I am Shashi Tharoor and it is my great honour to welcome you all to this afternoon’s informal debate. The topic for this afternoon’s discussion brings together a number of elements that have been occupying many of us in this hall professionally over the past few years - in particular, I daresay, the importance of coexistence, the impact of globalization and the emergence of a different type of threat to both our security and our sense of ourselves as members of one human family, the threat of fundamentalist terrorism, sometimes mistakenly seen as a clash of civilizations.
It is true that we seem to live in a world which is simultaneously pushing us together and pulling us apart. Globalization has pushed us together, but it has not made the world more secure. More than 45 years ago, the now all-but-forgotten Secretary-General U Thant warned that an explosion of violence could occur as a result of the sense of injustice felt by those living in poverty and despair in a world of plenty. Was he correct? Were the seeds of today’s conflicts, and especially of terrorism, to be found in the very factors that have made our world more affluent and our opportunities so much larger?
The defining features of today’s world are the relentless forces of globalization, the ease of communications and travel, the shrinking of boundaries, the flow of people of all nationalities and colours across the world, the swift pulsing of financial transactions with the press of a button, new opportunities and new tools to knit us all together and indeed to address the kind of poverty and injustice that Secretary-General U Thant could only have dreamt of.
But those same features have also made it clear that our global village has other menaces, that a fire that starts in a remote thatched hut or dusty tent in one corner of our global village can melt the steel girders holding up the tallest skyscrapers at the opposite end of the global village.
This is not about a clash of civilizations; it is about human civilization itself, and the forces that unite and divide us. Extremist violence, after all, emerges from a blind hatred of an “Other” with a capital “O”, and that, in turn, is the product of three factors – fear, rage and incomprehension: fear of what the Other might do to you, rage at what you believe the Other has done to you, and incomprehension about who or what the Other really is. These three elements, fused together, ignite the deadly combustion that kills and destroys people whose only sin sometimes is that they feel none of these things themselves.
If we are truly to have an alliance of civilizations, we will have to deal with each of these three factors by attacking the ignorance that sustains them. We will have to know each other better, learn to see ourselves as other see us, learn to recognize hatred and deal with its causes, learn to dispel fear and, above all, just learn about each other. After all, if a State cannot even offer its people hope for a better life for its children by providing access to basic education, then how can we expect those people or those children to resist the blandishments of hate-mongers? It should come as no surprise, for example, that the Taliban recruited its foot soldiers from the rather primitive versions of the madrassa system, schools whose only nurture and education offered was not science or mathematics or computer programming, but only a distorted creed of dogma and destruction.
Clearly, there is a need to work together to ensure that all people have access to, at a minimum, not just the opportunity to live beyond starvation, but also to receive an education and to develop and maintain realistic hopes for a better future. Of course, the Millennium Development Goals elaborated in this building in the year 2000, if fulfilled, will themselves go a long way towards improving the lives of those in desperate need. While we know that eliminating poverty will not in itself solve our problems, a sense of oppression, of exclusion, of marginalization, can also give rise to extremism.
Yet one can hope that our globalized world also offers a solution to the sense of disenfranchisement and despair. A world in which it is easier than ever before to see or hear strangers at our breakfast table can become a world in which it is easier than ever before to see strangers as essentially no different from ourselves.
I am convinced from my years in this august institution that ignorance and prejudice remain the handmaidens of violence. It is as true of terrorism as it is of modern civil conflicts that the men of war prey on the ignorance of the populace to instill fears and arouse hatreds. That was certainly the case in Bosnia and in Rwanda, where murderous, even genocidal, ideologies took root in the absence of truthful information and honest education. If only half the effort had gone into teaching those peoples what unites them and not what divides them, unspeakable crimes could have been prevented.
For me, the winds of civilization must blow in both directions. The UNESCO Constitution memorably tells us, in the words of the poet Archibald MacLeish, that as war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the foundations of peace must be constructed. Those were less enlightened times and I am sure that MacLeish would have said “humankind” today, rather than “men”. But the truth of his words remains: that it is not just war and peace, but the entire fabric of human life and society which must be constructed in the mind. And the acolytes of Osama Bin Laden and the young foot soldiers of the Taliban have taught us that education is essential in our shrinking globe, because the globe will always have more than one kind of human mind.
