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Recently we received a message from an alumna in Argentina, congratulating us on this web site and also saying, "it is thrilling to feel at home again". I understood immediately what she meant, but it was still a startling sentiment! Sentiment indeed, that degraded currency in today's (deliberately?) cynical world. Is there something about our Sacré-Cœur education which, literally, "calls us home"? My teenage daughter, (our Webmaster), looks at me askance when I express thoughts of this kind. She accuses me of nostalgia. I plead guilty to this as I explain to her the Greek roots of the word: nostos: home; algos: pain. Perhaps this pain is as old as the ancient Greeks, probably older, because "home" has never been an easy concept to define. Millenia of human endeavour have gone into this definition, and not just that of exiles. If one is to believe Hegel (whom I quote here in loose paraphrase), "home is the place where one's ancestors lived and are buried, where one lives in familiarity with one's neighbours, one's culture and the natural world". A nice description, until one remembers that Hegel formulated this description in order to define what was "natural" in contrast to the situation of the Jews. I believe that in the age of globalisation, nostalgia in the true sense of the word, not AIDS, is the most dangerous global disease of our time. We all ache to belong, Kosovo being only the latest on the list of casualties, for which a "cure" may be too late. AIDS is tragic, but at least resources are being devoted to the aim of ameliorating the disease, if not curing it. ( I cannot bring myself to believe, however compelling the "moral" or "humanitarian" justifications for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, expressed by no less a figure than Vaclev Havel, for eamxple, that it actually constitutes a real amelioration of the situation.) Globalisation risks making us all "homeless" because it first of all takes away our "markers", the fixed points which orient us and give us a sense of orientation and direction. This confusion is deliberately cultivated by the purveyors of the phenomenon, not just its "salesmen", but also its critics. To confuse and baffle us serves their ends. They are deliberately using cheap magicians' sleights-of-hand, but let us remind ourselves that what is complex is not necessarily incomprehensible. I venture here a brief summary of what I believe are the salient points, in the hope that brevity is not necessarily simplistic: Two main "spheres of influence" (to use a term from the colonial era which is by no means inappropriate) have been carved out so far:
In both these spheres, critics ranging from sociologists, journalists and political commentators to nation-states, have focused on the primacy of the "West" being of the utmost concern (the "West" being, in some instances, shorthand for the United States). Yet the "West" is just as vulnerable, as all of us are, to the dangers of our times. While few societies have been truly "equitable", today more than ever, we are being forced to accept the supposed inevitability of a world made up of "winners" and "losers". When an individual, or even a whole community, cannot "compete" in the global marketplace, they can lose any prospect of an independent livelihood. More insidiously, the writer Thomas Friedman says, "today cultures are offered up for global consumption and tested against one another...in a brutal Darwinian fashion...you could go to sleep at night thinking you're an Indian, an Egyptian, an Israeli, a Chinese or a Brazilian and wake up to find all your kids look like Ginger Spice". (1) Quite suddenly, a new entity called "the international community" has been created, whose name can be invoked to instantly justify decisions of all magnitudes, yet even in the most liberal democracies, these justifications appear to be less the result of consultative processes than something called "managing public opinion". It is little wonder that "losers" of all kinds are manifesting their dissent, usually in violent ways, from social upheaval to sectarianism, war and the worst excesses of "ethnic cleansing". If we are not to live in a "global village" owned by multinational corporations and inhabited by communities whose only means of expression is the latest opinion poll, and where at the fringes tyrants and fanatics rule the darkness, another form of human collectivity must exist to engage with the powers-that-would-be. Of course a name has already been coined for this, it is called "the international civil society" and it would be the third force that would encounter economic and political globalisation. Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, has called for civil society to be a major participant at the Millennium proceedings of the General Assembly in 2000 (2). But of what is this civil society to consist? I think this question is very relevant to us as members of AMASC. First of all, current organisation and representation of civil society seems to centre around non-government organisations (NGOs) and we may soon officially acquire this status on a ratified international basis. NGOs have already shown an enormous capacity to promote values beyond narrow commercial or political interests. The global climate treaty arising from the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the campaign for the banning of anti-personnel landmines and the movement to establish an International Court of Justice have been largely inspired and mobilised by NGOs. For all this, NGOs as they currently exist have great limitations, of which we must remind ourselves. The worst of these is narrowness of vision, of a background based on special interests which become too specialised. "The best of them, the ablest and most passionate, often suffer most from tunnel vision, judging every public act by how it affects their particular interest...A society in which the piling up of