Globalisation for the Common Good and How it all Began

I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1952. In 1971, after finishing high school, I came to England to further my education. In 1974 I married my English wife, Annie, and two years later we emigrated to Canada. I received my BA and MA in Economics from the University of Windsor in 1980 and 1982 respectively. We returned to England in 1982, and in 1986 I was awarded my PhD in Economics from the University of Birmingham.

From 1980 onwards, for the next twenty years, I taught economics in universities, enthusiastically demonstrating how economic theories provided answers to problems of all sorts. I got quite carried away by the beauty, the sophisticated elegance, of complicated mathematical models and theories. But gradually I started to have an empty feeling. I began to suspect that neo-liberal economics was an emperor with no clothes. What good were elegant theories which were unable to explain all the poverty, exclusion, racism, corruption, injustice and unhappiness that exist in the world?

I came to feel that my life as a lecturer was like a make-believe movie: sit and relax … in the end models dreamt up by detached economists will sort out the world’s ills! My classrooms were becoming unreal places. I began to ask fundamental questions of myself. Why did I never talk to my students about compassion, dignity, comradeship, solidarity, happiness, spirituality – about the meaning of life? We never debated the biggest questions. Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going to?

I told them to create wealth, but I did not tell them for what reason. I told them about scarcity and competition, but not about abundance and co-operation. I told them about free trade, but not about fair trade; about GNP – Gross National Product – but not about GNH – Gross National Happiness. I told them about profit maximisation and cost minimisation, about the highest returns to the shareholders, but not about social consciousness, accountability to the community, sustainability and respect for creation and the creator. I did not tell them that, without humanity, economics is a house of cards built on shifting sands. Where was the economic theory that reflected my students’ real lives? How could I carry on believing in such an unreal world? I could not go on asking them to believe unbelievable theories in the name of economics.

I wanted to run away from all the white elephants: the barren theories and models in my textbooks, the department of economics, the MBA programmes and more.  I could not carry on defending the indefensible. How could I respect modern economics when it had no respect for other disciplines?

These conflicts caused me much frustration and alienation, leading to heartache and despair. I needed to rediscover myself and a real-life economics. After a proud twenty-year academic career, I resigned from my position as lecturer and, after a debilitating year of soul-searching, decided that I would become a student all over again. I would study theology and philosophy, disciplines nobody had taught me when I was a student of economics and I did not teach my own students when I became a teacher of economics.

It was at this difficult time that I came to understand that I needed to bring spirituality, compassion, ethics and morality back into economics itself, to make this dismal science once again relevant to and concerned with the common good. It was now that I made the following discoveries:

•  Economics, from the time of Plato right through to Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, was as deeply concerned with issues of social justice, ethics and morality as it was with economic analysis. Most economics students today learn that Adam Smith was the ‘father of modern economics’ but not that he was also a moral philosopher. In 1759, sixteen years before his famous Wealth of Nations, he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explored the self-interested nature of man and his ability nevertheless to make moral decisions based on factors other than selfishness. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith laid the early groundwork for economic analysis, but he embedded it in a broader discussion of social justice and the role of government. Students today know only of his analogy of the ‘invisible hand’ and refer to him as defending free markets. They ignore his insight that the pursuit of wealth should not take precedence over social and moral obligations, and his belief that a ‘divine Being’ gives us ‘the greatest quantity of happiness’. They are taught that the free market as a ‘way of life’ appealed to Adam Smith but not that he distrusted the morality of the market as a morality for society at large. He neither envisioned nor prescribed a capitalist society, but rather a ‘capitalist economy within society, a society held together by communities of non-capitalist and non-market morality’. That morality for Smith included neighbourly love, an obligation to practice justice, a norm of financial support for the government ‘in proportion to [one’s] revenue’, and a tendency in human nature to derive pleasure from the good fortune and happiness of other people.

•  The leading figure in the establishment of the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1885 was the progressive economist Richard T. Ely. He sought to combine economic theory with Christian ethics, especially the command to love one’s neighbour (as did Adam Smith). He declared that the Church, the State and the individual must work together to fulfil the Kingdom of God on earth. Few economists or economics students today know much of this history: that, for example, twenty of the fifty founding members of the AEA were former or practising ministers. Ely himself was a leading member, in the 1880s, of the Social Gospel movement; he was better known to the American public in this capacity than as an economist. He believed that economics departments should be located in schools of theology because ‘Christianity is primarily concerned with this world, and it is the mission of Christianity to bring to pass here a kingdom of righteousness.’ As a ‘religious subject’, economics should provide the base for ‘a never-ceasing attack on every wrong institution, until the earth becomes a new earth, and all its cities, cities of God.’

•  The focus of economics should be on the benefit and the bounty that the economy produces, on how to let this bounty increase, and how to share the benefits justly among the people for the common good, removing the evils that hinder this process.

• ‘Economic rationality’ in the shape of neo-liberal globalisation is socially and politically suicidal. Justice and democracy are sacrificed on the altar of a mythical market as forces outside society rather than creations of it.

