THE FIRST EURASIAN CONFLICT REGION FORUM March 9, 2002
Session 3Is Globalization a "New Religion"?
David R. Loy
When we read in magazines and newspapers about new Information Technologies and transnational corporations expanding their markets, we often get the impression that globalization is basically a ﾔwin-winﾕ process for almost everyone. This is deceptive. When we stop to ask ﾔwhat are the effects of globalization on how we try to live together?ﾕ we realize that globalization is in fact a contest between some very different visions of what it means to be a human being, between different understandings of what our responsibilities are to each other and to the earth. I want to draw your attention to these different visions, because each of us needs to decide where we stand on this issue -- especially if (as I suspect) it is not possible to be neutral in this struggle.
Since 1989 capitalism has been without a serious economic competitor. The choice today seems to be, not whether or not to have a capitalist economy, but what form capitalism will take. Recently the World Trade Organization has been set up to completely ﾔliberateﾕ capitalism ﾑ to remove the trade barriers and other national constraints that interfere with the freedom of corporations to gain access to resources and markets anywhere. The justification for this is that ﾔfree tradeﾕ is the best way to benefit everyone, especially the poor, who desperately need such access in order to lift themselves out of their poverty.
Those who criticize the International Monetary Fund and the WTO argue that this is a myth, because economic globalization benefits primarily the rich (those with capital to invest) and further impoverishes many of the poor, who lose control over their own land and local resources. According to the United Nations Development Report for 1999, almost a billion people in 70 countries consume less today than 25 years ago; the richest twenty percent of the worldﾕs population (which includes all of those likely to read this article) now account for 86% of private consumption, the poorest twenty percent only 1.3% ﾑ a gap that continues to grow. As a result, about 250,000 children die of malnutrition or infection every week, while hundreds of millions more survive in hunger and deteriorating health. . . .
Most of us are familiar with this kind of argument. Since the crucial issue is ﾔhow shall we live together? what is our vision of what it means to be a person?ﾕ, I would like to focus on another party involved in this ideological debate: religion. Today religion is not often mentioned when economic issues are discussed, but, more traditionally, religion has been one of the most important factors affecting historical change. For most people throughout world history, religions have been the source (and receptacle) for their most important values. So it is necessary to ask: what role are religions playing in this struggle over what kind of society we want in our new globalizing world?
Religion, however, is extremely difficult to define. Scholars have never been able to come up with a satisfactory definition that they can all agree on. One way to understand it is to see religion as grounding us by teaching what is really important about the world, and therefore how we should live in the world. From such a ﾔfunctionalistﾕ perspective, however, we can see that today there is a new religion, in fact the most successful religion of all time, if judged by how quickly it is winning new converts to its cause.
What I mean is that traditional religions are fulfilling their traditional role less and less, because that role is being replaced by another belief-system and value-system. Of course, Iﾕm not referring to any of the usual ﾔnewﾕ religions in Japan. While the most powerful explanation of the world is now provided by the hard sciences, the most attractive value-system has become consumerism. In other words, our present globalizing economic system may also be understood as our religion because it has begun to fulfill a religious function for us. I believe that economics today is less a ﾔsocial scienceﾕ than the theology of that religion. Its god, the market, offers a kind of secular salvation for us with its cycle of ever-increasing production and consumption. People used to go to shrines and temples to feel a sense of spiritual security. Today our temples and cathedrals are banks and the stock market. Because we seek a different kind of security, that is where we have to worship.
From this perspective, the globalization of market capitalism is more than the simple victory of ﾔfree trade.ﾕ Rather, it is the victory of one particular way of understanding and valuing the world that is neither ﾔnaturalﾕ (as economists, eager to be scientific, would have us believe) nor inevitable. This economic system is only one historically-conditioned way of organizing (or reorganizing) the world. Built into it is a ﾔreligiousﾕ world-view, with its own theology and ethics, in competition with other understandings of what the world is and how we should live in it.
Capitalist free trade sounds attractive, because it 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, when we view ﾔfree tradeﾕ from a religious perspective ﾑ or rather, as a religious perspective. If we look for the world-view embodied in this approach, we can see that it tends to commodify the whole world, including us (workers sell their time and labor). The critical stage in the development of market capitalism occurred during the industrial revolution of the late 18th century, when new technology led to the ﾒliberationﾓ of a critical mass of land, labor, and capital. Their ﾒliberationﾓ means they became understood in a new way: primarily as commodities ﾐ that is, as things to be bought and sold. The world was divided up (into ﾒresourcesﾓ) and converted into exchangeable market commodities, in order for market forces to interact freely and productively.
For those who had capital to invest, the industrial revolution was sometimes extremely profitable, but for most people industrial commodification was more often 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 too became commodified into labor, also valued according to supply and demand. Millions of people lost their village homes and had to migrate to the cities, where they and their children could survive only by laboring in factory sweatshops.
That process of commodification is how the social and economic world we live in today was created, but that transformation is far from finished. Now the same migrations are occurring in the third world, where millions of people ﾐ most of them young women -- now work for poverty wages in sweatshops making goods for Western consumers to enjoy. That is why such institutions as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the WTO are necessary ﾑ to make sure that nothing stands in the way of converting the rest of the world into a ﾔconvenience storeﾕ of resources to be exploited and into markets for the products made from them.
