no other logic or voice that seems capable of coming forward to secure the globalizing human community as a community. But maybe that is the point, which is the need for a new kind of dialogue amongst the world’s people regarding the conditions of a shared future. The logic of global competitiveness is nothing other than the logic of war,15 and increasingly thoughtful people around the world may soon be called upon to fight it for a more common survival. In the aftermath, teacherly wisdom may have some important things to say about how to live together, better.

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THE MISSION OF THE HERMENEUTIC SCHOLAR

The language of missions is something with which I am very familiar. My parents were missionaries, first to China in the 1940s, where I was born in the city of Chongqing, Sichuan Province, during the formative years of the Maoist revolution. Later we went to central Africa (Northern Rhodesia/Zambia), which is where I grew up, in the towns of the Copperbelt near the Congo border and on mission stations deep in the savannah bush, where for many African children we were the first White people they had ever seen. Certainly, I felt myself a stranger. I believe that these experiences were formative to my journey into hermeneutics, because as Wilhelm Dilthey an early hermeneutic theorist of the modern period once said, “It is the experience of strangeness that makes interpretation, the work of hermeneutics, necessary” (as cited in Rickman, 1976, p. 78). In a way then, engaging in hermeneutic activity is simply the ordinary work of trying to make sense of things that we don’t understand, things that fall outside of our taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of experience. As Heidegger (1962) said in Being and Time, “Interpretation is the primordial work of Being” (p. 43); so, really, everyone is a hermeneut. To speak of the work of any scholar in terms of “mission” requires its own hermeneutic engagement. If mission basically involves sending (< L. miss, ‘send’), what could this mean in the context of scholarship? Is the scholar one who sends things (mission statements, missives, even missiles), or is s/he sent by someone, something, some organization? All this becomes a question of the motivation, the driving force, or what might be described as the emissary foundation of the scholar, and it is a question of no small importance today when professors and teachers are being told that the emissary foundation of their life and work is to be The Market. More on that later. One may ask too, what is the specific mission of the “hermeneutic” scholar, as distinct from that of a scholar engaged, say, in phenomenological, scientific, or biographical work? Perhaps it is most important to say that, except for the work of philosophical hermeneutics, the object or interest of hermeneutic work is never hermeneutics per se. That is, the scholar oriented by the hermeneutic imagination is not so much interested in pondering the texts and arguments of the hermeneutic tradition as in engaging Life hermeneutically, which means trying to understand ever more profoundly what makes life Life, what makes living a living. This is not playing with words; this is asking for the conditions under which it is possible for us to say that we are alive; that our lives are lively, not deadly; and that living seems worthwhile, not just something to be endured until its putative end.

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Hermeneutics is part of what in the German philosophical tradition is called lebensphilosophie, or life-philosophy, and it’s interest is “understanding,” Verstehen. That Hermes, the Greek messenger god from whom hermeneutics gets its name, was “a young god always” (Stapleton, 1982, p. 141) speaks to the way that living hermeneutically keeps us young, because life is found to be infinitely interesting and engaging, indeed a vocation. Life calls us, draws us into its fullness, its complexities, as the means through which we find ourselves to be human (lit. “of the earth,” < L. humus). What I would like to do in the rest of this chapter is, first of all, situate hermeneutics historically, especially in the modern period from the late 19th century to the mid 1980s. This is in keeping with what the leading contemporary hermeneutic scholar, H.- G. Gadamer (1983), once suggested should be a guiding question for hermeneutic work; namely, “What is the question for which this (text, work of art, idea) is the answer?” What is/are the question/s for which hermeneutics, or the need for interpretation, arises as a response? Answering this question will allow the possibility of seeing how the hermeneutic commitment to human vitality and vivification devolves on certain assumptions about (especially) language and history. Indeed, because these assumptions provide a kind of methodological framework for hermeneutic activity, they also point to hermeneutics’ own limitations as a strategy of inquiry. In its mainline formulations, hermeneutics’ very desire for meaning and understanding is coextensive with the modernity’s project of Enlightenment, and as such it carries within itself the limitations of that project, limitations that have come to light especially through the critiques of postmodern theory, postcolonialism, and, most recently, certain forms of globalization theory. Claims of understanding another person or group can often reflect condescension and subtle domination. Also, as contemporary ecophilosopher Wendell Berry (1999) has suggested, a preoccupation with meaning can get in the way of simple appreciation. Still, wherever one is situated as a teacher, researcher, or citizen, basic insights from the hermeneutic tradition can be helpful both in illuminating the conditions of one’s life and in providing guidance on the meaning of appropriate action in the conduct of that life. That interest will provide direction for the second part of the paper. Hermeneutics, as the art of interpretation, is ancient. There was a school of hermeneutics in Alexandria (Egypt) in the first century BCE, and Aristotle wrote a manuscript called the Peri Hermeneia in which he explored what we are doing when we interpret something. During the Reformation of the 16th century, Protestant reformers tried to delegitimize the Roman Catholic Church by saying that the authority for Church doctrine was the Bible, not the tradition of the Roman church community. This meant that the reformers now had to clarify the means by which they themselves were interpreting scripture, and many texts appeared that attempted to do this. Very notable was Johan Chladenius’s The Correct Interpretation of Reasonable Discourses and Texts, published in 1742. A central question for Protestant theologians was, if scripture can be subject to interpretation,

