Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Mark Gerzon
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: Are You a Global Citizen?
1. Witnessing: Opening Our Eyes
2. Learning: Opening Our Minds
3. Connecting: Creating Relationships
4. Geo-Partnering: Working Together
Conclusion: Global Intelligence - Twenty Ways to Raise Our GI
Appendix: Global Citizens’ Resources – An Action Guide
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
What does it mean to think globally? How can we become global citizens? Why is this so important?
Ground-breaking and provocative, this book sets out a new way of thinking. It argues that our vision of the world is outdated and that, if we are to overcome the challenges we face today (such as terrorism, the environment and financial crises), we need to free ourselves from our narrow identities. We all have to start thinking like global citizens if we are to effect real change.
This is not a utopian dream, but reflects today’s reality. The new world order means we need the ability to influence – and be influenced by – individuals and organizations that we may never have met, with whom we may not share a common language, and who come from very different cultures – in order to achieve shared goals. And we need a new mindset to do this.
The author, Mark Gerzon, is perfectly placed to explain this important development. He lectures, consults and trains clients ranging from Chinese businessmen and American politicians to the leaders of the world’s top think tanks. He shows how sharpening four essential skills – witnessing, learning, connecting and partnering – will help us become ‘advocates for the whole’ and start to solve the many crises facing our earth.
With the help of numerous case studies from every continent, this unique book will undoubtedly change the way you see yourself, and the world. And it dares you to become an engaged, committed global citizen.
As President of Mediators Foundation, which he founded over twenty years ago, Mark Gerzon has launched scores of projects that have advanced the field of global citizenship. He has also worked with a wide variety of organizations, including the US Congress, multinational corporations, and the United Nations. The author of numerous books, including the recent Leading Through Conflict (Harvard Business School Press), he lectures and conducts leadership workshops throughout the world.
For four decades, Gerzon has been involved in global affairs – first as a student (he lived in families in seven different cultures during his year with the International Honors Program); next as a citizen diplomat (he worked for several years bringing together Soviet and American civic leaders to help end the Cold War); then as a journalist (he co-founded WorldPaper, a ‘global newspaper’ which reached a circulation of 1.5 million in five languages); and more recently as a leadership consultant and UN mediator.
In 2006, he founded the Conflict Transformation Collaborative, a network of peace-builders from around the world which connects more than one hundred grassroots mediators. He is also designing an interactive workshop ‘The Global Citizen Experience’ based on this book, which provides citizens, old and young, with an opportunity to raise their global intelligence and identify how they can uniquely serve the earth.
For more information about these initiatives, go to www.mediatorsfoundtion.org.
The Whole World Is Watching
A Choice of Heroes
Listening to Midlife
A House Divided
Leading through Conflict
I am a citizen of the world.
— Diogenes Laertius, Greek philosopher (AD 220)
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.
— Thomas Paine, American revolutionary (AD 1776)
I am not a citizen of the world. I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous!
— Newt Gingrich, American politician (AD 2009)
Two millennia ago, philosophers in ancient Greece were already proclaiming themselves ‘citizens of the world’. More than two centuries ago, American revolutionaries were declaring, ‘My country is the world.’ Over the past few generations, this visionary identity has been evoked by renowned political leaders (Mahatma Gandhi), endorsed by some of the greatest scientists (Albert Einstein), and even put to music (John Lennon). Clearly the idea of global citizenship is a deep and enduring part of human culture.
But here is the paradox: legally, none of the almost seven billion population of the planet is actually a citizen of the world. To my knowledge, no one carries a viable global passport; every one of these documents is issued by, or approved by, nation states.
So every one of us, including you and me, embodies this paradox: we are and we are not global citizens. Strictly speaking, none of us is a global citizen. Yet our only hope is to think and act as if we are.
Haven’t we all been personally affected by the terrorist attacks of 2001 – or by the British and American responses to those attacks? Haven’t all our finances been affected by the global economic crisis of 2008 – and the response of other countries to it? Aren’t almost all of us concerned about the growing environmental crisis, including the threat of climate change, the health risks from breathing pollutants and ingesting contaminants in our food and water, etc.?
