Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 41-42, 2004

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 291-297

Kane X. Faucher

University of Western Ontario

How to Build a Globality without Organs

Mihai I. Spariosu, Global Intelligence and Human Development. Toward an ecology of global learning. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005; 296 pp.; ISBN: 026269316x (pbk.); LC call no.: LC1090.S65; US$23.00

Spariosu’s book doubtless charts difficult and choppy waters, and the optimistic and arguably ambitious task he sets forth is the very challenge we must collectively and individually face in a rapidly shifting globo-social climate. Rather than to remain complicit with doomspeak pontiffs or ideologically-imbricated disciplinary specialists, Spariosu contends that the effort necessary to face the real challenges of the coming century entail a concerted effort that forces us to widen our perspectival approaches, methods, and models. What Spariosu observes as the failings in contemporary practices fashioned to resolve local-global problems are not merely dismissed out of hand as non-viable, but that the limitations facing various disciplinary and political initiatives can be remedied given his emendations to existing practices that would respond and attend to the new and real conditions of our shared global heritage. Hence, he champions a transdiciplinary model of educational reform that would steer our current stultifera navis to a more certain degree of safety, prosperity, and sustainability. The trappings of ideological allegiance only serve to hinder a true sense of the globality-globalism split, rendering the populace and its governors myopically fixed to archaic ideals that will only bring about, at the least the further inter-national antagonisms, and at worst the ruin of the planet we all share. After (re)mapping conceptions of locality-globality and localism-globalism, Spariosu engages a project of “deep (post-) structure” which attempts to put forth a self-admitted utopic direction for intercultural dialogue and educational reform. Of course, educational reforms are never new, but rarely employed to the strict letter of their intentions – that is, as Spariosu cites the example of the United Nations University, what begins as a properly good idea may cease to function as such in practice when seized upon by a legion of cold-blooded administrators, careerists, and trustee-bodies that are appointed according to political and financial stature rather than by some Aristotelian idea of virtue or excellence that would be manifest by academic criteria. Spariosu quite rightly criticizes not only the distorted trajectories of various [end page 291] political machinations and the inherently all-too-real souring conditions of our institutions of higher learning, but he dares to do what so few are willing or capable of doing in the kind of cynical malaise of our contemporary condition: to advance a prospective project that would better alleviate these ills in order to maximize on the nascent, ignored, or abused opportunities already available to us. To this end, he draws from the long history of theoretical and practical wisdom – be it Platonic, Sufist, or Confucianist – in order to present a critical mass of ideas that have always been with us, but never implemented as a whole.

Despite Spariosu’s ambitious clarion call for real and sustainable local-global change, and in due respect to his own admission that the particularities are not specifically addressed so as to ground the fundamental principles of this wide-ranging reform of proper resonance (rather than negative amplifying feedback loops that only cripple any chance at reform), we should here deal with various specific problems that may still obstruct Spariosu’s vision of a dynamic and intercultural global environment, as well as perhaps note the inherent difficulties in the logic of his educational reforms.

In terms of Global Intelligence there are a few problems that require some address. For instance, the division between what he has in mind for a global intelligence schema may either be perceived as or distorted to fit the criteria for a rough envelopmentalization doctrine of post-democratic think-tankism. Although Spariosu seems to follow the Aristotelian dictate that intelligence is the key to apprehending fundamental principles, and though he does advocate the collaborative resonance of academic and non-academic stakeholders, he speaks of a local-global elite that is to spearhead such a program. If he means precisely “leadership,” then perhaps the word choice of “elite” may not incite a clandestine exclusion. Staying true to his principle of a local-global network of inclusion, the notion of elite may thusly be spared the critical fire it may inspire.

