In Global Peace Through The Global University System

2003 Edited by T. Varis, T. Utsumi, and W. R. Klemm

University of Tampere, Hameenlinna, Finland

GLOBAL LEARNING:

For Peace and Civility

Majid Tehranian

University of Hawaii at Manoa

"Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe."

H. G. Wells

This essay reviews the current debate on the future of the university, its possible demise, and its more probable transformation. The essay particularly focuses on the role that the university can play in promoting peace and civility. It argues that to fulfill that role, the university has to (a) rapidly adopt the new information and communication technologies (ICTs), (b) employ them in the service of globalizing its curricula, and (c) move from closed to open learning systems in which local knowledge is advanced and enriched by global knowledge.

Mixed Blessings

A Chinese proverb seems to have cast a spell upon our Information Age. "May you be born in interesting times," the proverb thus wishes us a mixed blessing. We are indeed living in interesting times. Global markets and communication have made higher levels of material and cultural life accessible to increasing numbers of people. Global financial institutions have facilitated unprecedented levels of foreign trade and investment. Global movements of labor are not as vast as movements of capital, goods, and services. But voluntary and forced population movements have turned the major world cities into multicultural melting pots. Global television networks (notably CNN, BBC, STAR, and Aljazeera) are bringing the news of the world into the intimacy of our living spaces and bedrooms. The Internet and World Wide Web have connected the world in unimaginable networks. Global virtual universities are burgeoning everywhere in the cyberspace. The Global University System, for instance, is of particular interest. To eradicate poverty through distant education, it is focused on reaching the rural and remote areas of the globe. To circumvent the absence of coaxial cables in the less developed countries, its use of wireless technology is an admirable example of technological leapfrogging.

According to Moore's Law, supported by historical trends since 1971, microchips are doubling their capacity every two years. Although this may slow down in the future, the Information Revolution has been thus continuing in full force ("Information Technology," The Economist Survey, May 10, 2003: 46ff). Great technological transformations in information and communication have obviously facilitated stunning global changes.

Under the impact of such changes, it is timely to ask what the university as the oldest civilizing global institutions can contribute to world peace and civility. As the name suggests, a university is or should be dedicated to the study of universal problems. But most universities around the world are, in fact, primarily focused on local, national, or regional preoccupations. In the meantime, the new technologies have transcended the barriers of time and space. To live up to their old mission of universalism, universities are thus facing new challenges.

Can global learning, broadly speaking, civilize a world that is caught in deadly conflicts? Following the end of the Cold War and particularly since September 11, 2001, we seem to have entered a global civil war without physical and moral boundaries. Employing state and private networks as the channels and terrorism as a weapon of choice, the new war has turned civilization into an ideological battle cry. The fanatics on all sides are ostensibly fighting in the cause of Christian, Islamic, or Jewish civilizations.

We clearly live in an uneven but intimately connected world. The annual United Nations Human Development Reports have demonstrated growing global gaps among the world's rich and poor. These gaps roughly correspond to a global digital divide. That divide threatens the future peace of the planet. Since 1945, all inter and intra-state wars have been fought in the less developed areas of the world. Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East, Africa, former Yugoslavia, and Chechnya have been the burning spots. That shows that poverty and violence go hand in hand.

New epidemics such as AIDS and SARS also demonstrate the heavy costs of a networked but uneven world. Images and viruses travel freely across the globe. Television brings the images of Hollywood extravagance into the slums across the world. Because of its poor public health facilities, Africa south of the Sahara is by far the greatest victim of AIDS. Since 1976, China's rush to a market economy has left the Chinese rural and urban slums behind and vulnerable to epidemics such as SARS. But the Chinese Diaspora of some 50 million immigrants around the world has brought the viruses to Hong Kong, Singapore, Toronto, and San Francisco.

The End of Civility?

Civilization and civility are murky concepts. Those terms have been so abused that it is tempting to consider them beyond salvation. They can be of course abandoned. But that would impoverish our language. In politics of discourse, it is always preferable to engage in a dialogue on normative but controversial topics such as democracy, freedom, patriotism, peace, civilization, and civility.

Beginning with Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis (1993, 1996), the concept of civilization has assumed a center stage in global discourse. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, the world also has been intently focused on the North-South rather than the East-West conflicts. On the presumption of Huntington's analysis, some politicians and states have also contemplated a possible bloody war of civilizations. A feverish international debate has ensued. Voices countering the Huntington thesis have been raised. Benjamin Barber (1995) has characterized the conflict as "Jihad vs. McWorld." More generically, I have called the conflict between two current world pathologies: "Identity versus Commodity Fetishism." (Tehranian 1981). Edward Said (2001) has called the Huntington thesis "a clash of ignorance." Tariq Ali (2002) has called it a clash of market and religious fundamentalisms.