special interests replaces a single strong voice for the common good is unlikely to fare well...In the long run a stronger civil society could also be more fragmented, producing a weaker sense of common identity and purpose..." (3) There are many individuals who have risen from our ranks - both living and dead - and who I believe have derived their strengths from our particular kind of formation, and who have worked and are working to create the kind of "common identity and purpose" which builds a better world. Now I am also going to be audacious enough to say that we must also do this more consciously as an organisation. We must transcend narrowness to become a different kind of NGO if we are indeed to become one, for are we not a ready-made international community in the true sense of the term? Our very membership of this organisation is the product of a certain kind of audacity: of courage and of vision. Writing around the time of St. Madeleine Sophie's birth, the economist Adam Smith "pointed out that the English agricultural worker commonly had in his lowly cottage all sorts of products from distant countries that had been through many hands. Not so in France, where distances were so much greater and local cultures much more distinct" (4). Coming from this isolated world, our Foundress lived to see the foundation of over a hundred different Houses of her Society in 16 different countries. In an age when missionary activities were so often a form of cultural imperialism, she created institutions in each of those countries which respected local traditions and cultures: this common inheritance capable of accommodating diversity is ours today. At a time when women played a marginal role in society, she believed that society itself could be recreated in the home. The creation of a true civil society in the "new world order" which is in the process of becoming requires a similar enlargement of vision. Such a society should aspire to be "civil" in both senses of the word: non-partisan and not aligned to any particular ulterior interest in profit or power, but also a society of grace, of values and humanity. I am not pretending that any of this will be simple or painless. Nor will it be achieved overnight, or even in our lifetimes, although it is a project we might hope will be taken up by our children and grandchildren. It requires commitment, energy, and above all, expertise (and indeed, I appeal to all our alumnae who are much more qualified than I to contribute their thoughts, knowledge, ideas and ideals to this discussion!) Globalisation, which has promised to unite us all, seems to have resulted in increasing differentiation. The gulf lies not just between the "haves" and the "have-nots", but between those who have a future and those who don't. For this reason I think we need to revise our notions of "charity" or even of the "social contract". As Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong writes in his excellent book East and West, "For a time, maybe, you can keep declining industries going at the exhausted heart of declining communities. It is easy to regard that as an act of benevolence, an act of cultural solidarity, provided you yourselves do not have to go on living in a community rotting away at the centre, with no future save trying to defy markets and consumers for just a little longer. The bigger and more positive challenge is to help those communities acquire new vitality (5). Unlike Patten, I have less faith in any state's ability to take on this challenge; it is more likely to be one that a strong and decent civil society could address. As crises unfold and human ties fragment, it is easy to be discouraged. Who are we to engage in these enormous arenas of world-wide power? Isn't this being a bit quixotic? Yes it is! Perhaps it is time we redefined what it means to be a "winner" or a "loser". In his essay "the Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote", the scholar Pierre Ryckmans writes: 'The famous multibillionaire Ted Turner made a remarkable statement some years ago. He said he disliked Christianity, as he felt it was "a religion of losers". How very true!... 'The word "quixotic"...has entered the common language, with the meaning "hopelessly naive and idealistic", "ridiculously impractical", "doomed to fail". That this epithet can be used now in an exclusively pejorative sense not only shows that we have ceased to read Cervantes and to understand his character, but more fundamentally it reveals that our culture has drifted away from its spiritual roots. 'Make no mistake: for all its earthiness, its cynical jests, its bawdy and scatological realism, Cervantes' masterpiece is anchored in Christianity - more specifically , in Spanish Catholicism, with its strong mystical drive. In this very connection, Unamuno remarked that John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Ignatius of Loyola did not reject rationality, nor did they distrust scientific knowledge; what led them to their mysticism was simply the perception of "an intolerable disparity between the hugeness of their desire and the smallness of reality". 'In his quest...Don Quixote suffered repeated defeats. Because he refused to adjust "the hugeness of his desire" to "the smallness of reality", he was doomed to perpetual failure. Only a culture based upon "a religion of losers" could produce such a hero. 'What we should remember, however, is this...: the successful man adapts himself to the world. The loser persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the loser.'(6) It may be quixotic to envision a "global village" which is not just an advertising term, or a marketplace for the multinationals, or a field for the military planners and the geopoliticians. But let us dream about it anyway, that place for which we all have nostalgia; a place of trust, inclusion and true human relationships: everybody's homeland.
JOSEPHINE BARCELON NOTES:
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