The truth is that we are all profoundly affected by the decisions and actions of people whose faces we may never see, whose language we may not speak, and whose names we would not recognize – and they, too, are affected by us. Our well-being, and in some cases our survival, depends on recognizing this truth and taking responsibility as global citizens for it. Whether the problem being debated is the financial crisis or immigration, war in the Middle East or the next pandemic, we human beings are now being challenged to realize that we are something more than citizens of separate nations, members of different races, and followers of different religions. We are also global citizens.
‘Why do the people in France hate us?’ a Chinese student, one of almost three hundred seated in the large lecture hall, asked me. ‘They tried to attack the Olympic torch when it was passing through Paris. Is that because they don’t like our country? Is it because they are angry that we are a rising power?’
For a moment, I was speechless. I knew the answer to the Chinese student’s question. So, I imagine, do you. The demonstrators were angry about the Chinese government’s crackdown on Buddhist monks in Tibet, and more generally about its violations of human rights.
With the Beijing Olympics only a few months away, however, my Chinese hosts had specifically asked me not to talk about Tibet on this ten-day book tour that they were hosting. They worked for a government-managed publishing house that had just translated my most recent book, Leading Through Conflict, into Mandarin, and they did not want me to stir controversy.
For that instant, which seemed like an eternity, I could not decide what to say. Do I violate my host’s request and jeopardize the rest of the trip? Do I assert that their government is at fault? Or do I sidestep the question?
‘Before I answer,’ I said, ‘let me ask you all a question. In the current conflict between China and Tibet, there are two common ways of looking at it. One is that the violent behaviour of Tibetan demonstrators is the problem; the other is that Chinese policies are the problem. If you think Chinese government policy is the problem, please raise your hand.’
In the entire auditorium, there was not a single hand in the air.
‘If you think the Tibetans are the problem, please raise your hand.’
A wave of hands shot into the air until the room was filled with a sea of fingers.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Now I want to tell you that a few months ago, at a university in the United States, I asked the same question. In that room, the results were just the opposite. Every single American student felt China was responsible for the bad situation; no one felt it was the Tibetans’ fault.’
The students sat in shocked silence. It was incomprehensible to them that their American counterparts could see the Tibet–China conflict so differently from them.
‘Do you think that classes like these where everyone thinks exactly the same will provide the best education?’ I asked.
‘No!’ echoed around the room.
‘Do you think that diverse opinions will make you smarter and make your country safer?’
Loud shouts of ‘Yes!’ formed a Chinese-accented chorus.
‘I agree with you,’ I said, building on their energy. ‘China is a great country. Your power is rising. So you need to see all sides. When a wall of mistrust exists between China and another country, don’t stop at the wall. You must use your minds, and your hearts, to see beyond it.’
Just as these students consider themselves to be ‘Chinese’, so do most of us have a national or cultural identity. Rarely do we think of ourselves as truly ‘global’. Yet on every other level – genetic, physical, social, economic, ecological, technological, political and religious – we certainly are. Let’s look briefly at each of these eight levels.
So even if we are legally national citizens, every other dimension of our lives underscores that we are, in fact, global citizens. Narrow, exclusive human identities have reached a dead end. As separate nations, separate tribes and clans, separate faiths and ideologies, we created the problems we now face. Our vision of the world – divided along ethnic lines, national borders, and religious categories – is outdated. To update it, we must realize that the future is here, and it is global.
This shift of worldviews begins with Einstein’s counsel: ‘We cannot solve problems at the same level of awareness that created them.’ So even as we pledge our loyalty to different nations, carry different currencies, serve in opposing armies, and follow different leaders, we must shift our level of awareness to include what is global. Split apart into diverse, sometimes clashing cultures, glib platitudes about ‘oneness’ and ‘Spaceship Earth’ are just not enough. Being a global citizen is neither a cool, ready-to-wear eco-identity, nor a chic lifestyle that we adopt by turning down our thermostats, listening to certain rock stars, eating locally grown foods or driving a hybrid, or even writing a cheque to feed a child or free a political prisoner. Although all these activities may be worthwhile, none makes us global citizens.