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what makes an interpretation authoritative? That question remains a vital one to this day, well beyond biblical interpretation. As far as contemporary social sciences are concerned, hermeneutics came to prominence in the 19th century in the movement known as German Romanticism, itself a reaction against the German Idealism of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Especially in the arts (poetry, literature, painting, sculpture), people were concerned with the effects that the excessively rationalistic philosophy of Kant was having on the practice of everyday life. Kant was perhaps the leading philosopher of the European Enlightenment that began in the 17th century. According to him, Reason should rule everything because (a) the universe is inherently reasonable, and therefore (b) to live reasonably is to live well, in accordance with universal law. Living according to intuition or emotion, said Kant, was/is to invite “selfincurred immaturity” (as cited in Schmidt, 1996, p. 42). Of course, today Aboriginal cultures, the women’s movement, and the wars of colonial independence have taught us that, in fact, rather than being universal, what constitutes reasonableness is tied to specific situations of history and place. Indeed, this insight was part of what constituted the hermeneutic revolt against Enlightenment rationalism, as we will see. First though, mention should be made of the work of Freidrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), a Lutheran theologian who wrote “An Outline of Hermeneutics” in 1819, first published in English by New Literary History in 1978. One of Schleiermacher’s main contributions was to revive the role of intuition in human understanding, except that he called it a process of “divination,” to be counterposed to the analytic comparative studies that had underwritten interpretive work to that point. Divining, as a way of coming to an understanding of someone or something, was a “feminine” activity, said Schleiermacher, meaning to imply that the work of interpretation is profoundly creative, that it attempts to creatively suggest possible meanings and interpretations and show relations between things in new ways, rather than simply document or record them or play them off against each other in a kind of epistemological power play. Other contributions of Schleiermacher have continued to be influential even into the present. For example, he indicated how coming to understand something is never a once-and-for-all event, but a continual process of emerging understanding, growing out of a spiraling dialectic between the parts and the whole. A good example is the popular puzzle game in which a small part of an item is shown and the participants are asked to guess what “it,” the whole item, is. To be successful in the game, one has to imagine context clues, to what larger things the part could be connected, and so on. Eventually, enough of these ‘other’ parts converge in one’s mind’s eye for comprehending the whole thing. In the context of human relations, or human understanding, it is easy to see how this same dynamic plays out, with an additional element, the element of perpetual self-transformation. I meet you and form an impression. We have a conversation, and what I learn changes my initial impression. We do something else together, and again my impression is revised. The same thing works for your relationship

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with me. Eventually, we may become friends, whereby our impressions become solidified and we can trust our understanding of each other. Unless we live in close quarters 24 hours of every day, however (and perhaps even then), still each of us changes as we meet the broader world in our individual ways, and for the friendship to continue, we have to translate what we have experienced into terms that each of us can understand. Sometimes this takes a long time, as in the case of young soldiers who leave the comfort and security of home and then travel abroad to both witness and enact atrocities in the name of war. When they return, nobody at home understands what they have been through. A hermeneutic question would be, how can their experiences be rendered into terms comprehensible to their former friends and relations? Indeed, is such a work possible? Perhaps it is always a question of degree, but clearly we can say that without hermeneutics we live with a sense of isolation from one another. Hence it is that H.-G. Gadamer (1979) could say that hermeneutics is the art of “conversation.” As a relational activity, it clearly depends on a certain kind of commitment, the commitment to stay together in the work of gaining understanding. You cannot have a conversation if one partner has no desire for it or if his/her worldview does not value it necessarily. This is, I believe, a big issue for international relations in the age of globalization. What are the implications for a globalizing world of traditions that are exclusive in their self-interpretation, wherein being in conversation with Others does not imply the possibility of change within one’s own worldview? Schleiermacher’s student was Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), who in the late 19th century could be credited with being the first to draw a distinction between the hard or natural sciences and what he called “the human sciences.” The research methods for each, he insisted, must be different: “Nature we can explain, but humans we must understand (Verstehen)” (see his discussion in Dilthey 1989). This is a key point, but in what ways? Explanation involves registering something against a predetermined norm or rule. A does B because of C, and so on, in which case the person or researcher making the claim about B’s behavior already has to be in charge of a catalogue or register of expectations (a canon of ‘knowledge’) regarding the possible effects of C. This is essentially the Kantian logic that hermeneutic scholars were trying to debunk. It is the logic of “the expert,” or “the professional,” the one deemed to be capable of making a claim about something or someone without necessarily requiring a deeply human encounter with it. Among other things, it is the logic of “objectivity” in the name of some external authority such as “scientifically proven knowledge.” Trying to have a meaningful human relationship with an “expert” can often be a very frustrating experience, because the feeling arises that the person isn’t really seeing or hearing you as you understand yourself to be. This is a common problem in certain forms of therapy, for example. If explanation involves applying a rule of causality, what is involved in “understanding,” as Dilthey would have it? He suggested that human nature is different from other forms of nature in that human beings construct their lives

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historically, through the inner and outer dimensions of culture, language, and other contexts. Our human expressions (richly understood through such performatives as art and labor, etc.) can indeed be called “the objectifications of life,” but the work of understanding them can never be finally completed because there is always something new to be uncovered or said about them. Again, this is something we understand well from our relationships—there is always something new to be learned even of those with whom we may feel completely familiar, as we learn to listen to their “story”, their history. Dilthey’s work anticipated many strands now familiar in the human sciences today, such as the interests in biography, autobiography, narrative, and story. Another key figure in the history of hermeneutics is Edmund Husserl (18591938) known mainly today as the originator of phenomenology. Through his theory of “intentionality,” Husserl attempted to overturn the Enlightenment preoccupation with “objective reason.” I cannot be objective in my thinking about the world, said Husserl, because the world is already in my thinking as I think about it. I cannot interpret the world through any categories that can be shown to be separate and distinct from the world because those categories are always already part of the world they may be attempting to explain or interpret. My relation to the world is never one of me, as subject, examining the world as object. Instead, the relationship is better described as one of “intersubjectivity,” a relation between subjects. Husserl’s work can be seen as foreshadowing many later movements, such as systems theory, and ecology. We live in a world of mutually effecting entities; everything I do has an effect on someone else, whether I am aware of it or not. In turn, so am I affected by what others do. Hermeneutics can be described, since Husserl, not just as the study of mutual effect, however, but also as an enactment of a particular kind of responsibility, a taking of responsibility for myself as an integral part of my interpretation of other things, other people, and accepting the fact that my self-understanding must change as my interpretations are shown by the Other to be wrong or in need of revision. Sometimes this is painful, as my ego structure is revealed for what it is; namely, not really mine at all, as a possession, but something constructed through my relations with others, with the world. I am never who I think I am, in any full or final sense, and maybe sometimes this is a good thing. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a student of Husserl who turned the project of phenomenology into a kind of hermeneutic phenomenology of Being. Although Aristotle had made the science of Being the chief purpose of philosophy, it is very difficult to establish what ‘being’ actually is, in itself. All one can do is point to what people actually do and how they give account of themselves and of their place in the world and what the world is for them—their lived sense of Being, or what Heidegger called Dasein. Although Heidegger’s place in Western philosophy is controversial because of his early sympathy for National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s, still his efforts to articulate the human experience of freedom, of existence in the world, of inauthenticity, dread, guilt, destiny, and so on make him one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.

