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THE BIOLOGY OF GLOBALI

Elisabet Sahtouris

Elisabet Sahtouris is an evolution biologist, fu- turist, and consultant to the United Nutions un indigenous peoples. Author of Gaia and EarthDance, and co-author with Willis Harman of the forthcoming Biology

ZATION

Kevwoned, she lectures and appears oti ‘1 ‘V -

and radio in Europe and North, South, and Centwl America.

From the vantage point of a macrobiologist-a human species watcher -it’s encouraging to see the swell of interest in, even fervor for, a global human community with more equitable and less ecologically destructive economics. I rejoice that the words “community” and “communal values” are back in our vocabularv now that the Soviet stigma has been removed

d u

from them. We have suffered Ereatlv from their absence. The big question is whether we can restore community and comrnu- nal values before all is lost.

As an evolutionary biologist, I see globalization as natural, inevitable, and even desirable. It is already well on its way and is not a reversible process. We are doing some aspects of it coopera- tively and well, to wit our global telephone, postal, and air travel systems, but the most central and important aspect of globalization-its economics-is currently being done in a manner that threatens the existence of our whole civilization. For this reason, we must become more conscious participants in the process.

Fortunately life is resilient, and we are witnessing a growing storm of protest along with some quieter discussions of economic globalization. These are healthy reactions that can help lead us to survival. Their common features lie in the recognition that communal values have been overridden in a dangerous process that sets vast profits for a tiny human minority above all other human interests. Most of those looking at the problems of mar-

PERSPECTIVES ON BUSINESS AND GLOBAL CHANGE 0 1997 VOL. 11. NO. 3 WORLD BUSINESS ACADEMY

28 PERSPECTIVES ON BUSINESS AND GLOBAL CHANGE

fhe currenf course

of glo&ulizuficwl

cannof confinue

und must be

changed fa u

heulfhier one.

ket-driven capitalism are aware on some level that the measure of human success must shift from money to well-being for all, and that to do this communal values wlusf be reclaimed and acted upon in a way that ensures a balance of local interests and the global interests we share with each other and all other species.

The evolutionary process never goes well until individual, communal, ecosystemic, and planetary interests are met simul- taneously and reasonably harmoniously. This is an aspect of biological evolution that unfortunately has not gained prominence, and is therefore not in our meme (social gene) bank. My purpose is to help put it there, for we humans, however spiritual we can alSo be, are inescapably biological creatures and could benefit greatly from the lessons already learned in the four-and-a- half-billion-year improvisational dance we call evolution.

THE WAKE-UP CALL

To see why the current course of globalization cannot continue and must be changed to a healthier one, we need to look at the inherent contradictions between what we have euphemistically called “free market capitalism” (in fact an incipient global to- talitarian capitalism) and what we should have: a democratic and ecologically sound economic system. I want to discuss this fundamental contradiction from a biological perspective, but let’s look first at the pattern of growing opposition to corporate globalization without representation.

Such opposition has long had a grassroots character in the United States, with recent developments such as the Green Party drafting Ralph Nader as its presidential candidate. In addition, some capitalist entrepreneurs are uniting with each other to work out ways of doing alternative and responsible-to-community capitalism in such organizations as The World Business Acad- emy, Business for Social Responsibility, the Social Ventures Network, and the Conscious Business Alliance. A significant body of intelligent and respectable critics have gathered together in the San Francisco-based International Forum on Globaliza- tion (IFG), which has now published a volume of some forty essays on the subject.’

But of all the recruits to this cause, one of the most surpris- ing is a multi-multi-billionaire drawn from the biggest winners in the global casino of cyberspace money created by the corporate capitalism he now opposes: George Soros.

Soros warns us of “The Capitalist Threat” in a cover article in the Atlantic Monthly. Hardly the first to point put the sacrifice of communal values to market values, he must nevertheless be heralded as one of the most convincing critics of big-time corporate capitalism to date. As Robert Kuttner wrote in the Los

Sahtouris: THE BIOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION 29

Angeles Times on January 27-“When a man who makes billions by understanding markets warns of their excesses, even the most ardent defenders of pure capitalism should pay attention.”

In Soros’ ovSn words: “The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.”