The breathtaking photographs taken by the first generation of early astronauts triggered an idealistic outburst of ‘global awareness’. Biologists asserted more boldly that the Earth is a ‘living organism’ or ‘Gaia’, physicists described an ‘unfolding co-evolution’, theologians evoked a ‘sacred Creation’, and philosophers proclaimed an ‘indivisible oneness’. As the futurist Arthur C. Clarke predicted optimistically, the ‘more extreme forms of nationalism’ would not survive now that we ‘have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.’
Unfortunately, however, the heady thrill of viewing our Earthly home from outer space did not instantly transform human consciousness. Instead, those beautiful portraits of our terrestrial home have been pushed aside recently by other images: the World Trade Centre in flames, conflicts in the Middle East descending into chaos, and ethnic violence from Kenya and the Congo to Sri Lanka and Kashmir. Tribalism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism have not disappeared; in many parts of the world, they are reasserting themselves. The seamless, interconnected world that brought the astronauts to tears is the same world in which Israelis and Palestinians fight over a small hill in Gaza; in which Tamils and Sinhalese massacre each other in a struggle for their small island of Sri Lanka; in which scores of countries with widespread hunger spend lavishly on weapons, and in which rich countries erect higher walls and tighten security to keep out poor immigrants.
What is needed now is a practical, results-oriented approach to global citizenship that meets Einstein’s challenge. As so many global businesses are discovering, thinking globally is no longer idealistic. It is immensely practical. In globally competitive industries, a multinational company that fails to become a ‘globally integrated enterprise’ will not survive for long.2
‘Contrary to the view of Tom Friedman,’ says Mansour Javidan, referring to the New York Times columnist, ‘the world is not flat. Maybe it will be seventy-five years from now. But now, the global cultural terrain is pretty bumpy.’
I am sitting here on campus with Professor Javidan; we are participating in a meeting of the International Leadership Association. I wanted to talk personally with this Iranian-born professor (who describes himself as a ‘Russian-Iranian mix with an Arabic name’) because he knows more than anyone about how ‘bumpy’ the world can be. In 1994, he formed a network of scholars around the world that he calls a ‘United Nations of Academia’ for the purpose of developing a truly cross-cultural research methodology. With his more than a hundred colleagues, he launched the GLOBE project, which has analysed the cultural differences that prevent us from truly learning – and leading – across boundaries.
‘Every society has put a lot of energy into teaching its members to learn about people like them,’ Javidan tells me, between sips of his very strong coffee. ‘Now on a massive scale people have to deal with people who are different from them. In the world we are dealing with right now, people are increasingly dealing with people who are different from them. Never in human history have we experienced such massive-scale short-term contact across cultures.’
‘Do you think we can cope with this?’
‘Yes,’ Javidan answers directly. ‘But we will need a global mindset to do it.’3
Aware of this challenge, the global citizens from all over the world who you will meet in the following pages are not only creating a more just and peaceful world. They also are deepening the meaning of their lives. Global citizenship is both an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ job because the inner work of raising our awareness enables us to act in the world in more effective, transformative ways. When we truly understand our inter-connectedness, we realize that caring about the welfare of ‘humanity’ or ‘the planet’ is also self-care.
Although global citizenship is more urgent and more relevant than ever before, the leaders who dominate the world stage are national figures working in their national interest, not global statesmen working in the planetary interest. A 2008 World Public Opinion Poll asked a global sample of twenty thousand people which leader on the world stage inspired their confidence. Not one – not the USA’s George Bush, not China’s Hu Jintao, not Russia’s Vladimir Putin – gained widespread support.4 Only ex-leaders, such as Nelson Mandela or Bill Clinton, receive wide respect when they are clearly working on behalf of causes that transcend the agendas of a single nation.