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Not least in importance, yet usually least recognized, is the influence of Asian philosophy, especially Buddhism on Heidegger’s later thought, and thus he may be said to prefigure contemporary attempts to establish an intercivilizational dialogue about basic human understanding (see, for example, Clarke, 1997). Echoing Buddhism, Heidegger said that mortality (or, in Buddhist terms, suffering) is the defining reality of being human, but as human beings we constantly work to forget this, with much of our effort spent in flight from our true being. Because of this “forgetfulness of Being,” we are driven ever forward into despair, or to the nihilism of modern existence. Our authenticity depends on a return to and an acceptance of our finitude, and a recognition that I can never really know, in any final sense, who and where I am. What I can do, however, is describe my Being through its enactments in time, such that being is time, and time is being. Because “language is the home of being” said Heidegger, attending to language, and our use of it, becomes the primary means for understanding the operation of Being in the world. However, all attempts to describe my being-in-the-world themselves participate in a dual action of disclosure and concealment; the more I think I understand something, the more it slips away from me. Again, radical acceptance of the “finitude of disclosure” becomes the condition of my true authenticity. These ideas from Heidegger have remained profoundly influential in the work of current philosophers such as Jacques Derrida (1978) and Emmanuel Levinas (1987), especially as they try to work out a new kind of ‘ethics of human relations’ in the context of eroding nationalisms and increasing cultural diversity in the age of globalization (see Shapiro, 1997). If Heidegger emphasized the linguisticality of being and the importance of exploring its enactments or life-worldliness rather than its essences as a form of metaphysics, his former student Hans-Georg Gadamer 1900-2002), widely recognized as the preeminent philosopher of “interpretation” of the second half of the 20th century, is perhaps best known for three hermeneutic developments: (a) his examination of the relation of method to hermeneutic discovery, (b) his theory of prejudice (or prejudgment), and (c) his articulation of what is translated most commonly as “effective historical consciousness” (Ger.wirkungs-geschichlisches bewusstsein), a term that is an attempt to describe the essential openness of history and tradition. For Gadamer, hermeneutic inquiry shows that the question of method in inquiry cannot be separated from what is being inquired into. It is impossible to establish “correct method” for research in advance of an encounter with what is being investigated. This is because what is being investigated holds at least part of the answer to how it should be investigated. If you want to get to know someone, it is best not to approach him or her with a prior list in your head called “Ten Ways to Make Friends.” It may be helpful in establishing initial contact, but for true friendship to evolve, it is best to let the other person reveal him- or herself on his or her own terms and then start a relationship from this space in between the two of you. This dynamic holds true also for all truly creative research, whether in the hard or human sciences. The fact that “scientific research” holds pride of place in

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our contemporary cultural environment is the legacy of older Kantian (a priorial) and Newtonian (mechanical) views of science that have been co-opted by a new conservative politics wishing to use the term science to protect and stabilize its own view of the world. It has nothing to do with what honest scientists today would say about their work; namely, that it is ‘riddled’ with ambiguity and uncertainty and is always largely interpretive (hermeneutic) rather than factual. Second, for Gadamer, prejudice or prejudgment, rather than being a swear word, is a definitive requirement in the process of understanding. To any encounter I have with another person, or with a poem or painting, I inevitably bring a prejudice or prejudgment or “fore-structure of understanding” that constitutes the necessary starting condition for my interpretation. Without such a prejudice, I have no basis of encounter, nothing for the new person or thing to register upon, from which I can begin the process of understanding, or better, from which together we can come to a shared understanding. Understanding in this sense then involves a “fusion of horizons” whereby what I bring and what you bring to the encounter can be dialogically engaged to produce a condition whereby we feel that we understand each other. What is required for this process of understanding is an openness to my prejudice, not only to see clearly the way that my self-understanding emerges from a set of particular conditions, but also to see how my identity opens out onto the horizon of Other identities so that, really, identity can only be something that “we are,” not something that “I am” exclusively. Hermeneutically speaking, this is true not just of persons, but also of traditions. As Michael Shapiro (1997) has suggested, Jew implies Arab; you can’t have one without the other, as any reading of Hebrew scripture will tell you. Purity of identity is an impossible idea, defied by the simple facts of existence and sustained only through exclusivist ideological or theological positions. Of course, this is a provocative and controversial claim, but hermeneutic research has shown how meanings, interpretations, and identities are always contingent, always dependent, and it seeks to show how those contingencies and dependencies operate in action. In the biblical story of the Exodus, for example, the fact that “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (Exodus 10:20) as part of the process of making the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt possible means that Jewish identity is dependent on a God who also acts through Others, not just to reveal and protect Jewish identity, but also as a reminder that He (sic) is no respecter of persons necessarily when it comes to the fulfillment of the promise of justice and mercy. As recorded in the Second Book of Kings, in the Hebrew Bible, during a drought and famine in the time of the prophet Elijah, when many perished, the prophet of the Lord was sent not to Israel but only to a widow living in Zarephath in the territory of Sidon. Or in the time of the prophet Elisha, many people suffered from leprosy, but no one was healed except a non-Israeli, Naaman the Syrian (II Kings 5). From the perspective of the poststructuralist hermeneutics (as it might be called) of scholars like Derrida (1978) and Caputo (1987), stories of contingency (how identity is constructed through Others), not only refute any theory of pure identity, but also point to how such exclusivist theory depends upon acts of suppression and

