The Challenge of Interconnectivity
Linked In/Walled Out
THE MOST distinctive yet novel fact of the world in which we live in today is that it is one of interconnected plurality. Economic globalization and the radical digital wiring of the world over the last twenty years have created sprawling multicultural spaces and a de-territorilized infosphere in which vastly contrasting ways of life encounter each other as a matter of course.
As the digital revolution goes mainstream and gets assimilated into our daily lives, it is easy to loose perspective as to how unprecedented and revolutionary the fact of instant global interconnection with contrasting ways of life really is. As a child of the eighties growing up in a third world economy, my only contact with truly different ways of life was limited to the brief international coverage of the two public TV stations or through the narrow expat communities living in my city. Fast forward twenty years and now I carry in my pocket a device that connects me instantly to the vast majority of the global population, giving me immediate access to their beliefs, feelings, struggles and ways they see the world. Today, a growing portion of our life experience occurs online, and when we are connected, we are in the most radically-multicultural and diverse space ever experienced in human history.
The sweeping interlinkage of alterity brought about by the recent digital revolution is coinciding with what in turn is the most pressing challenge of our time: the relentless rise of fundamentalism. Not a day goes by in this new global village in which we don’t hear about the destabilizing and murderous consequences of clashing beliefs. A growing sense of impotence and frustration towards rising moral incompatibility is palpable and we are all starting to catch a mood of self-defensive moral militancy. We are all rushing to align with the political party, media outlet or preacher that advances our values while we fortify the walls separating us from those whom we disagree with. Wall-building has become the policy of choice of a new brand of politicians that are profiting from the global paranoia — a far cry from the days of the collapse of the Soviet Union when tearing walls down and reunifying were all the rage.
The sweeping interlinkage of alterity brought about by the recent digital revolution is coinciding with what in turn is the most pressing challenge of our time: the relentless rise of fundamentalism.
We can all sense that the balkanization of our moral landscape is a hazardous phenomenon threatening the stability of our growingly interconnected world, yet we seem to be paralyzed in the face of growing fundamentalism. What is so particular about the new millennium that has turned us all into unyielding defenders of our own moral outlook? Why all of the sudden everyone that does not share our private ends seems like a bigoted fool or an immoral libertine? And why are now all of our moral disagreements metastasizing into paralyzing political battles, bloody civil wars and even civilizational animosity? These are some of the questions we will grapple with in this book.
That we are failing at finding the right formula for stability in these times of interlinked plurality is undeniable. One does not need to subscribe to all the specificities of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis to recognize that indeed something is amiss in our societal capacity to integrate opposing moral outcomes. As information and communications technologies (ICTs) accelerate the pace at which our plural world weaves itself together, the pressure to find a solution to the riddle of how to peacefully cope with alterity continues to rise. The clock, it seems, is ticking.
The spectacular global resurgence of religious militancy in the past few decades and the return of religion as a mobilizing political force have undermined the secularization assumption that religion would slowly but surely fade away into the sunset. Today, the bloody battles unfolding in North Africa and the Levante between those favoring a secular state and those strongly advocating for an active participation of Islam in politics exemplify the resurgence of the philosophical schism between those who argue for a clear privatization of substantive beliefs and those that cannot make sense of politics without the deep commitments of religion.
But the militant clash of beliefs is not confined to religion alone. The crippling partisanism of the political conversation around secular topics such as immigration, economic policy, gender equality and wealth distribution points to a broader moral divide that extends far beyond the spiritual.
The reheating of moral conflict we have been evidencing in particular since 9/11 forces us then to reconsider an issue we westerners thought was pretty much settled: Is there a way to secure a well-ordered and stable society that transcends the struggle between what seem to be incommensurable moral commitments? This is the question at the heart of the dilemma of pluralism and stability, a dilemma we thought liberalism and its clear separation between a private morality and a neutral state had solved once and for all. For a long time it did appear as if fundamental beliefs were all but privatized and the bureaucratic liberal state had managed to secure a neutral ground from where it protected the rule of law and delivered economic prosperity. But that appearance melted down together with the steely structures of the Twin Towers. Since then, unyielding belief and paralyzing — and often deadly — moral conflict have defied our long-held assumptions as to what it takes to conjure stability out of moral diversity.