If genuine ‘global citizens’ are to rise into positions of leadership, they must make this identity more concrete, specific, and grounded in tangible daily actions. It can no longer just be an educational ideal (‘We are developing a curriculum to ensure that every one of our students becomes a responsible global citizen,’ one elementary school principal told me). It can no longer just be a corporate mantra for pumping up global sales figures (‘When we promote executives to the senior level nowadays,’ said one CEO of a high-technology company, ‘we look for experienced global citizens.’) Nor can it remain a vague, high-minded cliché. (Even Global Issues for Global Citizens, the tome recently published by the World Bank, never managed to define what a ‘global citizen’ actually is.)5
To shift our level of awareness from the ethnocentric to the geocentric, we must challenge ourselves to leave our comfort zone. Whatever narrow identity we were born into, it is time to step out of it and into the larger world. We can still cherish our own heritage, lineage, and culture, but we must liberate ourselves from the illusion that they are separate from everyone else’s.
‘My name is Mark,’ I said, shaking hands with one of the Muslim journalists. Like me, he was attending a small meeting between Western and Middle Eastern TV news editors who were concerned about how the media’s coverage had increased tension between the regions.
‘Hello,’ he replied in English, but with a heavy Arabic accent. ‘I am Jihad.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said quickly, unsure about what I had heard. ‘I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Jihad,’ he repeated more clearly.
‘Good to meet you,’ I replied before moving on and introducing myself to the other participants in the meeting. But I promised myself that I would seek out Jihad during a break to find out more about his name.
‘It is actually not an uncommon name,’ he told me later. ‘I was born in the mid-Fifties, and many Muslim parents were drawn to this name.’
‘Why did they pick that name?’ I probed, still puzzled.
‘My parents wanted their son to succeed, and to excel at school. “Jihad” roughly translated means “hard work” or “perseverance”. That is what my parents expected of me, and so they gave me that name.’
‘But how—?’
Jihad raised his hand and smiled. He knew what I was going to ask before the words had left my mouth.
‘The word has been hijacked by the extremists,’ he said. ‘When I was born, it simply meant to be diligent, devoted, and willing to work hard to become the best you could be. Now, in some circles, it means to wage a holy war. But that is not the original meaning of the word at all. If anybody knows the difference, it’s me!’
Ultimately, the challenge of global citizenship involves building a bridge that connects ‘us’ and ‘them’. In the following pages, we will look closely at what makes global citizens so effective at working beyond the borders that divide most of humankind. As we become acquainted with them, we will discover that they have developed four capacities which, taken together, enable us to meet Einstein’s challenge and shift our level of awareness. These four capacities each express themselves through parts of our bodies: eyes, minds, hearts, and hands.
Witnessing: Opening Our Eyes. The journey toward global citizenship begins when we open our eyes. As the Buddhist masters put it: ‘right seeing, right intention, right action’. Once we begin to see the world, then we can learn about it, connect to others, and partner with them.
Learning: Opening Our Minds. Once we can envision the world, we naturally want to learn. We can sense how our mind’s full range has been narrowed. We are not satisfied with whatever our own culture (or subculture) calls ‘learning’. Instead, we recognize that we can embrace the world only if our mind, like a door, is opened. Only then can we cross the threshold to the other side.
Connecting: Creating Relationships. The mind alone is not a passport across borders. To bridge the divides that separate us from others, global citizens need to navigate rivers of feelings as well as thoughts. We need to open our hearts and connect to the hearts of others, creating relationships even with those who may be called ‘enemies’.
Geo-partnering: Working Together. With our eyes, minds, and hearts open, we are ready to act. But global citizens soon realize that no one of us can build a bridge alone. We need a counterpart on the other side. Ordinary partnerships will not suffice because we need an ally who is different from us. We need to open our hands, reach out and take theirs, and work together.
The Conclusion highlights twenty different ways to help us develop these four core skills more fully – witnessing, learning, connecting, and geo-partnering. Taken together, these twenty strategies are a curriculum for raising our ‘global intelligence’.
After a lifetime of work in this field, I believe that as a species we face a choice about whether or not we will invest in developing our ‘GI’. If we do not raise our collective, global intelligence, we may close our eyes and become blind; close our minds and become rigid; close our hearts and become callous; close our hands and become aggressive. History shows that we human beings have both the capacity to open our eyes, minds, hearts, and hands – and to close them. We have the capacity to build an interdependent, peaceful global civilization and to splinter and fragment into endless conflict. We can see the world narrowly, or broadly, depending on which parts of ourselves we are able to develop. Indeed, wherever we may live, the drama of the Earth itself is occurring within each of us.