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denial, a kind of selective reading that ultimately disallows any truth that might jeopardize prior self-definitions, personal or collective. Poststructuralist hermeneutics, echoing the earlier work of Gadamer, is engaged in the labor of smoking out such repressions and denials in an effort to show the dynamic openness of all interpretation and that human understanding and vitality depends upon such a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” as hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1981) used to describe it. As the work of ‘showing relations,’ hermeneutics is indirectly yet intimately involved in trying to clarify the conditions of ethical human encounter. Gadamer may be arguably regarded as the last formal philosopher of hermeneutics of the modern period. Some scholars, such as John Caputo (1987), have attempted to extend Gadamerian hermeneutics into an engagement with the philosophical preoccupations of the so-called postmodern period of today. Formally speaking though, perhaps the most interesting hermeneutic research being done today can be referred to as “applied hermeneutics,” wherein scholars are using classical hermeneutic principles to interpret different fields of endeavor, such as pedagogy and ecology (Jardine, 2000), international relations (Shapcott, 2001), interreligious dialogue (Pandikattu, 2001), Asian wisdom traditions such as Confucianism (Huang, 2001), mathematics (Brown, 2001), education (Gallagher, 1994) and medicine (Svenaeus, 2001). This work represents not so much the “application of a method” as creative engagement with and the rereading of received traditions of knowledge and ‘information.’ My own work for the past five years has focused on the phenomenon of “globalization” (Smith, 1999, 2000, 2002) in relation to the interests and concerns of teaching, teacher education, pedagogy, and conceptions of citizenship and social ethics in a global era. I believe that globalization and its discontents will be the defining topic of responsible scholarship through the current century, as geopolitical forces converge around issues of “blood and belonging” (Ignatieff, 1995), the meaning of economic welfare (Heilbroner, 1989), and the politics of identity in the age of eroding national borders (Hall & DuGay, 1996). As I see it, contemporary neoliberal economic theory, which was installed by the Reagan administration in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK during the 1980s, and which engaged in unprecedented triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, is now attempting to construct a new form of “totalitarianism” (Spring, 1998) in the world. This totalitarianism, economic in its foundational interests, yet metaphysical and theological in its rationalizations, is responsible for reducing all prior understandings of citizenship to the analytic category of “consumer,” to serve the needs of multinational corporations and global stockholders. It is responsible for creating vast inequalities of wealth worldwide; eroding ordinary people’s sense of place and purpose; diminishing true freedom of persons through unjust and demeaning labor practices; contributing to the construction of social, political, and family violence through preaching the logic of self-interest; severing the connection between commercial and social responsibility by emasculating the powers of governments to intervene on their own people’s behalf; and destroying

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the conditions required for democratic participation in the construction of shared futures. As economic historian Karl Polanyi (1944/1989) described the situation that evolved from the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, this is the age of Homo Oeconomicus (Economic Man [sic]). Everything is increasingly defined in commercial terms (Kuttner 1999). For education the application of neoliberalist principles has resulted in a host of actions designed to change both the nature and the delivery of educational work. Some of the more important features can be noted as follows:16 vigorous attempts to delegitimize public education through documents such as A Nation at Risk and The Holmes Report, which highlighted the failures of public schools rather than their successes; treating education itself as a business with aggressive attempts to commercialize the school environment as well as make it responsible to outcomes or “product”-based measures; emphasizing performance and achievement indicators as a way of cultivating competitiveness between schools and districts; privileging privatization initiatives through strategies of school “choice” and voucher systems; giving strict financial accounting procedures precedence over actual pedagogical need; assaulting teacher unions to deregulate teacher labor to make it more competitive; downloading educational management to local board authorities (site-based management) while retaining curricular and policy authority within state (hence now Market) hands; tying the financing of education to target projects such as the technologization of instruction and the privileging of science and technology subjects in schools and universities to serve the needs of global industrial competitiveness; adopting a human capital resource model for education, whereby curriculum and instruction work should be directed at producing workers for the new globalizing market system; invoking the language of lifelong learning to abate concerns about the end of career labor (expect to lose your job frequently, and reskill, as companies need to perpetually “restructure” to remain globally competitive); aggressive generating of curriculum and educational policies by noneducation groups such as the Business Council on National Issues (Canada), the Business Roundtable (US), the Trilateral Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank (thereby accelerating efforts to “harmonize” curricula across nations and states to enhance the mobility of workers and bring more states into the globalizing web of the new economy); separating debate and discussion of pedagogical issues such as how children best learn and how teachers can best teach humanely from issues of educational management; and, finally, pressuring governments around the world into accepting these actions as a condition for joining the new international trade cartels such as the World Trade Organization. Why would a person with a background in hermeneutics, and a professor of education, be interested in globalization and economics? This requires consideration of a number of factors, all drawn from the hermeneutic tradition as elaborated above. For one thing, my own history, or horizon of understanding as a child of Christian missionaries, has undergone serious reinterpretation in the light

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of postcolonial critiques of the Western episteme. I did not know, as a boy growing up in Central Africa in the 1950s, that I, and my family, were part of an aggressive European imperialism with tentacles all over the world and that the many forms of this imperialism (educational, religious, administrative) were part of a selfappointed civilizing mission on the part of European powers. Actually, ‘civilizing mission’ was simply a rather crude mask for economic exploitation serving the natural resource and market requirements of Europe and America. Looking back, I now see more clearly the hermeneutic failure at work in the colonial period. The British overlords had absolutely no interest in Africans as persons, only as exotica and as cheap labor. The colonial administration almost completely destroyed Africans’ own sense of agency by delegitimizing traditional forms of African community and wisdom. As a European youngster, I was taught nothing about Africans or Africa, only Latin, English literature, and the history and geography of the British empire related in triumphalist terms. The idea that there might be a creative engagement between the cultures that faced each other in those days never occurred to anyone in the colonial administration. I see many of these same dynamics now at play in the North American context. In a sense, colonialism has come full circle to feed on its own progeny, like Chronos, the Greek god who ate his own children. Economic time is chronological time, the clearly measured time necessary to evaluate efficiencies of production (as distinct from kairotic time, such as “in the fullness of time”). Twenty-five percent of Canadian children now live in poverty (Broadbent, 2001). America is currently the most imprisoned nation on earth, with prison labor an accepted factor in economic analysis (Hallinan, 2001) Educational institutions have become propaganda sites for marketing purposes. Typifications of the ideal person have been reduced to narrower and narrower definitions of beauty, intelligence, and skin color, all of which feed into the construction of a Loser Culture. The language of international competitiveness bifurcates the world into winners and losers, and by definition winners must be very few. So what becomes of the rest of humanity? Many of the assumptions of this new “Enterprise Culture” (Keat & Abercrombie, 1990) are now staple aspects of school curricula. For example, the Grade 3 social studies curriculum for my home province of Alberta here in Canada, defines community as “a place where people trade in goods and services” . This is almost a direct paraphrase of Adam Smith’s idea in the 18th century that man’s deepest propensity is “to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another,” a phrase that was eventually to yield the concept of Economic Man (Polanyi, 1944/1989, p. 43). As economic historian Polanyi pointed out, before the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, markets were always an accessory to society, never its primary telos. Today, The Market is God (Cox, 1999), and economics is its transcendental theology (Loy, 1998). Children are being “branded” early by marketers to ensure their longtime loyalty (Acuff & Reiher, 1997) but this exploitation of children to serve the insatiable appetites of The Market must be described as a human development that is nothing short of diabolical.