Another way to describe this, from a religious perspective is, that the earth and all its beings are being de-sacralized. As they become treated more and more as commodities whose only value is to be bought and sold and consumed by us, they lose any sacred or spiritual dimension.
Such commodified values are not ﾒnaturalﾓ or inevitable, but how extraordinarily persuasive are the missionary conversion techniques of this new religion! As a philosophy and religion teacher, I know that whatever I can do with my students a few hours a week is insignificant when compared with the attractive advertising messages that surround all of us outside class ﾑ on television and radio and in magazines and newspapers and trains and buses, etc., all of them teaching us to ﾒbuy me if you want to be happy.ﾓ It is very difficult to compete with this religion of consumerism.
According to the United Nations Development Report for 1999, the world spent at least $435 billion the previous year for advertising, and almost half of that was spent in the US alone. That does not even include public relations and marketing, which is now well over $100 billion a year. No wonder, then, that a child in the developed countries consumes and pollutes 30 to 50 times as much as a child in the third world, according to that same UNDR. 270 million ﾒglobal teensﾓ now inhabit a single pop-culture world, consuming the same designer clothes, music, and soft drinks. And the extent of our consumption is staggering. 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.
What is going on here? Again, I think we can only understand this aspect of economic globalization as a religious phenomenon: first the United States, and now almost the whole of the developed world, has embraced a new way to try to become happy. Since traditional religions offer a very different explanation for our inability to be happy, and a very different path to become happy, I think that they cannot ignore this religious function of globalized consumerism.
From the more traditional religious viewpoint, there are two big problems with our globalizing consumerist values: greed and delusion. On the one hand, the ﾔfree marketﾕ requires greed. To keep the economy growing, you need the desire for profit, and you have to find a way to keep people wanting and consuming more. (Technologically, most of the problems of economic production have been solved; today the economic problem is creating demand in those who have money to buy.) So the idea that there is something wrong with greed, with always needing more, tends to be forgotten.
Rather than liberate greed, traditional religious understandings of the world have emphasized the need to control it. The important point is that our human nature is malleable: each of us is a cluster of various traits, some self-centered and and others more altruistic. Then the important issue becomes: which character traits should society approve and emphasize, and which ones should be socially discouraged and controlled? From a religious perspective, you shouldnﾕt build an economy based on greed (always wanting more) anymore than you should construct a society on the basis of our tendencies towards aggression and violence.
The most fundamental problem of all, however, is that such greed is based on a delusion: the delusion that happiness is to be found this way. Buddhism, for example, emphasizes that insatiable desires are the source of the frustration that we experience in our daily lives. Overconsumption, 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 UNDR, the percentage of Americans who considered themselves happy peaked in 1957, although U.S. consumption has more than doubled since then. Consuming more isnﾕt making Americans happier! 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. Why? Once we learn to define ourselves as consumers, we can never have ﾔenough.ﾕ
That points to the problem with growth, which today has become the supreme value of governments as well as corporations. From a religious perspective, growth can be a good meansﾑ most of the worldﾕs six billion people need better food, housing, medical services, etc. ﾑ but by itself growth is a bad goal. Today we pursue growth because, to tell the truth, we donﾕt know what other goal to aim for. We have no other vision of salvation, no other solution to the problem of how to live happily. But today we are also confronted, more and more, by the limits to growth, especially ecological catastrophes, like global warming, that have already begun to change the earthﾕs climate.
In conclusion, today it is important for us to realize that globalization is not just an economic and a technological process, but also a religious one, which we can see when we look at it in terms of how it is affecting our values and the meaning of life for us today. In response, I think that it is important for genuine religions to clarify their message, so that they can challenge such commodifying and consumerist values, and help us create an alternative to the ﾔreligion of the market.ﾕ
COMMENT by TERASAWA Jyunsei:
I am very interested in this way of understanding globalization, as commodifying the world into resources and markets, and therefore de-sacralizing the earth. However, when the role of religion is considered as a response to this, it seems to me that there are two possibilities, one of them dangerous and the other one much more hopeful. The dangerous one is what is often called religious fundamentalism. We see this with certain developments within Islam, and also within Hinduism, for example the Hindutva movement. In Japan we had a tragic experience with state Shinto supporting fascism. All of these groups are anti-West and anti-modernity, but not in a helpful, progressive way. The challenge is how to encourage the other alternative. How to retain the divinity and spirituality of religion, in a way that does not support either economic greed or fundamentalism, but rather works to unite and empower people?
RESPONSE by David Loy:
I appreciate this comment very much, because it draws attention to the larger challenge that modernization and globalization offer to religion. Religions have always been influenced by other religions, but in the past they usually had more time and space to develop independently. Today the worldﾕs increasing population, along with accelerated transportation and communication systems, mean that religions are forced to ﾒrub shouldersﾓ and interact with each other constantly. How should they respond to that? One reaction is fundamentalism ﾐ clinging harder to old beliefs and ways of doing things ﾐ but, despite all the attention that gets, fundamentalism is not really viable in the long run. Fundamentalism can fight and destroy, as we see in many places including the Israeli-Palestine conflict; but it cannot cooperate with others to build the new interdependent, multicultural world we need. The other possibility is inter-religious dialogue, in which religions learn from each other. This can help each religion clarify what is really essential about its teachings and what is not; in that way religions can realize that the ﾒenemyﾓ is not each other but a globalizing economic system of greed and consumerism that threatens the future for all of us.
2003 Eurasian Conflict Forum Committee