If we are willing to open our eyes, minds, hearts, and hands, then every one of us can become a global citizen.
Yes, everyone.
For the past decade, early versions of this manuscript circulated under the title Leading Beyond Borders: A Handbook for Global Citizens. I received detailed responses from readers around the world, and I thank them for their encouragement and criticism.
For the past twenty years, the board members and colleagues of Mediators Foundation have continued to inform and to support my work. Under the auspices of the Foundation, many of the global projects that have shaped my understanding of global citizenship – such as the Entertainment Summit in the 1980s, the Common Enterprise in the 1990s, and the Global Leadership Laboratory and Conflict Transformation Collaborative in recent years – have emerged and flourished. In particular, I appreciate colleague Simon Fox’s wide-ranging support at the Foundation, and board member John Steiner’s thoughtful responses to numerous drafts of this book over the past decade.
Four other institutional affiliations have helped to forge my global citizenship over the years. First, my experience as Managing Editor of WorldPaper, one of the first truly global newspapers, opened my eyes to the diversity of global perspectives. Second, the opportunity of leading the Global Partners team at the Rockefeller Foundation enabled me to experience the challenge of aligning diverse perspectives into action. Third, my years consulting with the United Nations Development Program, in particular the Bureau of Crisis Prevention and Recovery, taught me profound lessons about leading beyond borders in key nations around the world. Fourth, my tenure as a Distinguished Fellow at the EastWest Institute, which included working with my colleague Dale Pfeifer to build a network of global policy institutes from every region of the world, greatly expanded my understanding of both ‘global thinking’ and ‘Track II’ diplomacy.
In addition, I have consulted with a number of international organizations which provided me with unparalleled opportunities to witness global citizens in action around the world. I am grateful to all of them, including the Civic Exchange, the International Leadership Association, the Institute for Educational Leadership, the New Israel Fund, Outward Bound International, Search for Common Ground, the State of the World Forum, Synergos Institute and its Bridging Leadership Task Force, United Nations Leadership Academy, the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum, among others.
As I now translate this book into action, I am working with a circle of colleagues to design and implement a Global Citizen Experience, a practical and highly interactive ‘action learning’ workshop that enhances global awareness. To all of these colleagues, who are inspiring me to new understandings and insights, I express my heartfelt gratitude.
So many colleagues and friends deserve my appreciation – for reading drafts, for introducing me to sources and interviews, and for educating me about their cultures – that I do not know where to begin. So I will simply say a collective ‘thank you’ to all of you here, and promise that a copy of this book inscribed with a message to you will be my personal way of letting you know that this is a much wiser book because of you.
Two thoughtful and committed women directly helped make this book a reality: my agent Jill Kneerim in Boston and my editor Judith Kendra in London.
I also want to thank my own multi-cultural family for inspiring me to write this book. In so many ways, we are a microcosm of the global family: a Cherokee-African-Mexican-Polish-Ukrainian-Dutch-American clan that includes a mixture of Buddhist-Christian-Hindu-Jewish heritage. As we deal with our personal and cultural differences, we are discovering new dimensions to our relationships that have enabled me to understand global citizenship more deeply, and more personally.
Finally, I want to thank the woman I married thirty-six years ago, Rachael Kessler, for helping me learn to see her – and myself – as whole. In ways that are still mysterious, that has helped me see the whole world more clearly.
Mark Gerzon Boulder, Colorado
We cannot solve problems on the same level of awareness that we created them.
— Albert Einstein
Developing the four capacities outlined in this book – witnessing, learning, connecting, and geo-partnering – will raise our ‘global intelligence’. Unlike IQ, which is our intelligence quotient, or our EQ, which is our emotional quotient, GI is our ability to use all our faculties in ways that cross the borders that separate humankind. If we crystallize the extensive research on this subject, the most succinct and straightforward definition of global intelligence is: the human capacities that enable us to coexist and co-create with people different than ourselves.