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It is precisely because economics has become severed from historical consciousness that hermeneutic scholars have special responsibility to “engage the powers” (Wink, 1992) of our time. Fukuyama’s (1993) celebration of “the end of history” is well known and only little debated, as the decline of funding for humanities subjects in universities attests. Not only is historical consciousness itself, in the hermeneutic sense, in decline, but it is also now being relegated to exotic irrelevance by economic planners conditioned by the instrumental reasoning of science. For example, the World Trade Organization, in order to protect the multibillion-dollar American agribusiness machine, has declared that European citizens’ preference for nonchemical beef is a mark of “historical culture” rather than of enlightened culture based upon science (Shiva, 1997). There is not space here to detail the kind of analysis now being undertaken by scholars around the world deeply concerned with the globalization phenomena. One of the most penetrating inquiries is that of John McMurtry (1998) in Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System. This is a profoundly hermeneutic work that reveals the evolution of the global market system while unpacking its epistemological and teleological orientations. Amory Starr (2000) has also conducted an excellent study of globalization’s movements of discontent. What is still lacking in much of the globalization analysis, including McMurtry’s (1998), is a consideration of ‘what to do.’ It is here that hermeneutics has important insights to offer in its understanding of the deeply intersubjective nature of human knowing and its determination to keep the book of life open for constant reading and rereading. The road ahead will be long and difficult and, I suspect, violent, partly because contemporary economic theory has its roots deep in certain forms of protestant Christian theology (see Weber, 1920/1980; Tawney, 1950) whereby it obtains the sacralization of its own self-understandings. The Kingdom of God has been conflated with a culturally specific and very narrow interpretation of human welfare. It is also connected to the Christendom ideal that, since the conversion of Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity in the fourth century CE, has married the Christian faith (understood in a particular kind of way) with empire building. Although many contemporary New Testament scholars (see Borg, 2001) are now deconstructing this historical relationship, to show its remove from the more universal wisdom and mercy traditions of the Church, the fact that global exploitation is linked to the West’s own sacred myths and selfunderstandings means that disentangling this linkage in the name of a new more equitable and just global ethics will require unprecedented forms of intelligence, stamina, strength, and goodwill. The forces of resistance are and will be great, but Hermes’s most special gift may be the art of breaking through the codes of dogmatic interpretation to show a better, freer, more comprehensive way. So . . . may the arts of interpretation and understanding keep serving people everywhere, in the name of human vivification and peace.

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NOTES 1

Swami Atmaswarupananda is a personal acquaintance. Europe also means countries such as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia that were settled by Europeans in the 19th century and whose institutional infrastructures are still defined by the earlier premises of Europe. 3 For background reading related to what immediately follows regarding 9/11, see Ahmed (2002), Chossudovsky (2002), Griffin (2004, 2005), and numerous Web links at Onlinejournal.com. 4 For a detailed discussion of the theological debate within the Roman Catholic church in the 16th century surrounding the decision to legitimize genocide, see Dussel 1994, pp. xx-yy. I have summarized the contents of this debate in Smith (2005). 5 Most ‘alternative’ information today is found on the Internet as Web sites such as Onlinejournal.com, Black Radical Congress, Center for Globalization Research, and the World Social Forum, and so on. I also draw attention to the Public Knowledge Project, organized by John Willinsky at the University of British Columbia, Canada. 6 For an excellent brief history of rocket science, see the extended essay by Fought and Quilmartin (2002). I am indebted to their work here. 7 For an elaborated version of this debate, see Dussel (1995), pp. 66ff. 8 See Morton Enslin (1956), Christian Beginnings, New York: Harper and Row, for a discussion of how the earliest Christian missionaries engaged Greek philosophy to reformulate their own self-understanding. 9 For a more detailed elaboration, see Smith (1999). 10 These are discussed more fully in Spring (1998), Ball (2000), Peters ( 1996), Barlow and Robertson (1994), and many other sources. 11 The Internet has become the place of gathering for alternative research and interpretation of events in the public domain. By way of example, for evidence of the ways that the US Republican party obtained the presidency for George W. Bush through tampering with the electoral rights of African American voters, see the website http://www.GregoryPalast.com. 12 The support that the Canadian oil exploration and development company, Talisman, indirectly gives to the government of the Sudan, and hence to its civil war with the local Muslim population, has been a topic of great controversy in Canadian media in recent years. 13 Outstanding alternative sources of news include the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (http://www.policyalternatives.ca/) and the Black Radical Congress (http://www.blackradicalcongress.org/). 14 For an excellent survey of organizations and movements that are attempting to define civil life alternatively to the scripts of Globalization One, see Starr (2000). 2

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NOTES 15

This insight was suggested to me in Ursula Franklin’s remark at a conference organized by the Canadian Association of University Teachers on the theme “Universities in the Public Interest,” held in Ottawa, ON, October 29-31, 1999. Franklin said in a public address, “Global competitiveness is the practice of war.” 16 These are discussed more fully in Spring (1998), Ball (2000), Peters (1996), Barlow and Robertson (1994), and many others.

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INDEX 1492, 35, 41, 53, 64, 74, 75 1492 World System, 64 9/11, xxi, xxii, xxiv, 40, 61, 62, 78, 116 Abraham, 40 Abu-Lughod, 36 Adultomorphism, 93 aesthetics of emptiness, xxiv Age of Europe, 78 Ahmed, 3, 5, 116 Albright, 12, 17, 66, 79 aletheia, 9, 29 Alexander, xxi, 41, 42, 75 Alexandrian library, 44 alterity, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 68 Amin, xxii, 41, 64, 66, 76 Amore, 42 anadialogic, 9 analogic, 9 Anglo-American alliance, xxiii, 2 Anglo-American tradition, xxi, xxiv apocalypticism, 60 Aristotle, xxv, 40, 106, 109 Arkin, 5 Arnold, 49 Arnove and Torres, 82 arts of peace, 96 Aryan philosophy, 51 Aryanism, 49 Asanuma, 89 Ashoka, 42 Asian Crisis, 23 Atmaswarupananda, 56, 57, 116 Atwood, 97 avatars, 43 avidya, 40 Bacon, 47 Barlow and Robertson, 21, 23, 90 Barshevsky, 99 Basham, 43 Batchelor, 49, 50, 51 Bateson, 52 Baum, 80 Beaud, 38 Becker, 78 Bello, 2, 5, 7, 10, 69, 78 Benedetti and DeHart,, 82 Berlin Conference, 18 Berry, 2, 106 Bhagavad Gita, 48 biblicism, 60 Bill Clinton, 79