The recent rise of fundamentalism is a tragedy not only because of the countless lives that it is destroying, but also because of the monumental wasted opportunity that our times have become. The fact that ruinous moral conflict is proliferating precisely in an era of complete global interconnection and widespread access to information is particularly disheartening for all of us that want to see humanity flourish and thrive under what should be the most exciting of times. Sadly, the unprecedented capacity that a digital world affords to harness our collective wisdom is being sabotaged by our epistemological petulance.
It would have seemed reasonable to expect that growing interlinkages between different cultures would have fostered an acute sense of global empathy and an amplified capacity to grasp and appreciate the vast variety in which we human beings go about our lives. The basic premise is quite simple: greater interconnectivity should mean greater opportunities to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes on a regular basis, hence expanding our capacity to recognize and understand others’ feelings (emotional empathy) and others’ beliefs (intellectual empathy). If empathy is a human aptitude fostered by proximity and ongoing exchange, then a globalized and interconnected humanity like the one that has emerged in the last couple of decades should have been been ideal for empathy’s development.
Unfortunately, the reality seems to be quite the opposite: the rise of global interconnectivity is not only failing to promote a sense of global empathy, it is promoting empathy’s evil twin: global fundamentalism. It turns out that greater chances to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes do not necessarily mean that we will expand our capacity to empathize: rather, the actual experience of having to constantly try new unbroken pairs is fueling our hostility. It seems that in a world where otherness was reasonably isolated it was easy to be tolerant — as the annoyance of having to deal with others’ beliefs was in reality quite minimal. But in a globally wired world, coping with otherness has become a central feature of our daily life, raising the stakes of our ability to tolerate. As such, what looked like a suitable environment for enhanced empathy is turning out to be fertile ground for the rise of a new breed of super-charged fundamentalism. That fundamentalism and moral conflict have the upper hand over empathy and tolerance in our novel digitally-embroiled world is a tragedy that we should strive to reverse.
A Tragic Wasted Opportunity
It is easy to loose sight of the unprecedented opportunities for flourishing that a world of absolute digital entanglement has opened up for us amidst the cacophony of polarizing voices and heart-wrenching violence that is coinciding with it. But imagine for an instant a world in which the supercharged potential of our interconnected era is fully allowed to develop unhindered by conflicting world-views and undivided by obstinate belief. Just think about the feats we could accomplish as a digitally-intermeshed collective if we were somehow blessed with a stable sociopolitical environment of collaborative truth-seekers. I am fully convinced that this is not but an utopian dream; some of the great achievements of the last two decades already offer clear examples of the opportunities at hand when such conditions are met. But all of this potential could go to waist if we fail to confront fundamentalism and rise up to the intellectual challenge of reconciling pluralism with stability in a world of total interconnection.
The good news is that when we have confronted paralyzing and destructive fundamentalism before, our best philosophical minds rose up to the challenge: Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration, Kant’s Perpetual Peace and Mill’s On Liberty — among many others — tell the story of how we once pulled ourselves out of the murderous swamp of reactive ideological rigidity and built societies that supported a plurality of beliefs.
The good news is that when we have confronted paralyzing and destructive fundamentalism before, our best philosophical minds rose up to the challenge
The bad news is that our challenge is vastly more complex and unprecedented. Just three decades ago, the American philosopher John Rawls — one of the brightest minds of the twentieth century — revolutionized political philosophy when he outlined a version of liberalism capacious enough to contend with the fact of irresolvable pluralism common in our increasingly global world. He found, we thought, a way to secure principles of justice that we would all embrace in spite of our fundamental moral disagreements. But in the nineties, when he outlined his theory, the plurality Rawls sought to integrate was one of divided yet reasonable actors willing to put justice ahead of belief. Fundamentalists were a nuisance that the state could easily deal with — a band of outliers that couldn’t be brought in under his version of justice but that presented no real threat to the liberal way of life. Fast-forward twenty five years and the Rawlsian community of conflicting yet reasonable fellows seems like an idilic paradise.
Those days, I am afraid, are gone. Today, reasonableness can no longer be presupposed. And it is not only that the militant violent fundamentalists have grown in numbers — they clearly have — but that all of us are sliding away from reasonableness and moving closer to the reactive intolerance typical of fundamentalism as we plug ourselves into the polarizing ways of our new digital lives. New intellectual avenues need to be found if we, as Locke, Kant and Mill did once, are to find ways to unshackle the fundamentalist malaise that afflicts our world. This blog is my personal contribution to this challenge.