Communism versus capitalism? Let’s look back for a moment at “the communist threat.” Seen through the lenses of my worldview as a biologist, the capitalist/communist drama that played out for most if not all of our lifetimes reveals a fundamental dramatic flaw. We played our own roles in it by buying into an odd and ultimately impossible ideological choice: to build society on the basis of individual interest or on the basis of communal interest.

Or? Whatever labels we give to the human econo-political systems of various times and places, I think we can all agree that they are living systems. If we see them that way, this either/or choice makes no sense. A living system can maintain its health bonly while there is a balance of interests between parts and whole, between individuals and community. To sacrifice one to the other would kill the system, as it did Soviet communism, and as Soros

I warns us could happen as well with capitalism. He points out that in nature, “Cooperation is as much a part of the system as competition,” and again, “ The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhib- ited pursuit of self-interest.” Butunless self-interest is “tempered by a recognition of a common interest,” the society, on which the market rests, “is liable to break down.”

In practice, it turned out, there was more in comrnon between the two systems than the surface ideology indicated. Alvin Toffler was the first author I recall talking about parallels between the Soviet East and the Capitalist West: Both, he pointed out, were unfairly exploiting the Third World to support their large industrialist economies.2 Now David Korten goes further, in the International Forum on Globalization volume of essays, telling us ‘“that a modem economic system based on the ideology of free market capitalism is destined to self-destruct for many of the same reasons that the Marxist economy collapsed in East- em Europe and the former Soviet Union.” He spells out these common features as (a) the concentration of economic power in unaccountable and abusive centralized institutions (state or transnational corporations); (b) the destruction of ecosystems in the name of progress; (c) the erosion of social capital by depen- dence on disempowering mega-institutions; and (d) narrow views of human needs by which community values and spiritual con- nection to the Earth are eroded.

A living system

can maintain its

he&h oniy while

there is u buhce

of interest5

between parts

and whok.


Note that all of these illustrate systems in which the “top” level is empowered by &empowering local and individual levels. We are accustomed to understanding this about communist systems, but we have ignored the erosion of our own democratic principles in the process of capitalist globalization.

GLOBALIZATKIN BY NAFTA, GATT, AND THE M/TO

Also in the IFG volume, democratic activist Ralph Nader and attorney Lori Wallach show very clearly how the institutions of global corporate totalitarianism evolved from. the World Bank and IMF to NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO, which were estab- lished with very little understanding by anyone outside the ranks of their architects. How many citizens of the WTO’s seventy member nations are aware that their ‘“democratic” congresses voted away the sovereignty of their nations by agreeing to uphold the provisions of the WTO, which can meet in secret and challenge any laws made at any level in our nation, our state, county, or city that are deemed to conflict with its interests?

The objectives of

the WU were not

designed to

being of the

humun commu-

The objectives of the WTO were not designed to promote the well-being of the human community. It appears to be set up by a handful of players who have now succeeded in gaining control of a process designed to enrich a very small handful of humans at the expense of all the rest. Nader and Wallach empha- size that the WTO is a permanent and legal structure the binding provisions of which ‘“cl0 not incorporate any environmental, health, labor, or human rights considerations. Moreover, there is nothing in the institutional principles of the WTO to inject any procedural safeguards of openness, participation, or accountabil- ity.. . . and in several provisions, requires that documents and proceedings remain confidential.”

All the WTO’s member states authorize the WTO to do their business negotiations. All are bound by its decisions and can be forced to change any of their own present or future laws if, as the WTO provisions read, “the attainment of any [WTO] objet- tive is being impeded” by its existence. The trade dispute panels of the WTO and NAFTA do not guarantee members’ economic disinterest. Further, they keep all their proceedings, documents, and transcripts secret. There cannot be any media or citizen participation, and no review or appeal is available.

So Thailand has been told it cannot refuse to import Ameri- can cigarettes for health reasons, and Indonesia may not keep the rattan it needs for domestic use. Neither children nor adults are protected from exploitative and unhealthy conditions of labor, and no member country may make any e&ort to protect its local industry and employment against erosion by unfair competition in the world market. Self-sufficient organic farming is

Sahtau~is: THE BIOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION 31

literally outlawed, while poisonous chemicals are forced on countries, destroying the health of people, crops, land, air, and water for the sake of short-term profits in high places.