binary logic, 83, 84 Blum, 12 Bohm, 52 Boot, 3 border crossing, 13 borderless world, 15, 18, 22, 84 Borg, 54, 115 Brahman, 40 Bretton Woods Agreement, 20 Broadbent, 88, 114 Brown, 2, 112 Bruer, 45 Bruneau and Savage, 2 Brzezinski, 2, 61, 78 Buddhism, x, 42, 44, 47, 50, 51, 54, 57, 68, 110 Buddhist, xvii, 13, 40, 42, 45, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 68, 110 Burbules and Torres, 91 Bush, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 11, 37, 62, 65, 66, 116 Business Council on National Issues, 84, 113 Business Roundtable, 84, 113 Campbell, 18 Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), 19 Cantor, 60 Capra, 52 Caputo, 111, 112 Carnoy, 18 Casino Economy, 87 Catholic Church, 47, 60, 64, 106 Cedric Bell, 44 Centre for Globalization Research, xxi Century of the School, 88 Chah, 57 Chandler, 39 Chang, 65 Chaudhuri, 36 Cheney, 3, 63, 66 Chidester, 46 Child Study, 72 China, 4, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48, 53, 61, 73, 78, 89, 95, 96, 105 Chinese, xxvii, 36, 44, 45, 46, 47, 73, 96 Chladenius, 106 Choice Theory, 65 Chomsky, xiii, 1, 11 Chossudovsky, 61, 63, 116 Christ, 43, 44, 49, 59, 77 Christendom, xv, 37, 55, 86 Christendom ideal, xv, 86, 115

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INDEX Christian, xxv, 7, 25, 35, 37, 40, 41, 42, 47, 49, 53, 54, 56, 59, 60, 64, 66, 67, 68, 76, 77, 113, 115, 116 Christianity, xv, 7, 40, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 59, 77, 86, 115 Christocentric Europeanism, 68 Christo-European modernity, 64 Christos, 43 Chronos, 114 citizenship education, 66, 69 civilization, 3, 6, 7, 8, 45, 51, 53, 54, 56, 59, 66, 76, 83, 103 Cixous, 19 Clarke, 20, 46, 47, 48, 54, 86, 87, 110 CNN, 99 cognitive self-enclosure, 75 Cold War, xxi, xxii, 2, 9, 20, 21, 22, 83, 85, 87, 102, 112 Cole, 44, 54 colonialism, xiv, 3, 81, 114 commensality, 54 commensurability, 12 commercialization, 16, 24, 25 Comparative Discourse of Empire, 66 competitiveness, 20, 22, 27, 84, 87, 113, 114, 117 complementarity, 12, 47 Comte de Gobineau, 49 condition of mutuality, 92 Confucian, 13, 46, 47, 52, 57, 89, 96 Confucianism, 23, 46, 47, 48, 57, 96, 112 Confucius, 45, 46, 58 consciousness, 2, 43, 50, 56, 57, 63, 66, 74, 81, 115 constructivism, x, 16, 17, 31 consumption, xxiii, xxvi, 18, 24, 31, 39 conversation, 9, 24, 25, 36, 38, 46, 51, 55, 72, 107, 108 conversion, xv, 55, 56, 76, 86, 115 Cooper, 2 Corn, 5 Cox, 54, 86, 114 Crossan, 54 culpable immaturity, 7, 76 cult of information, 22, 39 culture of lying, 9 curriculum studies, 81, 82, 83 D’Ancona, 100 Damasus I, 42, 59 Daniel, xxvi Darwin, 8, 18, 51, 78 Dasein, 109 de las Casas, 8, 76 de Sepulveda, 8, 76 deconstructionism, 52

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Deep Ecology, 52 deification in Christ, 43 DeKerkhove, 82 delocalization, 24, 26, 30 deregulation of labor, 22 Derrida, 12, 19, 52, 110, 111 Descartes, xiii, 8, 78, 103 desire, xxvi, 9, 12, 26, 40, 50, 51, 56, 65, 71, 72, 96, 103, 106, 108 Devall, 52 development of underdevelopment, 9 developmentalism, 7, 8 Dharma, 42, 50 Difference, 37, 75, 80 Digital Age, 93 Dilthey, 105, 108 divine chosenness, 40, 60 Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, 53, 59 Dussel, xiv, xxiii, xxvi, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 37, 38, 44, 50, 53, 59, 60, 64, 66, 67, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 116 East-West engagement, 36, 53, 55, 57 ecology, x, 16, 17, 31, 50, 52, 79, 98, 109, 112 economic theory, xv, 18, 21, 23, 24, 30, 33, 38, 48, 82, 84, 86, 88, 99, 101, 112, 115 effective historical consciousness, 110 empire, xv, 1, 2, 23, 47, 66, 67 enactivism, 31 enantiomorphism, 6 encounters, 57 Encyclopedistes, 47 end of history, 21, 66, 115, 121 enfraudening, xv, xvi, 1 engage the powers, 115 Enlightenment, x, xiv, xv, 7, 8, 10, 16, 18, 35, 45, 48, 86, 99, 100, 103, 106, 107, 109 Enterprise Culture, 114 episteme, 8, 12, 19, 75, 114 epistemological crisis, 16, 19 epistemological revolution, x, 16, 17, 19 eschatological dispensation, 15 eschatology, 25, 34, 60 eschaton, 21 Euro-American modernity, xxvi, 7 Euro-American tradition, xxvii, 15, 18, 53 Eurocentric, 7, 9, 35, 49, 66, 78, 80 Eurocentrism, 13, 41, 76, 77, 78 European Enlightenment, xxiii, 39, 85, 107 evangelical Christian, 61 evangelical Christianity, xiv, 25 evangelicalism, 54, 55 Eze, 18 Fallacy of BadAppleism, xxv