To know is not necessarily to do, just as knowing what is “ethically right” is no guarantee of right ethical performance. A global education schema may increase the statistical odds of international cooperation efforts under the guise of a “global care” structure, but it also runs the risk of local or national reductions. The Nietzschean question rings: Who are the “teachers” of the global intelligence community, and who devises its “curriculum”? By what criteria? How can practitioners of this new global logic divorce themselves from their inculcated ideological formations and national concerns without advancing a Rawlsian perspective of that problematic “veil of ignorance”? If liberal democracy is the preferred mode of government, actual or ideal, should we not investigate as to why this is, for whom this is ideal, and if we could not [end page 292] construct a more viable form of governmental system that would better attend to the demands of our newly shared global situation? We may, in the final analysis, still be trying to resolve newly arising conflicts with the same old tools and methods – the outmoded means of applying archaic ideological perspectives on a complex dynamic of competing ideologies with no center beyond those illusory objectifications of late capitalist wealth-flow and the veiled (resurgent) messianism of various political figures who chart the new waters of globalism with more assertive and possible means of exerting changes than an average citizen, whether we like it or not. Global intelligence also runs into the serious problem of being too optimistic a solution, perhaps assuming that the average citizen with its values is the new showpiece production of modern media and its methods of indoctrinating, homogenizing, and reducing the citizenry to the basest elements of forced choice within a rigid propagandistic strategy that merely mollifies its “consumers” with more panem et circenses. If global intelligence is to “work,” it must find a way to circumvent the real and narcotizing effects of the media’s manipulation of subjects which may take one of two forms: 1. Educating the market and political elite and hope for a trickle down effect; or, 2. By resorting to the same propagandistic procedures that popular media employs (ubiquity, repetition, compartmentalization, social difference reduction and games of forced choice) through a counter-doctrine. Ellul’s analysis still holds salience in this regard where the axes of vertical and horizontal methods of propagandistic control is no different now than during the terrors of Nazism and Stalinism (although, it may be noted, the Western democratic model has improved upon these surreptitious social engineering projects by promising the false totem of “individual choice” which is always in a prescribed limit set down by corporateers and media barons). In the final chapter, Spariosu is optimistic about the co-opting of the New Media as a means of promoting the global intelligence education, but such a top-down approach can only work if the means of utilizing the popular media are available. We cannot assume here that everyone is reasonable or without onerous self-interests that give no mind to the pressing demands of our global condition. It may turn out that we may have to a) convince those successful media networks such as Fox, ABC, etc., to significantly alter their programming to reflect the need for global intelligence, which is perhaps a task worthy of Sisyphus; and, b) to, as Locke says, “cozen” others into such knowledge. As Plato states in The Republic, education cannot be a coercive activity.

Global intelligence may promote a more thorough global awareness to the tenuous yet deeply imbricated awareness of our shared global [end page 293] condition, but we cannot guarantee that vicious self-interest will not continue to take pole position in the actions and decisions of those in power that have already defined their rule sets and agendas in a rigid, anachronistic fashion. That is to say, old habits die hard. There may also be a hidden and distorted clause that justifies the continuation of grievous outsourcing of production under slavish labour conditions, claiming that this corporate-oriented husbandry of our developing international cousins is indeed a form of global awareness, albeit to the advantage of the few to the detriment of the many. One need only to take stock in what our current “global intelligence” actually contains as its knowledge-element to determine the daunting task facing Spariosu’s solution: what is more global than Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and the like? The success of these metacorporate entities is their industrious talent to reduce constitutive knowledge-elements to their readily identifiable regime of signs, and then to grant the postcolonialist “handshake-up” to the local employment base to perpetuate the metacorporate operations and its dominant global expansionism. Even Spariosu’s solution of tailoring education to respond to both global and local community needs has already been in the service of corporations, most notably with those corporations such as McDonald’s that will merely make a menu alteration to suit the local tastes.

Spariosu claims that these bleak forecasts cannot offer any significant innovative solutions to our shared global plight, and readily implicates a contingent of thinkers who advocate a resistance strategy against capitalist exploitation as somewhat bankrupt in concerns to providing us with a more viable solution that would foster a positive paradigmatic shift. However, paradigmatic shifts are not simple. In the past, such shifts have never taken place by way of concerted mass action, per se, but through a tragic event. To follow the history of science, a paradigm shift has only occurred when a certain maximum point of salience has been reached and there emerges, collectively within the scientific community, a crisis point. In that case, it is not the individual scientist whose innovative thinking spearheads the shift, but rather that the scientist – responding to crisis – becomes an avatar of a larger collective transformation. If it were simply up to individuals, then Nietzsche’s philosophy would have gained ground much sooner, but as he stated, his thoughts were “uncanny” and “too soon,” which is to say that the dominant paradigm had yet to reach that crisis point which would have been receptive to the type of innovation Nietzsche presented. If one were to undertake the arduous task of performing a “global” symptomatology, then one could read the symptoms as indicative of where possible change may occur that would have any lasting effects, and be able to assess if the dominant paradigm would be receptive to a significant alteration. Regrettably, it seems that it has [end page 294] always been the crisis-event that opens the way to change and not the actions of concerted individuals. The one exception to this rule would be, sadly enough, marketing where demand can be created for a new product in advance of its release to the consumer public – but even this operates within a paradigmatic parameter wherein the new “product” is inscribed within an objectively stable system. The trade-off in this strategy is that it produces “fads” that have an acknowledged ephemerality or shelf-life, and so cognizant of the lack of any lasting permanent change, corporations can respond to local transformations in taste or preference (usually inculcated with the aid of ubiquitous media and a sensitivity to what has already been successful), and maximize on the trend until the “fad” reaches its economic zenith and trails off (only to return, perhaps, as retro or kitsch which has been shown to be a brilliant strategy of repackaging the old and catering to a false sense of cultural nostalgia).