We have given away democracy, community, health, and well- being, all unnecessarily. We were not paying attention when our congresspeople were voting. Although we could have gotten hold of the agreements and we could have sorted through their 500 closely printed pages, we assumed we were living in a democracy that our elected representatives would uphold and that they, whose job it is, were paying attention. We might also have expected that the public media would have informed us more responsibly of what may be the most important set of events in all human history. But then, the media is globalized in this same process.

LESSONS OF NATURE

We can see more clearly what is going on if we understand the individual, the community, the nation, and global human society as living systems embedded within each other, like Russian nested dolls or Chinese boxes. Arthur Koestler had an elegant termi- nology for this concept: holons in holarchied The fundamental flaw in both communist and capitalist systems is the subjugation of local holon interests (individual and community) to national and global holon interests, however much we in the West were ideologically taught that our individual well-being was primary and our democracy good for our communities. Practice did not bear out theory.

In biological terms, megacorporations, now globally legiti- mized by the WTO and the GATT, are overriding the interests of their embedded holons: nations, local communities, and individuals. As Nader points out, “Under WTO rules, for example, certain ‘objectives’ are forbidden to all domestic legislatures [national, state, county, city]. . . including [objectives such as] providing any significant subsidies to promote energy conservation, sustainable farming practices, or environmentally sensitive technologies.”

Take the living system most intimately familiar to all of us: the human body. We’ve long known that our bodies behave as a community of cells. It has a central nervous government that continually monitors all its parts and functions, ever making intelligent decisions that serve the interest of the whole enterprise, and an immune defense system to protect its integrity and health against unfamiliar intruders.

More recently, microbiology has revealed the relative au- tonomy of individual cells in exquisite detail: every cell con- stantly making its own decisions, for example, of what to filter in and out through its membrane, and which segments of DNA to r&ieve and copy from its nuclear gene library for use in main-

We huve given

uwuy democrucy,

community,

heuhh, und well-

being, all unnec-

essurily.


Nature may

stumble ut fimes

in its improvisu-

tionul dunce, but

it is fur too

in tdigen t to

poseed by

ucciden t.

taming its cellular welfare. Hardly the automatons we had thought them to be!

It is abundantly clear that the needs and interests of individual cells, their organ “communities” and the whole body must be continually negotiated to achieve their dynamic equilibrium, commonly called balance. Cancer is an example of what hap- pens when this balance is lost, with the proliferation of individual cells outweighing the needs of the whole. In the same sense a mature ecosystem-say a rain forest-is a complex ongoing process of negotiations among species and between individual species and the self-regulating whole composed of the various micro and macro species along with air, water, rocks, sunshine, magnetic fields, and so on.

It should be obvious by now that I have a respectful view of life in evolution as a self-organizing enterprise-nature may stumble at times in its improvisational dance, or make crude moves, especially on the part of young aggressive species, but it is far too intelligent to proceed by accident. One can discern in evolution a repeating pattern in which aggressive competition leads to the threat of extinction, which is then avoided by the formation of cooperative alliances.

New biological information on nucleated cells, multicellu- lar bodies and mature ecosystems as cooperative enterprises challenge our ingrained view of antagonistic competition as the sole driving force of evolution, which was adopted as the rationale for capitalist competition. (Note that the cooperative side of evolution was emphasized in the Soviet Union.) As Soros says, “there is something wrong with making the survival of the fittest a guid- ing principle of civilized society. This social Darwinism is based on an outmoded theory of evolution.”

What is it that prevents your cells, or your organs, from pur- suing their self-interest competitively such that relatively few “win” and most “lose”? The obvious answer is that they are part of a cooperative- a multi-celled creature, a whole entity that began as a single cell, but is more than the sum of all the cells cloned from it. That creature, like every cell composing it, is autopoietic; that is, self-creating and self-maintaining, thus nec- essarily self-reflexive and self-interested.