INDEX Fanon, 19 Father Antonio del Calancha, 44 Feld, 51 Fernandez-Armesto, 36 Fields, 36 finding home, 29 finding truth, 29, 33 Fischer-Schreiber, 42 forgetfulness of Being, 110 Fought and Quilmartin, 73, 116 Frank, 36, 38, 48 Frankfurt School, 9 Franklin, 27, 116 Free Trade Agreement (FTA), 85 Friedman, 21, 84, 85 Friedrichs, 43 frozen futurism, 25, 26, 27 Fukuyama, 21, 66, 83, 115 fundamentalism, 3, 22, 25, 41, 51, 91 Fusang, 45 Gadamer, x, xi, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112 Galeano, 67, 74 Gallagher, 112 Gandhi, 12 Gard, 39 Gates, 83 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 102 Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), 91 Girard, xxv, 64 global cities, 23, 87 global citizenship, 65 global competitiveness, 20, 21, 23, 26, 100 globalization, xxi, xxv, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 55, 60, 78, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115 glocal, 82 Goizueta, 10 Good Life, 39, 74 Goodstein, xxiii Grand Game, 61 Gray, 10, 18, 22, 24, 26, 78, 85, 89, 99, 100, 101, 102 Greek rationalism, 48 Greider, 21, 87 Griffiths, 79 Groothuis, 52 Gunder Frank, 9 Guo, 37 HAARP weapon, 63 Hall and DuGay, 112 Hallinan, 114 Halper and Clarke, 35

Hamerton-Kelly, 64 Hammond, 42 Hanh, 45 Harpur, 37, 41, 42, 54, 60 Hays, 39 Hebrew Bible, 111 Hegel, xiii, 7, 18, 36, 44, 59, 77, 78 Heidegger, 105, 109, 110 Heilbroner, 112 Heinberg, xxiii Held, Goldblatt, McGrew, and Perraton, 17 hermeneutic, xxvi, 7, 12, 24, 41, 56, 60, 71, 74, 95, 98, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115 hermeneutic failure, 114 hermeneutic inquiry, 110 hermeneutic suspicion, 95 hermeneutics, xi, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 115 hermeneutics of suspicion, 112 Hermes, 106, 115 Hershock, 32 hesychiastic, 43 Hindu, xxvi, 37, 40, 43, 56, 75 Hinduism, 40, 42, 43, 44, 57, 68 Hirst and Thompson, 15 historical culture, 115 Hobart, xxvii Hobson, xxiv, xxvii, 35, 36, 45, 58 Hochschild, xxii, 83 Hodgson, 36 Holmes Report, 84, 113 Homo Oeconomicus, xxii, 82, 91, 113 horizon of understanding, 113 Hsun-Tzu, 46 Huang, 112 hubris, 35, 40, 66 Hui Neng, 32 human capital, 21, 84, 113 human cognition, 52, 79 Huntington, 13, 91 Husserl, 109 I Ching, 47 Ian Angel, 85 identity, xxv, 19, 31, 68 Ignatieff, 112 Ikenberry, 73 imaginary, xv, 6, 36, 45, 52, 56, 65, 73, 77, 78, 79, 86 imperium, 3, 6, 7, 75 implicate order, 79 Incas, 44 Industrial Revolution, 83, 113, 114 infanticide, 64 information technologies, xxvii, 25, 81, 87

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INDEX intentionality, 109 intercivilizational dialogue, 54, 110 International Monetary Fund, 4, 19, 45, 84, 89, 104, 113 interorigination, 45 interpretation, xxi, xxii, 27, 51, 54, 56, 88, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116 interreligious dialogue, 112 Japan, 20, 46, 47, 50, 83, 89 Jardine, x, xv, 112 Jeshua, 64 Jesuit, 46 Jesus, xiii, 42, 43, 49, 64, 79 John 3-16, 65 Johnson, 3 Joshua, 64 Joshua 1-24, 64 Jung, 10 Kant, 7, 8, 18, 30, 39, 47, 50, 53, 64, 66, 78, 86, 107 Kantianism, 50 Keat and Abercrombie, 84, 114 Kelsey, 101, 102 Kennedy, 10, 69, 93 Kerckhove, xxiii Kessen, 72 King, 42, 50 Kingdom of God, 115 knowledgeable ignorance, xxvi knowledge-based economy, 90 knowledge-ism, 39 Koestler, 54 Krauthammer, 3 Krishna, 43 Kuttner, 38, 83, 113 Lasch, 5 Lau, 58 League of Nations, 3, 49 lebensphilosophie, 106 Leibniz, 47 Leland, 45 Lemus, 90 Levinas, 9, 68, 110 Libby, 3, 4 logic of freedom, 67, 68 logic of global competitiveness, 104 logic of immanence, xxiv, xxvii, 35, 58 logic of sacrifice, 65, 67 London School of Economics, 85, 99, 100 Long Boom, 18, 20 Loser Culture, 26, 114 Lost Childhood, 93 Loy, 13, 15, 23, 25, 50, 53, 65, 68, 78, 86, 114 Luke 14–14-24, 76

132

Lyotard, 19 machoism, 8 Mack, 41, 54, 59, 64 Madsen, 62 Mallo, 63 Maori, 44 Market as God, The, 86 market logic, 21, 23, 25, 34 Market, The, xv, 21, 25, 27, 65, 67, 69, 105, 114 Marty and Appleby, 22, 91 Marx, xiii, 11 Master of Heaven, 46 Maturana and Varela, 52 Maya, 45, 64 McChesney, xxiii, 1, 88 McClintock, 19 McLuhan, 82 McMurtry, 1, 6, 7, 12, 38, 66, 68, 72, 78, 82, 85, 86, 90, 115 meditation, 57 meditative sensibility, xxv, 50, 55, 57 Mencius, 46 Mertz, 45 Millennium Challenge Account, 6 missionaries, 42, 46, 61, 105, 113, 116 mnemonic reparation, 96 Montaigne, 45 Moore, 7, 62 Morris, 101 Morton, 99, 116 Moser, 65 mysticism, 40, 54 myth, 7, 8, 9, 11, 15, 23, 37, 49, 53, 54, 60, 64, 103 myth of emancipative reason, 7, 8, 9, 11, 53, 64 myth of modernity, 7, 8 myth of sacrifice, 8, 11, 53, 64 Naess, 52 Nandy, 75, 92 narcissism, xxiv, xxv, 8, 95 Nation at Risk, 20, 84, 113 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 3 nemesis, 35, 40, 66 neoconservative, 35 neoliberalism, xxi, 11, 21, 81, 84, 85, 86 New Knowledge Economy, 39, 57 New Literary History, 107 New Physics, 52 New Zealand, 21, 44, 77, 84, 100, 101, 102, 116 Nietzsche, 12, 50, 51 Noble Savage, 48, 49