Without education, we cannot understand how peoples of other races, religions or languages share the same dreams and the same hopes. Without education, we cannot understand the myriad manifestations of the human condition, nor fully appreciate the universality of human aims and aspirations. Without education, tolerance is impossible, but the biggest challenge to tolerance comes from the assault that the forces of both convergence and disruption make on our identity.
The American author Benjamin Barber wrote some years ago of the twin prospects facing today’s humanity as Jihad versus McWorld, a Jihad, as he put it, “in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence”, against technology, against pop culture, against integrated markets, against modernity itself, versus a McWorld of globalization run rampant, a world of fast music, fast computers and fast food, “with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald’s”, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous theme park.
Of course, Barber’s point was that both Jihad and McWorld are a threat to humanity, as he defines the two terms “Jihad” and “McWorld”, and I think the challenge is that they both end up obliterating our most precious possession: our identity. We each need to be able to assert our identity – this is who we are, this is what we are proud of, this is what we want to be. But every one of us has many identities.
Amartya Sen has recently reminded us that by ascribing singular identities, for example, by calling someone a Muslim while overlooking other aspects of his or her individual makeup, we lead to the miniaturization of human beings and the belittling of human identity. He has argued passionately against reducing people to a choiceless singularity, when all of us have so much more complexity to our identities. Sometimes, religion obliges us to deny the truth about our own complexity by obliterating the multiplicity inherent in our identities. Religious fundamentalism, in particular, does so because it embodies a passion for pure belonging, subsuming all other factors.
And yet we do need to understand why so many today, in privileging one amongst the many identities they could lay claim to, have fallen back on religion. Why are so many political grievances – real or imagined – articulated in religious terms? The answer surely lies in the primordial natural of religious identity. When other avenues of identity-mobilization are either restricted in autocratic States or difficult in societies where political patterns are entrenched and admit few interlopers, then ordinary people fall back upon the one identity that seems basic to them.
Secular intellectuals like Amartya Sen or myself may give equal weight to the tag of being a cricket fan or a university don to that of being born in, in his case and in my case, a Hindu family. But we are in a minority in today’s world and it would be unwise, indeed, for us to ignore the clarion call of fanaticism that so many desperate young men and even a few young women around the world are heeding.
So one question I would like to toss up is, can we separate religion from political identity? Can we dream of a world in which religion has an honoured place, but where the need for spirituality will no longer be associated with the need to belong? A political identity can relate principally to citizenship rather than faith, to a land rather than a doctrine. If that identity is one that can live in harmony with other identities, then we might resist both Jihad and McWorld.
For that, we must promote pluralism. If we all come to understand and accept that every one of us has many identities, perhaps we can assert that without condemning others. It seems to me that in much of the world there exist societies whose richness lies in their soul and not in their soil, whose past may offer more wealth than their present, whose imagination is more valuable than their technology.
Recognizing that this might be the case and affirming that tolerance and imagination are as central to humanity’s sense of its own worth as the ability to eat and drink and sleep under a roof is part of the challenge of security before the world today. It seems to me that the only way to ensure that this challenge is met has to be to preserve cultural and imaginative freedom in all societies, to guarantee that individual voices find expression, that all ideas and forms of expression and belief are enabled to flourish and contend for their place in the sun, without threatening, therefore, the individual identities of each of us and of our civilizations.
We have heard in the past that the world must be made safe for democracy. That goal, it seems to me, is increasingly being realized. It is now time for all of us to work to make the world safe for diversity. And we are fortunate to have with us a very distinguished panel today, composed of people who can really help us to think and understand about how that might be achieved. As befits a panel on the interaction between differing civilizations, our panelists will make their addresses in three different languages, and as befits the United Nations, simultaneous translation is available through, of course, the headsets attached to your seats. To facilitate a more fluid discussion afterwards, however, we are planning – I think we all agree – to use English for the question and answer discussion period, in order to have a lively exchange.