Oddly, this notion of simultaneous self-interest at several levels of living systems is not yet popular among evolutionists. Darwin, as we all know, held the competitive individual to be the driving force of evolution (the capitalist version), while later biologists countered with the alternative of species self-interest, wherein individuals demonstrated altruism and self-sacrifice for the common good (the communist version). Then along came Richad Dawkins saying both sides of the debate were in error

Suhtouris: THE BIOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION 33

because competition among selfish genes drove evolution (rni- cro-capitalism?).

This is a pervasive either/or syndrome in our society, exem- plified by settinb ourselves the choice of capitalism or ~con-nnu- nism, and often enough between thinking and acting locally UY globally. It seems to me that all these evolutionists are right, but not right enough. The evolution of living systems, as well as their ongoing livelihood, is an improvisational dance of negotiations among individual parts and levels of organization- among the holons in a holarchy. This dance is energized by the self-interest of every part and level, choreographed by compro- mises made in the tacit knowledge that no level may be sacri- ficed without killing the whole. At its best it becomes elegant, harmonious, beautiful in its dynamics of non-antagonistic coun-

If seems fo me

fhf cdl fhese

evolutionisfs are

righf, buf nof

right enough.

terpoint and resolution. My hope lies in the fact that life is resilient and that the great-

est catastrophes in our planet’s life history have spawned the greatest creativity..Ancient bacteria once blanketed the Earth by themselves, inventing all the ways of making a living still em- ployed today (fermentation, photosynthesis, and respiration) and devouring its “resources” with downright human thoroughness. Finding themselves in crisis, they invaded each other for new “resources” in a phase of bacterial imperialism we echoed so much later in our ignorance. This phase led to renewed crisis, because their early attempts at “globalization” into huge communities lacked protection for all participating members’ well-being. But somehow they finally managed to hit on the cooperative scheme we call the nucleated cell, a huge bacterial community with a peace- ful division of labor-all this without benefit of brains, in time to avoid the extinction of all Earth life eons ago.

DYNAMICS OF NATURAL DEMOCRACY

Let’s explore this driving dynamic a little further. As Aristophanes said of marriage partners a long time ago, “can’t live with ‘em; can’t live without ‘em.” Couplehood has its own interests, fre- quently in conflict with those of either partner. Or as one Indian creation myth has it, the cosmos began as a sea of milk in which a tiny wavelet formed, tom ever after between wanting to be itself and longing to merge back into the sea. Both, are metaphors of individual and community in the endlessly creative dialogue and metalogue of self-expression, already recognized in ancient times. What matters in this dialogue is that the contradictions do not become antagonistic.

No one denies that we humans are social/communal creatures as surely as ants and gorillas, or that both capitalism and communism are social systems- one cannot practice either as a

1f is u lesson to be

Ieurned from

many nafive

cultures fhuf

humankind is but

one holon within

the Eurfh

holarchy.

hermit. Had we just a little vision we would see them both as experiments and evaluate them both as having imbalanced the interests of individual and community respectively, by making one subservient to the other, rather than putting them in balance with each other.

It is of considerable interest here to observe that capitalism and communism both were in part inspired by the democratic political economy and social structure of the Native American Haudenosaunee, a union of native nations the Europeans called Iroquois. Ben Franklin, influential with the other founding fa- thers of the USA, on one side and Friedrich Engels, who influ- enced Karl Marx, on the other were inspired by this unique democracy.” Unfortunately, neither the capitalist nor the communist systems inspired by the Haudenosaunee ever really thought in these terms.

It is nevertheless a lesson to be learned from many native cultures that humankind is but one holon within the Earth holarchy. In such awareness, we all would see clearly the advan- tage in negotiating (not eliminating) our human differences, and we would also cease and desist immediately our denial of planetary interests and our profligate destruction of that natural entity sustaining us with ever more difficulty.

If we were an intelligent species-and I suspect aliens would have to judge us otherwise given our knowing destruction of our own life support system and our ridiculously juvenile antago- nisms over what belongs to whom-we would look to the planet that spawned us for guidance in human affairs, as was the origi- nal purpose of’natural philosophy in ancient Greece. It would then become obvious that human affairs have reached the dan- ger level at which cooperation must restore the imbalances of aggressive competition and hoarding if we are not to go extinct along with the tens of thousands of other species we are knock- ing out of the game each year.