The tall task of global intelligence presupposes that it is even possible, given the wild diversity of global participants, that we may collectivize our efforts in being able to understand and respond to what is in the benefit of all human beings. Is this a globalized version of John Stuart Mill’s “maximum good for the maximum number,” and if so, how are we to determine the concrete conditions of the ambiguous term of “benefit”? Spariosu includes in this model all other life on the planet as well, which I read to mean to include other taxonomic kingdoms such as plants and animals. However, the sketchy terrain of something which is to the benefit of all beings would need to be more precisely defined insofar as we must determine whether the protection of all life is merely for the sustainability of the environment so that human beings can continue to live (which does not necessarily benefit all beings), or if he means to include such issues as pertains to animal rights, veganism, and the like which are concerned about the benefits of animal treatment; i.e., that which would be a benefit to animals would not include their being kept in cloistered conditions to serve as a means to our ends. This would mean that we, as interested in the benefit of all life, would need to honour this pledge by abolishing the meat and dairy industries as no more than an Auschwitz for animals where vegetarian options are immediately available in those regions of the world (such as the West) where we are capable of making said choice.

As for Spariosu’s educational reforms which may be said to form the centerpiece for grounding and promoting global intelligence, he advocates the pressing need for academic self-governance rather than the corporate bureaucratism that is now firmly lodged within the structure of our institutions of higher learning. However, supposing that such self-governance was granted or even possible, the constituent fear is this: that the corporate entity would still maintain its phantom presence and exert its [end page 295] influence from a new position of reduced responsibility. That is, we cannot give short shrift and underestimate these corporate entities and their innate flexibility to changing conditions, for they may be just as resourceful as the Roman Empire in granting self-governance to the conquered whilst still reaping the benefits of their relation to the institution. Moreover, if we insist on a more privileged self-governing position, how will this entice our corporate “overlords” to stay and continue to invest in the institution, especially given the grievous fact that our ethical push would be at variance with their bottom line interests? One could appeal to government for more assistance to cover the vacuum left by now disinterested corporations and their moguls, as well as an appeal to local private sector patronage, but this would presuppose that either of these entities would follow suit according to a reasonable plan, which is perhaps too strong a presupposition to make. In this instance, the institution is caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

A further problem inheres in Spariosu’s proposed educational reform. So intent it is on furthering a transdisciplinary program attentive to global concerns that it runs the risk of reducing education to its utilitarian ends. Sustained intra-disciplinary and micro-disciplinary could not necessarily contribute to this utilitarian schema; for instance, an academic who is studying Carolingian miniscule for knowledge’s sake may find him or herself outmoded by this newly embroidered academy of use-value. Moreover, although admirable, the focus on broadening the disciplinary boundaries of a curriculum to encompass the three branches of knowledge may in fact lead to a stretching too thin of sustained focus on an area of specialty to the detriment of learning a particular area of knowledge thoroughly. As the knowledge base continues to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay current even in one’s own disciplinary milieu that this proposed “across the board” curriculum may not be entirely feasible. This is not to say that this non-linear and integrative model is impossible since it has been shown to work in certain institutions, but politically within the institution this could create a severe divide between what may be called a think-tank and the core disciplines, with the latter at risk of losing much needed funding to a transdiscipline that can better demonstrate its use and relevance to a non-academic body of potential patrons. Although he does suggest the dissolution of disciplines proper, this may be a bit hasty and potentially insensitive to those whose critical and rigorous acumen has informed the disciplinary choices they have made, within the broader framework of an institution whose disciplinary compartments have granted the tools and resources such scholars require. [end page 296]

Moreover, this experimental curriculum with its removal of financial incentives to academic administrators at a more brief tenure in that capacity, mandatory courses and internships in academic management for doctoral students, and the like may place an unwholesome burden on already overworked academic professionals and students. This is not to say that such incentives could not be introduced in certain measure, but that one must address the current demands of faculty and students and determine whether this seemingly increased workload is feasible. Although I concur with the introduction of academic management courses and internships for doctoral students where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, a balance of already existing demands must be struck since if it impedes the more immediate focus on academic performance then its use will be compromised.

Spariosu is to be lauded for both the courage of this proposal and the consistent rigour that links this book with his previous contributions. The modesty in which he presents his argument and suggested reforms should make him immune to virulent criticism, and rather inspire, foster, and encourage us to seriously consider how he has signaled the symptomatological problems facing our changing global environment. Overcoming the rigid, homogeneous, reductionist, and factionalist power structures in dominance is no facile task, nor one that can be rushed into practice, thereby making Spariosu’s book a kind of prolegomena to a future globally-aware prosperity.