GI involves all of who we are, not just our intellects. It may trigger every human emotion, ranging from the excitement of discovering our connections to each other to the despair of learning about inequality and injustice; from the delight of travelling to distant lands to the confusion of more complexity than we can digest. Becoming global citizens may fill our hearts with emotions that we might otherwise rarely know. It is not just about how we think, but also how we feel; not just about what we know, but how we act.
Among the many tests that measure our GI, one of the most sophisticated is the ‘global mindset’ inventory, based on the pioneering work of Professor Mansour Javidan and his colleagues at the Thunderbird School of Global Management.1 I encourage you to take this (or another similar) skills inventory to assess your current GI.
However, continuing to develop our GI throughout our lives is ultimately more important than our ‘score’ on a test at one point in time. What matters is discovering daily, lifelong activities for consciously developing your global intelligence that work best for you. After all, ‘raising your GI and becoming a global citizen’ is not a college course that lasts a semester, but rather a journey that lasts a lifetime.
Gathered from many sources, as well as my own experience conducting global leadership training around the world, here are twenty daily ways to stimulate global intelligence. Because they raise our GI, they will also help us deal with an increasingly complex and challenging world. Please do not use them as mere brain-teasers, but rather as ways to fashion a globally aware life. Whether you focus on a few of them, or pursue them all, please weave them into the fabric of your life. Doing so will help you find your own unique path to global citizenship – enriching your life and making a better, safer world.
NOTE: The Global Citizens’ Resources section that follows this chapter contains specific books, websites, organizations and other tools for exploring each of these GI-raising methods.
Gandhi’s oft-quoted advice is the right starting point for us because, if followed, it challenges us to go inward and go outward at the same time. It encourages us not to wait for ‘them’ to change, but to change ourselves first.
In this spirit, I must admit that the biggest obstacle to my achieving change in the world has been me. Although I have been fortunate to have many opportunities to contribute to the world during my life, I have missed some of them because I was not then aware of the parts of myself that were part of the problem. I was so determined to be a ‘caring’ person, and ultimately a ‘global’ citizen, that I remained blind to the parts of myself that were not caring and not global. I was so determined to be generous, for example, that I did not recognize how I was selfish; and so committed to being collaborative that I did not admit when I was headstrong, etc.
For me, following Gandhi’s advice has been highly practical as well as spiritual counsel. When he encouraged us to ‘be the change that [we] want to see in the world’, he was not advocating personal instead of socio-political change but rather internal change as a means to achieving external change. This distinction in interpretation is crucial if we are to become global citizens who walk in his footsteps.
The profiles of global citizens in this book are evidence that the key is to start with who we are, and where we are. We met global citizens with great power and influence, like UN diplomats, and those who have very little influence or wealth, like Zimbabwean Virginia Mupanduki. But no matter which global citizen we met – from Israeli and Palestinian peace-builders to African healers, from astronauts returning from orbit to university students in Zhuhai – the starting point for all of us is the same: here, and now.
If we want a compassionate, caring world, let us be compassionate and caring for those around us. If we want a just world, let us live justly. If we want a sustainable world, let us create lives that are sustainable. If we want a peaceful world, let us be peace.
Brain research has recently established that our minds tend to filter out information that challenges our identities. When we listen to speeches by public figures that include statements with which we disagree, our brains ‘turn off’; when they make statements that confirm what we already believe, our brains ‘turn on’.
If, for example, a Muslim sympathetic to al-Qa’eda heard a speech by a US Army general in Iraq, he would immediately discount whatever he heard, even if it were true. An American television viewer who heard a speech by Osama bin Laden would do exactly the same. Our left brain performs this screening function in order to protect our identity. The goods news is that by filtering out information that does not fit our current worldview it gives us a cushion of certainty. But the bad news is: it prevents us from learning.
Fortunately, our brain has two hemispheres. In simple terms, the left brain thinks, the right brain feels.2 We need to use both of them to raise our global intelligence. When our left brain ‘shuts down’ in the face of challenging evidence, our right brain can feel us contract and tighten. It can alert us to the fact that we are being ‘closed-minded’. It can challenge us to show more respect (literally, to ‘look again’). It can remind us to open our minds and to listen deeply to (not necessarily agree with) even points of view that strike us as outrageous, misinformed, and even immoral.