.

WHAT’S TO BE DONE?

The new wave of outrage at corporate greed, as I said earlier, is a healthy reaction to this win/lose global economic Monopoly game. But globalization is the unstoppable and natural next phase of evolution; we are not entirely in control and it is very likely beyond our power to stop. Clearly we have already globalized transportation, communications, money, industries, food, weap- ons, pollution, and other aspects of human culture. The good news is that we don’t have to play Monopoly to Flobalize. There are, as Hazel Henderson has urged us for decades, other games to play: win/win games5

Sahtouri~: THE BIOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION 35

As Henderson points out, it was the United Nation’s most powerful nations that commandeered the World Bank and the IMF, then dominated GATT discussions and &et up the WTO together with cbrporations and financial institutions. Yet the U.N.‘s special agencies, during the same timespan, formed agreements and treaties on nuclear proliferation (IAEA), air traffic rules (IATA), and postal rates (GPU), also working doggedly on health, education, and security issues, as well as accepting a great deal of criticism and recommendations for UN. restructuring, which is now an official process. Obviously the U.N. can only be as good as its member states will make it and as NGOs can push it to be.

Polls show clearly that the American people support the U.N. overwhelmingly, while their presumably representative govem- ment does not pay its dues and periodically threatens to quit. Interesting global power shifts would happen if it did.

The UN., whatever its problems and whatever our view of it is, remains, as Henderson points out, “the world’s major networker, broker, and convener of new global negotiations.” All the new problems of globalization are centered in its spinoffs, especially the GATT and WTO. So we must also see as a sign of hope the relentless popular pressure of NGOs that is proving

’ itself increasingly an agent of change. As an example, the UNDP under Gus Speth has been restructured to include NGOs and grassroots participation in its programs and supports demilitari- zation. In 1995 the U.N. World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen, covered by two thousand journalists, discussed replacing GNP measures with a people-centered and ecologically sustainable ‘&new development paradigm.” The 1996 U.N. Habitat II Summit in Istanbul hosted a World Business Forum that set up a process for global standards. Inside the World Bank, its own staff is creating significant progressive changes. In addition to NGOs, labor organizations, religious bodies, investment and pension funds, meetings such as the Gorbachev conferences, and grassroots movements are all playing a role in global awareness and the restructuring of human society.

Historian Arnold Toynbee studied twenty-one past civiliza- tions, looking for common factors in their demise. The two most important ones, it seems, were the extreme concentration of wealth and inflexibility in the face of changing conditions within and around them. We cannot go on playing Monopoly when a cooperative game is called for by our new and obvious global problems. The February 1994 Atlantic Monthly showed a burn- ing globe on its cover, to illustrate the feature article “The Com- ing Anarchy” by Robert Kaplan. He warned that anyone who thought things were still going well was ignoring three-fourths


of the world. This year, same month, same weather vane maga- zine, new cover story, George Soros tells us that global corporate and financial capitalism is it fault.

Good! Now at least the picture is clearer and we can get on with the task of ensuring our civilization against demise. We can prove ourselves a mature species, ready to learn from our parent planet’s four and a half billion years of experience in evolving workable living systems.

THE PRINCIPLES OF LIVING SYSTEMS

Consider world economics and imagine it as the economics of a living entity such as your body. Think what would happen in your body if the raw material blood cells in your bones were, mined as resources by the %orthern industrial” lung and heart organs, transported to their production and distribution centers where blood is purified and oxygen added to make it a useful product. Imagine it is then announced that blood will be distrib- uted from the heart center to those organs that can afford it. What is not bought is chucked out as surplus or stored till the market demand rises. How long could your body survive that system?

When will we turn the UN. and its spinoffs into a governing body as dedicated to service as our central nervous system? When will our diversity be as celebrated and noncontroversial as the diversity of our cells and organs? When will we be as concerned with the health of every local bioregion in our global body as our individual body is, or practice its cellular full employment policy? When will we practice its efficient and universally beneficial economics?

