Purpose: To examine the need for global citizenship and earth consciousness in an age of corporate empire and corrupted morals.

 

Materials

Readings: Justice Rising, Spring 2008, Emigrants—World Citizens or Corporate Slaves?; Combined JR Winter 2007, Progressive Religion vs. Pervasive Corporate Corruption; Yes Magazine, Spring 2015,Together with the Earth

Handouts: Questions, Talking Points

 

Paradigm: Policies of the global corporate empire and their failing nation-states, driven by an amoral corporate culture, have created a crisis of worldwide emigration, earth destruction and human bondage that can only be reversed with global citizenship and earth consciousness.

 

Context: Humans have revered birth’s magic and held nature’s wonders in awe since our beginning. Our oldest human artifacts honor fertility. Ancient cultures shared a deep respect for their fellow humans and nature. They flourished in societies built on partnerships, cooperation, and the sacredness of the land. That social milieu occupies 99.8% of the human time line.

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The disintegration of those societies erupted 3,500 years ago as notions of private property began erasing old concepts. The Old Testament, which forms the basis of our Judeo/Christian culture, displaced the old pagan cultures and supported the domination of nature by humans, establishment of private property, and patriarchal rule. The first human writing systems arose in this era and were used to divide land and wealth between haves and have-nots.

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Notions of human domination over nature and male patriarchy still drive today’s extraction societies of our global corporate empire. Imperial wars in the Middle East are destroying local societies. Western-promoted trade agreements help lay waste to local economies. Both wars and trade agreements send floods of migrants across borders to places where the corporate empire needs workers.  This has led to racially tainted culture wars across Europe and the US, instituting uncooperative national governments that denigrate migrants and eschew social justice. Nation states have proved incapable of solving these problems of migration.

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Meanwhile, as outlined in Part 3 of this course, the corporate empire is fouling the nest we live in. Oblivious to the economic and spiritual values of our natural systems, we are ruining nature’s systems and depleting our natural resources.

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We all need to adhere to a moral narrative that recognizes the value of other humans and nature and understand how we are all connected. Continual migration of humans has long developed a sense that more than anything we are citizens of the earth. That sense was canonized in the 1948 passage of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights. That document creates a basis of human rights and includes:

• All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

• Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.

• Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well being of himself and of his family.

• Everyone has the right to education.
  Our inherent respect for social justice does animate parts of our major religions. An Episcopalian priest once implored me to understand that the gospel never says that you win, that it is always a struggle. Most religions also address concepts of social justice including:

• The concept of Karma in Buddhism,

• The Zakat of the Quran,

• Rita of the Hindu tradition,

• Jewish “simcha ("gladness" or "joy"), tzedakah ("the religious obligation to perform charity and philanthropic acts"), chesed ("deeds of kindness"), and tikkun olam ("repairing the world").

The Quakers emerged during the strife of the English Civil War when merchants, corporations, and capitalism began dominating the culture in England. They presented a stinging analysis of what the new commercial ethos meant to the lives of the common people:

• “Trading has become a trap to captivate men in deceitful dealings;”

• “Vain customs and fashions [serve] the adulterous eye and vanity;”

• In this trap the just become a prey to the insatiable, the obsessively self-interested;

• Vainglorious clothing and amusements “have lost the man of the heart through vanity;”

• Consumerism “destroys the creation;”

• Flattering merchandisers “cheat poor country people;”

• “What traps there are in laws, which should protect the simple.”

This is the type of analysis we should be embracing. Martin Luther King in his great Beyond Vietnam speech encouraged us all to embrace a new morality. He declared “We must rapidly shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

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Almost all indigenous belief systems embrace social justice along with a respect for nature. When indigenous cultures rose to political prominence in Ecuador and Bolivia, indigenous leaders placed “sumak kawsay — “living well” or living in harmony with the natural world, while insisting that nature has rights deserving of protection — into their national constitutions. Those cultures have recognized that the earth is in peril and chosen to spread their concepts of sumak kawsay to the far corners of the planet.

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After the 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and The Rights Of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the participants declared the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. It is a great addition to the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights that essentially calls for global citizenship for all humans. The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth presents a moral and spiritual connection between humans and nature. Its dozens of statements include:

•  We are all part of Mother Earth, an indivisible, living community of interrelated and interdependent beings with a common destiny;

• Mother Earth is the source of life, nourishment and learning and provides everything we need to live well;

• All beings have the right to

  •  maintain their identity and integrity as a distinct, self-regulating and interrelated being;

  • be free from contamination, pollution and toxic or radioactive waste;

  • water as a source of life;

• Every human being is responsible for respecting and living in harmony with Mother Earth;

• Human beings, all States, and all public and private institutions must:

  • ensure that the pursuit of human wellbeing contributes to the wellbeing of Mother Earth;

  • respect, protect, conserve and where necessary, restore the integrity, of the vital ecological   cycles, processes and balances of Mother Earth;

  • promote and support practices of respect for Mother Earth and all beings;

  • promote economic systems that are in harmony with Mother Earth;

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Such global visions animate the growing global movement against corporate imperial empire that flooded the streets of the world with millions of people in February 2003. It also inspired the 2017 global women’s marches confronting the institutionalization of patriarchy in many societies around the world. Both events demonstrated that a global movement is coming together to promote cooperation, social justice, and a vision that we are all a part of nature.

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The great questions are: Will this movement achieve acceptance and political power before the earth plummets into endless wars over resources or rising waters flood our streets?  Can we bring on the Age of Aquarius in time to save earth as we know it?

 

Activities:  Give the class a historic sense of our migratory and spiritual history described above. Emphasize that we are a land of migrants and that economic policies and wars driven by economic/political/corporate conquest often force that migration. It might be interesting to see if economic necessity or wars drove the migration of the class members’ ancestors.

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You could also have someone talk to the class who has, or whose family has recently migrated to your community, especially if their migration was caused by corporate trade policies, resource wars, or the power of money.

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You can also distribute a copy of the Declaration of Human Rights. Please download a copy here. You can also download a copy of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. It can be interesting to have each member of the class read an individual section of the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth and come to a sense of our moral responsibilities to each other and to nature.

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It is also interesting to discuss the early Quaker critiques of the budding capitalism of the 1600s. For ideas on this, here is a link to the transcript of a talk I once researched and gave on Commercial Empire and the Selling of the Soul. You can see videos about global citizenship and global consciousness here. These are such important and personal issues, it might be good to go around the class and solicit people’s thoughts on these two topics.

 

These activities can easily take up the first part of the class. Take a break and come back for a discussion on questions about migration and spiritual responses to our global problems. Here are notes to help facilitate the answers to those questions.

 

This is the end of the regular class portion of this course. The last class helps people develop local solutions. One of the things we have done for that class is have everyone create a thirty-second elevator speech on one of the topics we have covered. To facilitate that, we have created an expanded list of the talking points you have handed out for each class. It provides background material for each of the talking points. Here is a link to those talking points. Send it as a PDF to all the class participants. Here is also a shorter amalgamated list of the talking points you have handed out for each class.

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You could also prepare the students to do some role-playing with the talking points and get ready to practice talking to their “conservative Uncle George” on one of these topics. Also hand out the survey about the class for class members to fill out and bring back.

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The day after the class, email the PDF document giving background for the talking points. You can also send them the survey for the class, a document about making an elevator speech, and a list of the solutions that have been discussed in class or in the readings. You can also send them this URL to a video about making an elevator speech. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/1248069313393/refining-the-elevator-pitch.html

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The day before the last class, send a reminder email that the last class is coming up and maybe resend the survey, talking points, elevator speech information, solutions and the URL to the video.