To counter the clash of cultures, in 1996, the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research chose "Dialogue of Civilizations for Global Citizenship" for its motto. Four years later, in 2000, the Institute brought together peace scholars from eight civilizations to engage each other in a serious dialogue. The results were later published in Dialogue of Civilizations: A New Peace Agenda for a New Millennium, including perspectives from Shamanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Secular Humanism.

At the initiative of President Mohammad Khatami of Iran, the United Nations designated 2001 as the Year of Dialogue among Civilizations. Ironically, 2001 coincided with the September 11^th terrorist attack on the United States. That tragedy seems to have ushered in a new Age of Terrorism. The new era threatens to pitch the world's privileged against the world's under-privileged in a global civil war. The clash could be, as Huntington has put it, "between the West and the rest." In a New York Times article, on November 27, 2002, Thomas Friedman dramatized "the clash" by an imaginary letter from President George W. Bush to the Muslim world warning it of the dire consequences of its belligerence. The letter was followed in March 2003 by a United States invasion of Iraq. The destruction of Afghanistan under the Soviet, Taliban, and U. S. occupation (1979 onward) and of Iraq under Saddam Hussein and the Anglo-American occupation (1968 to the present) seems to have borne out Huntington's prophecy. The U.S. aim is ostensibly to reconstruct Afghanistan and Iraq along democratic lines. However, history has taught us that building democracy is not like making an omelet. You cannot build democracy by breaking a few heads. It takes years, even decades and sometimes centuries of hard work to institutionalize the rule of law, periodic elections, and non-violent transitions of power.

Are we facing a conflict of unabashed material interests such as the control of Middle East oil, irreconcilable confrontation of fanaticisms, or an unembellished clash of civilizations? All three factors are probably at work in a complex bundle to camouflage human greed and ignorance. The challenge facing the world continues to be how to educate the globe's 6.2 billion people in avoiding future catastrophes such as a nuclear or environmental holocaust. Such an education calls for a revival of the core values of compassion and enlightenment embedded in all great civilizations - East or West, North or South. But it also demands the development of the cognitive and professional skills needed for survival in a technologically driven world.

The End of University?

In the meantime, three concurrent transformations are at work - in higher education, knowledge modalities, and civilizational boundaries. Under the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), the transformation in higher education has already begun. The explosion of virtual universities seems to be overtaking the functions of traditional universities. Eli Noam (1995) has argued that the end of university is near. According to this view, conventional universities have already lost much of their functions of knowledge production (to transnational corporations and think tanks), knowledge distribution (to virtual universities), and knowledge storage (to Value Added Networks, data banks, electronic libraries, Internet, and World Wide Web). In the meantime, some conventional universities, however, have responded to the challenge. Many universities have already launched or are experimenting with a complex variety of distance education programs. University of Phoenix, an internet-driven institution of higher education, enrolls more students than any other in the United States.

Universities are not however knowledge factories. They are vital and interactive social institutions. Along with other cultural and scientific institutions (religious, artistic, literary, and scientific establishments), they act as the moral and intellectual custodians of their societies. They are important conduits for socialization, recruitment, innovation, reflection, service, and empowerment (Tehranian 1996). Tiffin and Rajasingham (forthcoming) persuasively argue that a more universal higher education is now made technologically possible by liberating learning from time and space.

The new virtual universities are globalizing, democratizing, and transforming knowledge. Conventional universities in the Hindu-Buddhist, Confucian, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic worlds imposed certain boundaries on knowledge. Those boundaries were closely associated with metaphysical worldviews. Modern universities imposed a different set of boundaries on knowledge closely tied to the new positivism and empiricism of modern science. The parameters of knowledge have expanded with paradigm shifts from Newtonian to Darwinian and Einsteinian worldviews (Kuhn, 1962). String and chaos theories have further expanded those parameters. But virtual universities are further expanding the boundaries by relativitizing all knowledge.

Those who claim to have arrived at the Truth, whether metaphysical or scientific, are increasingly under the suspicion that they have lost it. Truth is increasingly considered to be the search for the truths. Two prominent theologians, one Jewish and another Muslim, have called for tolerance, nay celebration, of differences (Sacks 2002; Soroush 1378/1999). That means dialogue with other peoples, cultures, and civilizations. In this fashion, the concept of civilization itself has to undergo a profound transformation.

As Arnold Toynbee (1948) has aptly put it, "Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor." Considering the atrocities of the 20^th century, the most violent in human history, civilization can no longer to be considered as an obtained trophy by any nation or region of the world. Rather, it must be viewed as a human journey, a process of becoming. No nation can therefore claim to have arrived. Those who claim to be fully civilized may be standing at the edge of barbarism. Clash of civilizations may be a gory game only for the fanatics. Dialogue among civilizations is an imperative for negotiating problems and solutions. If fostered by conventional as well as virtual universities, such new perspectives can perhaps save humanity from the follies and catastrophes of its own making.