•  Every apparently economic choice is, in reality, a social choice. We can choose a society of basic rights – education, health, housing, child support and a dignified pension – or greed, pandemic inequality, ecological vandalism, civic chaos and social despair. Modern neo-liberal economics ignores the first and promotes the second path as the way to achieve economic efficiency and growth.

•  The moral crises of global economic injustice today are integrally spiritual: they signal something terribly amiss in the relationship between human beings and God.

•  Where the moral life and the mystery of God’s presence are held in one breath – because the moral life is the same as the mystical life – the moral agency may be found for establishing paths towards a more just, compassionate and sustainable way of living. ‘Moral agency’ is the active love of creation (for oneself as well as for other people and for the non-human creation); it is the will to orient life around the ongoing well-being of communities and of the global community, prioritising the needs of the most vulnerable; it is the will to create social structures and policies that ensure social justice and ecological sustainability.

•  In contrast to this sensibility, which weds spirituality and morality, stands modern economics’ persistent tendency to divorce the two, in particular to dissociate the intimate personal experience of a close relationship with God from public moral power.

•  It is the belief in collective responsibility and collective endeavour that allows individual freedom to flourish. This can only be realised when we commit ourselves to the common good and begin to serve it.

•  There are three justifications for the common good which are not commonly discussed in economics:

1. Human beings need human contact, or sociability. The quality of that interaction is important, quite apart from any material benefits it may bring.

2. Human beings are formed in the community – their education and training in virtue (their preferences) are elements of the common good.

3. A healthy love for the common good is a necessary component of a fully developed personality.

•  The marketplace is not just an economic sphere, ‘it is a region of the human spirit’. Profound economic questions are divine in nature; in contrast to what is assumed today, they should be concerned with the world of the heart and spirit. Although self-interest is an important source of human motivation, driving the decisions we make in the marketplace every day, those decisions nevertheless have a moral, ethical and spiritual content, because each decision we make affects not only ourselves but others too. We must combine the need for economic efficiency with the need for social justice and environmental sustainability.

•  The greatest achievement of modern globalisation will eventually come to be seen as the opening up of possibilities to build a humane and spiritually enriched globalised world through the universalising and globalising of compassion. But for ‘others’ to become ‘us’, for the world to become intimate with itself, we have to get to know each other better than we do now. Prejudices have to disappear: we have to see that the cultural, religious and ethnic differences reflect an ultimate creative principle. For this to happen, the great cultures and religions need to enter into genuine dialogue with each other.

•  Finally, today more than ever before, given the collapse of Communism and the increasing human and environmental cost of capitalism, there is a pressing need for alternative economic models. Activists are renewing Martin Buber’s search for what in 1943 he called ‘a genuine third alternative … leading beyond individualism and collectivism, for the life decision of future generations’ . Crises for our species such as mass starvation, Aids, unrestrained violence and the degradation of our biosphere – crises that transcend economic systems, political dogmas and national boundaries – are bringing us face-to-face with questions about self-preservation and self-restraint, personal and communal responsibility, moral authority and political power – questions that are at the very core of our religious traditions. If the idea of divine authority offends contemporary sensibilities, the environmental imperatives of creation may be seen to be as pressing as any divine commandments. The ‘market value’ of the world’s great faiths is at an all-time high in the ongoing enterprise of human liberation. It is time to call for a theological economics which can bring us sustainability for the common good.

After concluding my theological studies, I wrote a number of books and articles on my newly discovered areas of interest and founded an annual international conference, ‘An Interfaith Perspective on Globalisation for the Common Good’ , to address the problems and challenges of globalisation not only from an economic perspective but also from ethical, moral, spiritual and theological points of view.

My first conference (‘Common Goals, Common Crises, Common Call and Common Hope’) was held in Oxford in 2002. I did not know what to expect, or how many would turn up, but I was convinced it was the right thing to do. We succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. We had sixty senior speakers and many other participants from different parts of the world. I felt humbled and honoured. It was during this Oxford conference that I was pressed by many delegates to make it an annual event.

I enthusiastically took up the challenge but decided that, as we were concerned with globalisation, the conference should be held in a different country each year, extending the opportunities for dialogue and of learning from each other. Moreover, each conference was to be in association with a local organisation with aims similar to ours. So our first conference in Oxford gave birth to a global movement to promote and serve the common good.

The second conference, ‘Ethics, Spirituality and Religions: Transforming Globalisation for the Common Good’, was held in St Petersburg in 2003. The third conference, ‘Integrity, Spirituality, Ethics and Accountability: Transforming Business, Corporate Social Responsibility and Globalisation for the Common Good’ was held in Dubai in 2004. The fourth conference, ‘Africa and Globalisation for the Common Good: The Quest for Justice and Peace’ was held in Kenya, in April 2005. The fifth conference will be held at the Chaminade University of Honolulu in Hawaii in June 2006. Future conferences are currently being planned.

Our work has benefited greatly from the opening of our own website (www.globalisationforthecommongood.info), for which I am grateful to my good friend and colleague Dr Josef Boehle.

Kamran Mofid
Founder
Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative