| A Buddhist View of Globalization |
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22nd Jan 07 - David Loy, Buddhist Peace Fellowship The above reflections on dana and merit-making bring us to the larger issue of a Buddhist perspective on the economic globalization. We have already noticed that traditional Buddhist teachings do not include a developed social theory but do have many important social implications. Those implications can be developed to analyze and understand the new world order. The first thing to be noticed is also perhaps the most important: as the parable of the unwise king shows, Buddhism does not separate economic issues from ethical or spiritual ones. The notion that economics is a "social science" discovering and applying impersonal economic laws obscures two important truths. First, who gets what, and who does not, always has moral dimensions, so production and distribution of economic goods and services should not be left only to the supposedly objective rules of the marketplace. If some people have much more than they need, and others have much less, some sort of redistribution is necessary. Dana is the traditional Buddhist way of redistributing. The second important truth is that no economic system is value-free; every system of production and consumption encourages the development of certain values and discourages others. As Phra Payutto, Thailand's most distinguished scholar-monk, puts it: It may be asked how it is possible for economics to be free of values when, in fact, it is rooted in the human mind. The economic process begins with want, continues with choice, and ends with satisfaction, all of which are functions of the mind. Abstract values are thus the beginning, the middle and the end of economics, and so it is impossible for economics to be value-free. Yet as it stands, many economists avoid any consideration of values, ethics, or mental qualities, despite the fact that these will always have a bearing on economic concerns.6 This clarifies the basic Buddhist approach. When we evaluate an economic system, we should consider not only how efficiently it produces and distributes goods, but also its effects on human values, and through them its larger social effects. The collective values that it encourages should be consistent with the individual Buddhist values that reduce our dukkha. The crucial issue is whether our economic system is conducive to the ethical and spiritual development of its members, because individual and social values cannot be delinked. Much of the philosophical reflection on economics has focused on questions about human nature. Those who defend market capitalism argue that its emphasis on competition and personal gain is grounded in the fact that humans are fundamentally self-centered and self-interested. Critics of capitalism argue that our basic nature is more cooperative and generous that is, we are naturally more selfless. Buddhism avoids that debate by taking a different approach. The Buddha emphasized that we all have both unwholesome and unwholesome traits (kusala/akusalamula). The important issue is the practical matter of how to reduce our unwholesome characteristics and develop the more wholesome ones. This process is symbolized by the lotus flower. Although rooted in the mud and muck at the bottom of a pond, the lotus grows upwards to bloom on the surface, thus representing our potential to purify ourselves. What are our unwholesome characteristics? They are usually summarized as the "three poisons" or three roots of evil: lobha greed, dosa ill-will and moha delusion.7 The goal of the Buddhist way of life is to eliminate these roots by transforming them into their positive counterparts: greed into generosity (dana), ill-will into loving-kindness (metta), and delusion into wisdom (prajna). If collective economic values should not be separated from personal moral values, the important issue becomes: which traits does our globalizing economic system encourage? Greed is an unpopular word both in corporate boardrooms and in economic theory. Economists talk about demand, but their concern to be objective and value-neutral does not allow them to evaluate different types of demand. From a Buddhist perspective, however, our capitalist system promotes and even requires greed in two ways. The "engine" of the economic process is the desire for continual profits, and in order to keep making those profits people must keep wanting to consume more. Harnessing this type of motivation has been extraordinarily successful depending, of course, on your definition of success. According to the Worldwatch Institute, more goods and services were consumed in the forty years between 1950 and 1990 (measured in constant dollars) than by all the previous generations in human history.8 This binge did not occur by itself; it took a lot of encouragement. According to the United Nations Human Development Report for 1999, the world spent at least $435 billion the previous year for advertising, plus well over $100 billion for public relations and marketing. The result is 270 million "global teens" who now inhabit a single pop-culture world, consuming the same designer clothes, music, and soft drinks. While this growth has given us opportunities that our grandparents never dreamed of, we have also become more sensitive to the negative consequences: its staggering ecological impact, and the worsening mal-distribution of this wealth. A child in the developed countries consumes and pollutes 30 to 50 times as much as a poor one in an undeveloped country, according to the same UNHDR. Today 1.2 billion people survive on less than a dollar a day, and almost half the world's population live on less than two dollars a day. The 20% of people in the richest countries enjoy 86% of the world's consumption, the poorest 20% only 1.3% -- a gap that globalization is increasing, not decreasing. Clearly something is very wrong with this new world order. But these grim facts about "their" dukkha should not keep us from noticing the consequences for "our own" dukkha. The problem is not merely how to share the wealth. How much does our economic system promote individual dukkha by encouraging us to be greedy? And how much does our pooled greed promote collective dukkha, by contributing to the recurrent social crises now afflicting almost all the "developed" nations? From a Buddhist perspective, the fundamental problem with consumerism is the delusion that genuine happiness can be found this way. If insatiable desires (tanha) are the source of the frustration (dukkha) that we experience in our daily lives, then such consumption, which distracts us and intoxicates us, is not the solution to our unhappiness but one of its main symptoms. That brings us to the final irony of this addiction to consumption: also according to the 1999 UNHDR, the percentage of Americans who considered themselves happy peaked in 1957, despite the fact that consumption per person has more than doubled since then. At the same time, studies of U.S. households have found that between 1986 and 1994 the amount of money people think they need to live happily has doubled! That seems paradoxical, but it is not difficult to explain: when we define ourselves as consumers, we can never have enough. For reasons we never quite understand, consumerism never really gives us what we want from it; it works by keeping us thinking that the next thing we buy will satisfy us. Higher incomes have certainly enabled many people to become more generous, but this has not been their main effect, because capitalism is based upon a very different principle: that capital should be used to create more capital. Rather than redistributing our wealth, we prefer to invest that wealth as a means to accumulate more and spend more, regardless of whether or not we need more. In fact, the question of whether or not we really need more has become rather quaint; you can never be too rich. This way of thinking has become natural for us, but it is uncommon in societies where advertising has not yet conditioned people into believing that happiness is something you purchase. International development agencies have been slow to realize what anthropologists have long understood: in traditional cultures, income is not the primary criterion of well-being. Sometimes it is not even a major one, as Delia Paul discovered in Zambia: One of the things we found in the village which surprised us was people's idea of well-being and how that related to having money. We talked to a family, asking them to rank everybody in the village from the richest to the poorest and asking them why they would rank somebody as being less well off, and someone as poor. And we found that in the analysis money meant very little to the people. The person who was ranked as poorest in the village was a man who was probably the only person who was receiving a salary.9 His review of the literature led Robert Chambers to conclude: "Income, the reductionist criterion of normal economists, has never, in my experience or in the evidence I have been able to review, been given explicit primacy."10 To assume that we in the "developed" world know something about worldly well-being which such people do not looks increasingly like a form of cultural imperialism. Our obsession with economic growth seems natural to us because we have forgotten the historicity of the "needs" we now take for granted, and therefore what for Buddhism is an essential human attribute if we are to be happy: the importance of self-limitation, which requires some degree of non-attachment. Until they are seduced by the globalizing dream of a technological cornucopia, it does not occur to traditionally "poor" people to become fixated on fantasies about all the things they might have. Their ends are an expression of the means available to them. We project our own values when we assume that they must be unhappy, and that the only way to become happy is to start on the treadmill of a lifestyle increasingly preoccupied with consumption. All this is expressed better in a Tibetan Buddhist analogy. The world is full of thorns and sharp stones (and now broken glass too). What should we do about this? One solution is to pave over the entire earth, but a simpler alternative is to wear shoes. "Paving the whole planet" is a good metaphor for how our collective technological and economic project is attempting to make us happy. Without the wisdom of self-limitation, we will not be satisfied even when we have used up all the earth's resources. The other solution is for our minds to learn how to "wear shoes," so that our collective ends become an expression of the renewable means that the biosphere provides. Why do we assume that "income/consumption poverty" must be dukkha? That brings us to the heart of the matter. For us, material wealth has become increasingly important because of our eroding faith in any other possibility of salvation - for example, in heaven with God, or the secular heaven of a worldly utopia, or even (when we despair about the ecological crisis) the future progress of humankind. Increasing our "standard of living" has become so compulsive for us because it serves as a substitute for traditional religious values. If so, our evangelical efforts to economically "develop" other societies, which cherish their own spiritual values and community traditions, may be viewed as a contemporary form of religious imperialism, a new kind of mission to convert the heathen. . . . Despite their benighted violence, do "Third World terrorists" understand this aspect of globalization better than we do? Ill-will. Conventional economic theory assumes that resources are limited but our desires are infinitely expandable. Without self-limitation, this becomes a formula for strife. As we know, desire frustrated is a major cause perhaps the major cause -- of ill will. The Buddha warned against negative feelings such as envy (issa) and avarice (macchariya).11 Issa becomes intense when certain possessions are enjoyed by one section of society while another section does not have the opportunity to acquire them. Macchariya is the selfish enjoyment of goods while greedily guarding them from others. A society in which these psychological tendencies predominate may be materially wealthy but it is spiritually poor. The most important point, from a Buddhist point of view, is that our economic emphasis on competition and individual gain my benefit is your loss encourages the development of ill will rather than loving-kindness. A society where people do not feel that they benefit from sharing with each other is a society that has already begun to break down. Delusion. For its proponents, the globalization of market capitalism is a victory for "free trade" over the inefficiencies of protectionism and special interests. Free trade seems to realize in the economic sphere the supreme value that we place on freedom. It optimizes access to resources and markets. What could be wrong with that? Quite a bit, if we view "free trade" from the rather different perspective provided by Buddhism. Such a different viewpoint helps us to see presuppositions usually taken for granted. The Buddhist critique of a value-free economics suggests that globalizing capitalism is neither natural (as economists, eager to be scientific, would have us believe) nor inevitable; despite its success, it is only one historically-conditioned way of understanding and reorganizing the world. The critical stage in the development of market capitalism occurred during the industrial revolution (1750 1850 in England), when new technologies led to the "liberation" of a critical mass of land, labor, and capital. They became understood in a new way, as commodities to be bought and sold. The world had to be converted into exchangeable "resources" in order for market forces to interact freely and productively. There was nothing inevitable about this. In fact, it was strongly resisted by most people at the time, and was successfully implemented only because of strong government support for it. For those who had capital to invest, the industrial revolution was often very profitable, but for most people industrial commodification seems to have been experienced as a tragedy. The earth (our mother as well as our home) became commodified into a collection of resources to be exploited. Human life became commodified into labor, or work time, also priced according to supply and demand. Family patrimony, the cherished inheritance preserved for one's descendants, became commodified into capital for investment, a new source of income for an entrepreneurial few. All three became means which the new economy used to generate more capital. This commodified understanding presupposes a sharp duality between humans and the rest of the earth. All value is created by our goals and desires; the rest of the world has no meaning or value except when it serves our purposes. This now seems quite natural to us, because we have been conditioned to think and live this way. For Buddhism, however, such a dualistic understanding is delusive. There are different accounts of what Buddha experienced when he became enlightened, but they agree that he realized the nondual interdependence of things. The world is a web; nothing has any reality of its own apart from that web, because everything is dependent on everything else, including us. The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has expressed this well:
This interdependence challenges our usual sense of separation from the world. The feeling that I am "in here," behind my eyes, and the world is "out there," is at the root of our dukkha, for it alienates us from the world we are "in." The Buddhist path works by helping us to realize our interdependence and nonduality with the world, and to live in accordance with that. This path is incompatible with a consumerist way of understanding that commodifies the earth and thus reinforces our dualistic sense of separation from it and other people. Conclusion Buddhism began with the enlightenment of Shakyamuni Buddha. His "awakening" (the literal meaning of "Buddha") shows us the possibility of a different way of life, based on a different way of understanding the relationship between ourselves and the world. From a materialistic perspective, including the "social science" of economics, such religious responses are superstitious and escapist. From a Buddhist perspective, however, economic growth and consumerism are unsatisfactory alternatives because they evade the basic problem of life by distracting us with symbolic substitutes such as money, status, and power. Similar critiques of idolatry are found in all the great religions, and rampant economic globalization makes that message all the more important today.13 [The above article is taken from a longer version which is available here] NOTES 1. As it spread and adapted to different cultures, Buddhism has changed so much that it is difficult to generalize about its teachings. In this short essay, however, there is no space to distinguish between the different Buddhist traditions. My focus is on the teachings of Shakyamuni as preserved in the Theravada Buddhism of south and southeast Asia. The Pali sutras, which are believed to record his original teachings, provide a foundation generally accepted by all Buddhist traditions. The Nikayas cited in my text are an important part of those teachings. The Dhammapada is a very popular collection of Buddhist aphorisms taken from the Pali canon. In a few places I refer to the teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, which today are found predominantly north of the Himalayas. BIBLIOGRAPHY Chambers, Robert. Whose Reality Counts? (London: Intermediate Technology, 1997). SUGGESTED FURTHER READINGS Buddhist Peace Fellowship webpage at < http://www.bpf.org/index.html> David Loy
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