That is the good news. However, the same information and communication technologies that have immensely enhanced educational opportunities have also enabled state and private terrorists to plan globally for terror in a communication, financial, and political networks. The same technologies also have placed us in a global fishbowl. To pacify the revolutionary poor hungering for bread, Marie Antoinette once suggested, "Let them eat cake." She would have been better informed today viewing the images of famine in Africa and elsewhere as portrayed by the global television networks. Such utter ignorance of the world by the affluent would have been unthinkable.

On the other hand, the same ICTs have enabled the world's poor and marginalized population to witness the life style of the rich on television. Exposure to global advertising has whetted their appetite for consumer goods that are effectively out of their reach. Rising expectations and frustrations among the poor are displaying themselves in rising alienation, regression, and aggression. The human insecurities of the marginalized are in turn mirrored in the human insecurities of the entrenched. Ghettoes of the poor in rural and urban slums thus find their mirror image in the ghettoes of the gated communities of the rich defended by electronic surveillance.

Ten Commandments For Peace And Civility

The following Ten Commandments are suggestive rather than sacrosanct or exhaustive. But if they could provide a starting point for the discussion of the mission of global learning, they would have served their purpose:

1. Human conflict is inevitable but it can be constructive if you could observe certain peaceful rules of thought and conduct.

2. Allow for a cool-off period after the peak of a conflict until emotions simmer down and the sweet voices of compassion and reason can be heard.

3. Do not be self-righteous; truth has many faces; yours is only one of them.

4. Do not engage in a blame game; it leads to a never-ending cycle of verbal violence.

5. Do not engage in physical acts of violence; it leads to a never-ending cycle of violence.

6. Even if it hurts your sense of pride, listen to and acknowledge the truth on the other side(s).

7. Engage the other side(s) in a genuine dialogue to see if there can be a common ground for common understanding.

8. Consider the different options for resolving your conflict weighing the cost and benefits for each side of conflict.

9. By consensus, choose the option(s) that reasonably satisfies the interests of all sides.

10. If reaching a common agreement proves impossible, agree to disagree and postpone the negotiations until such time that all parties to the disputes are ready to try again.

Conclusion

Can global learning channel the human energies presently mobilized for violence into human efforts for global peace, civility, and development?

The future depends on the response to that question. Human civilization has been historically a torch passed on in a relay marathon from some world regions to others - from the river basins of the old world (the Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Yellow Rivers) to the new world (Western Europe and North America). Information and Communication Technologies today have created the physical infrastructure for a truly global civilization. The moral and institutional infrastructures for that civilization are, however, lacking.

Can global learning fill the vacuum? Yes, if global learning is infused with the values of compassion and civility. There are however no short cuts to salvation. But observing certain rules of civility and open learning are helpful in the peaceful management of human conflicts.

References

Ali, Tariq (2002). The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity. London: Verso.

Huntington, Samuel P. (1993). The clash of civilizations, Foreign Affairs, Summer.

Huntington, Samuel P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions, 2^nd ed. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Noam, Eli (1995). Electronics and the dim future of the university, Science, 270, 247-249.

Sacks, Jonathan (2002) The dignity of difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. London and New York: Continuum.

Said, Edward (2001) The clash of ignorance, The Nation, October 12.

Soroush, Abdol-Karim (1378/1999). Sarathaye mostaghim (The Straight Paths). Tehran: Sarat Cultural Foundation.

Tehranian, Majid (1981) The fetish of identity: Communications revolution and fundamentalist revivals, Media Asia, 8, 1.

Tehranian, Majid (1996). The end of university? The Information Society, 12, 441-447.

Tehranian, Majid, and Chappell, David W. (Eds.) (2002). Dialogue of civilizations: A new peace agenda for the new millennium. London: I. B. Tauris.

Tiffin, John and Lalita Rajasingham, The idea of a global virtual university, forthcoming

Author Biographical Sketch

Majid Tehranian, Professor School of Communications University of Hawaii at Manoa 2550 Campus Road, Room 309 Honolulu, HI 96822, USA 808-956-3353 Fax: 808-988-4483 majid@hawaii.edu www2.hawaii.edu/~majid or, Director, Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research 1600 Kapiolani Blvd., Suite 1111 Honolulu, HI 96814, USA 808-955-8231 Fax: 808-955-6476 majid@toda.org www.toda.org

Majid Tehranian is currently professor of international communication at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and director of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research (Tokyo and Honolulu). A graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard, Tehranian's publications include over 20 books and 100 articles in a dozen languages. He also edits Peace & Policy as well as the Toda Institute Book Series. A global nomad, Tehranian has been banished to paradise where he surfs the Pacific and the Net.