“Anyone who

knows how fo run

Obviously metaphors have their limits and I do not for a moment suggest we slavishly emulate body models. But bodies beat unrealistic mechanical metaphors of perfect societies run- ning like well-oiled machines. They are something we all have in comrnon regardless of our worldviews or our political or spiritual persuasions, and they do exemplify the main features and principles of all healthy living systems or holons, be they single cells, bodies, families, communities, ecosystems, nations, or the whole world. By understanding them we can assess the health of any particular living system and see where it may be dysfunc- tional. This in turn will give us clues to making the system healthier.

u househokf, Xilonem Garcia, a Meshika elder in Mexico, once said to

me, “Anyone who knows how to run a household, knows how to run the world.” This could be restated as “Anypne who knows the principles of living systems can apply them to any holon at any level of its holarchy.” Oddly, we are aware of those principles operating in our bodies, and we seem to get them fairly

knows how to run

fhe world. I’

Sczhtowis: THE BIOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION 37

well at the family level. Not many people starve three of their children to overfeed the fourth, or cultivate one corner of the garden by destroying the rest of it. At the community level they work to the extdnt that there is real community. Beyond that we seem to lose sight of them.

We must not let globalization override the interests of people and local economies. The balance between the interests of the global holon and those of the regional and local holon economies it comprises is as important as the balance between the interests of any local economy and those of the people and other species that compose it. The appropriate response to the world corporate state that railroaded the GATT and the WTO into existence under the rubric of cLeconomic liberalism” without democratic vote is the strengthening of self-sufficient local economies and also to launch a sufficiently strong movement to demand change in the GATT/WTO itself, and in their parent, the UN.

Taking our cues from our bodies, or from the Earth itself, with its diverse ecosystems, we can see that bioregionalism- basic local self-sufficiency economics-is as necessary and important an aspect of healthy globalization as equitable intema- tional trade relations are. Certainly no one part of a healthy globalized economy will be able to exploit another. That means local economies will have to protect themselves against unfair trade and strong economies will have to genuinely assist weaker ones in their self-development.

In nature living holons promote their own health, the health of their embedding holons (e.g., ecosystems) and the health of their embedded holons (e.g., cells) in the improvisational dance of rre- gotiating interests I described above. The best life insurance for any species is to make sure all of its output in product and waste is beneficial to itself and its embedding holons. Recycling is a criti- cal feature of Earth’s dance-there is no waste in nature.

unofher.

Other species, whether fish, birds, or mammals, have innate knowledge of how to live their lives; their negotiations over ter- ritory are largely ritual and rarely involve murder. But humans have vast, and unique freedom of choice with almost no innate behavioral limits. A healthy human social system requires in- vented guidelines for behavior. Law and ethics are the guidance systems we develop to lir-nit our negative behavior and inspire our positive behavior. And they must begin with values.

It is of course the market and monetary values of Soros and his peers that provide the role model for all of our consumer society and, worse yet, for the poorer countries that made it pos- sible, although they have little chance of sharing in it. So we must cheer, or at least breathe a sigh of relief, into the winds of


change, at Sores’ change of heart and his warning. If his peers can hear him, we may be able to avoid extinction yet!

Could I address them, my message would be that we must consciously re-form our human systems into an open society conforming to the principles of healthy living systems, for we are driven by evolutionary momentum to self-organize a world- wide body of humanity whether we like it or not.

Mark Twain tells the story of a young man returning from his first forays out into the world, amazed at all his father has learned while he was gone. It is of course a characterization of budding maturity: the ability to listen to an elder’s accumulated wisdom. When we humans, after all a very new species, drop our adolescent arrogance of thinking we know it all and read the wisdom in our parent planet’s accumulated experience, we too will mature as a species, to our own benefit and that of all other species, as well as the planet itself.

1. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, Eds., The Case ,AgaiGt the Global Economy and For a Return to the Local. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996.

2. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave. London: William Collins, 1980.

3. Arthur Koestler, Janus; A Summing Up. London: Pan Books, 1978.

l 4. See Paula Underwood, “Creation and Organization: A Native American Looks at Economics.” Perspectives on Business and Global Change, Vol 10, No 4, 1996, p. 24.

5. Hazel Henderson, Paradigms in Progress: Life Beyurzd Econom- ics, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1991; Building a Win/Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfare. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996.

Elisabet Sahtouris can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].