The corpus callosum is the vital part of the brain that connects the left and the right hemispheres. This ‘switchboard’ brings the skills of both parts of the brain together. Although it tends to be more highly developed in women than in men, every one of us can develop it more fully by becoming more familiar with its function and using it to keep the door of our minds open to the world.
Recently the GLOBE project, the multi-country research initiative that developed the concept of the ‘global mindset’, hired two neuroscientists to begin studying the differences in brain function between those who were global thinkers and those who were not. Using electrodes connected to an EEG, they found that many sectors on both sides of the brain would ‘fire’ simultaneously in subjects with high GI, while those with lower GI would function almost entirely in one region on the left side of the brain. While this research is still too preliminary to be conclusive, the early results suggest that whole brains are much better at witnessing the world than only a part.3
Note to parents: although television can build GI, please keep it out of the bedrooms of young children. The development of television has clearly strengthened the global part of ourselves insofar as it brings us news about communities and cultures other than our own. However, television in the bedrooms of young children is quite another matter. Children with televisions in the room where they sleep score lower on school tests and develop other negative behaviour patterns. The risks of television in children’s bedrooms outweigh whatever the benefits may be.4
In September 2008, more than a hundred Muslim scholars and clerics of all sects wrote an open letter to the world’s Christians that should be required reading. From across the Muslim world, they reached out to remind their Christian brethren that Osama bin Laden does not represent them. They pointed out how much Islam and Christianity share, including belief in the unity of God, the primacy of love for God, the power of loving thy neighbour, etc. Their letter, entitled ‘A common word between us and you’, catalysed a response from many Christians, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, who concluded his reply with these words: ‘So to your invitation to enter deeply into dialogue . . . we say: Yes! Amen.’5
Raising our GI means keeping our eye on what we share, not only on what we don’t. Yes, our faiths differ – but developing our global intelligence quickly reveals that our faiths also share common ground. Despite the tensions between the so-called ‘Christian West’ and the ‘Muslim Middle East’, both these faiths, as well as Judaism, began in one family – the family of Abraham.
Readers of this book may be Muslim or Hindu, Jewish or Christian. The people who hold this book in their hands may be Arab or Caucasian, Swiss or Swazi. On the one hand, becoming a global citizen means exercising what Jason Hill, a young Jamaican-born philosopher, calls ‘the right to forget where you came from’.6 It means uprooting ourselves from our historical identities. But on the other hand, raising your GI does not mean turning away from your roots, but turning into them.
Whatever our identities are, if we trace them deeper and deeper, they will take us into the oneness of the Earth. ‘Read the Bible, read the Koran, read the Torah, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita,’ said the late Indian guru Swami Satchidananda, in one of his clearest and most succinct statements. ‘[All faiths] say . . . Get out of these definitions. It’s the definitions that divide us.’
Wherever we dare to look beneath the surface differences we find an unexplored or undeveloped oneness. Before we split into many, we were one. To remember this simple but elusive truth, a simple exercise is this: whenever you say, ‘One, two, three,’ remember that one comes first.
As everyone knows, a house needs a door. Otherwise it is no longer a home, but a prison. But when it comes to religion, we often build houses of worship without doors. We create belief systems with walls but no exits.
All over the world fundamentalist parents of every faith believe that it is bad for children to learn about other ways of seeing the world, particularly ways that they consider evil. In the United States, for example, there are millions of followers of Jesus Christ who mistrust anyone who follows Mohammed and who would never encourage their children to study the Koran or read about Islam. Halfway around the world, in the thousands of fundamentalist religious schools called madrasas from Morocco to Mindanao, there are hundreds of millions of followers of the prophet Mohammed who do not want their children to study the Bible or read about Christianity. And scattered throughout the world are Jews, who live as a minority among the other Abrahamic faiths, and who inculcate their children into Judaism.
Of course parents of all faiths have the right to give their children a religious ‘home’ in order to ensure that they adopt the same faith as their parents. Although ignorance about one’s neighbours is not good for anyone, parents around the world teach their children about their own traditions and very little, if at all, about the faiths of others.