INDEX nondualistic theory of persons, 69 Norberg-Hodge, 22 normalization, 29 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 85 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 35, 84 Notovitch, 49 Nwedamutswu, 89 objective reason, 109 Occident, 77 OECD, 16, 18, 21 Oil Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 20 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 16, 88 Orient, 41, 77 oriental renaissance, 48 orientation, 40 Padoux, xxiv Paine, 13 Pandikattu, 112 Park, 25 parochial, 10, 37, 55, 60, 98 Pasha and Samatar, 54 Patriot Act, 2, 5 Payer, 38 Peace Corp, 19 Peace of Westphalia, 23, 45 pedagogical violence, xxvi, 9 pedagogy, xxiii, 11, 33, 66, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 112 pedagogy of the Now, 28 Peirce, 54 Pembina Institute of Canada, 90 Pennycook, 87 personal truth, 29, 30, 31 Peters and Humes, 39, 57 phenomenology, 8, 10, 50, 53, 79, 96, 97, 109 phenomenology of distraction, 97 philosophe, 45, 46 Philosophy East and West, 53 physiocrat, 48 Piaget, x, 79 Polanyi, xxii, 82, 113, 114 postcolonialism, 19, 76, 83, 106 Postman, 31 postmodern, 2, 9, 11, 16, 31, 49, 52, 86, 106, 112 postmodernism, 19, 76, 86 postscholarship, 20 poststructuralism, 19, 76, 83 poststructuralist hermeneutics, 111 prejudice, 13, 39, 52, 110, 111 Protestant, xxv, 23, 24, 41, 55, 60, 103, 106

Ptolemy I, 42 quantum theory, 52 Queen Maya, 45 Quesnay, 48 Radhakrishnan, 43, 55, 56 Ranke-Heinemann, 64, 65 Rational Autonomous Self, 32 Ratner, 5 Rawlinson, 43 religion and militarism, 74 relocalization, 28 Research Unit for Political Economy, 2, 3, 62, 63, 79 Ricci, 46 Rickman, 105 Ricoeur, 112 Rifkin, 21, 87 Riley, 40 Roberts, xxiii rocket science, 72, 73, 74, 76, 116 rocket scientist, 71, 72 Rodney, 56 Roman Catholic, 95, 106, 116 Rosen, 3 Roszak, 39 Rousseau, 48, 49 Rumsfeld, 4, 66 Same, xi, 80 Sassen, 23, 87 Schiller, 1, 88 Schlegel, 48, 51 Schleiermacher, 107, 108 Schmidt, 18, 30, 86, 107 Schopenhauer, 50, 51 Schuhmacher and Woerner, 43 Schumacher, 52 Schwab, 48 scientific rationalism, 30 Self, xxiv, 32, 37, 68, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 94, 103 self-enclosure, xxiv, 2, 8, 32, 38, 44, 75, 103 Sennett, 91 Seventh Day Adventist, 95 Shadow, 68 shadow side, xxv Shakyamuni Buddha, 45 Shantideva, xvii, 50 Shapcott, 112 Shapiro, 110, 111 Shiva, 115 Slaughter and Leslie, 38 Smith, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xxii, 8, 38, 48, 55, 64, 78, 112, 114, 116 Solomatin, 63 Song dynasty, 44

133

INDEX Soyinka, 96 Spencer, 82 Spring, 6, 17, 21, 23, 89, 112, 116, 117 Stapleton, 106 Starr, 115, 116 Steinitz, 92 Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs), 89 subjectivity, xxiv, 8, 77, 78, 79, 80, 92 subjectivity theory, 79 Sunyata, xxvii supernova, 6, 100 Svenaeus, 112 Tao, 43 Taoism, 44, 47, 57, 68 Taoist, 52, 57 Tapscott, 93 Tawney, 15, 115 teacher preparation, x, 17 teacherly wisdom, 104 technologization of instruction, 84, 113 the flag of the world, 77 Theodorus, 37, 42 Theodosius I, 59 Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, 42 Theosophists, 49 Third World Resurgence, 22 Thompson, xxvii, 1, 6, 48, 58, 74, 81, 100 Thoreau, 36 Titley, 38 totalitarianism, 6, 100, 112 transmodernity, 10 Trilateral Commission, 84, 113 Trungpa, 58 truth as home, 32 truth as shared, 29, 31, 32 tuam sat asi, xxvi, 37, 75 Tulio Arends, 44 underside of modernity, 12, 66 UNESCO, 19, 96 United Nations, 19, 49, 84 Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, 49 universal history, 7, 44, 59 University of Alberta, 57, 94 University Service Commission (WUSC), 19 Upanishads, 48

134

Van Gogh, 49 Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 52 Vasquez de Coronado, 44 Vedanta, 57 Vedantic, 56, 75 Verstehen, 106, 108 Victoria, 50 Vining, 45 Voice from the Outside, 66 Voltaire, 45, 47 Volunteer Service Organization (VSO), 19 von Hayek, 21, 84, 85 Wallerstein, 64 Way, xvii, 35, 39, 41, 43, 73, 97 Weatherford, 13, 75 Webb, 47 Weber, 13, 15, 79, 115 Weber-Pilwax, 13 Western imagination, 35, 36, 37 Westheimer, 2 White European Man, 79 Will, xvi, 13, 51 will to power, 51 Wink, 115 wisdom, xxiv, xxvi, 23, 25, 27, 44, 49, 52, 55, 57, 80, 112, 114, 115 WITOR (Who Is the One Researching?), 94 Wolf, 35, 36, 37 Wolfowitz, 3, 4, 66 World as Will, 50 World Bank, 4, 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 45, 84, 89, 90, 104, 113 World Parliament of Religions, 51 World System, 41 World Trade Center, 3, 68 World Trade Organization (WTO), 85, 90, 99, 104, 113, 115 Xavier, 46 Xu Dashou, 46 Yergin, xxii, 61 Yupa Indians, 44 Zen, xxiv, 49, 50 Zizek, 44, 54 Zweig and Abram, 68 Zwicker, 2