Beyond Individualism

The Challenge of Inclusive Communities

George Rupp

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231539869
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Éthique et philosophie morale

In many places around the world, relations between ethnic and religious groups that for long periods coexisted more or less amicably are now fraught with aggression and violence. This trend has profound international implications, threatening efforts to narrow the gap between rich and poor. Underscoring the need for sustained action, George Rupp urges the secular West to reckon with the continuing power of religious conviction and embrace the full extent of the world's diversity.

While individualism is a powerful force in Western cultures and a cornerstone of Western foreign policy, it elicits strong resistance in traditional communities. Drawing on decades of research and experience, Rupp pushes modern individualism beyond its foundational beliefs to recognize the place of communal practice in our world. Affirming the value of communities and the productive role religion plays in many lives, he advocates new solutions to such global challenges as conflicts in the developing world, income inequality, climate change, and mass migration.

PART 1

Education as a Resource

2	The Challenges of American Provincialism

EDUCATION IS AN INDISPENSABLE resource for any quest for more inclusive communities because of the need to engage the longstanding but ever more counterproductive provincialism at the heart of so much of American public life.

American Provincialism

For most of our history, we in the United States have been subject to the charge of provincialism. In its formative years, the United States was far removed from the then centers of world influence. The frontier mentality of a population pressing into new territory also did not lend itself to cosmopolitanism. And the enormous size of the country once we expanded our borders to the full breadth of the continent allowed a self-contained preoccupation with the domestic as distinguished from international concerns.

Despite this long-established pattern of self-containment and distance, the twentieth century, as we are all very much aware, witnessed the emergence of the United States initially as one international force among others and by the end of the century as indisputably the world’s preeminent global power. Yet, despite its global reach, the United States has continued to exhibit its entrenched tendency to go its own way. To take one striking instance, when President Woodrow Wilson pressed a visionary international agenda, Congress—with the opposition led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA)—refused to authorize U.S. membership in the League of Nations because of concerns that joining would compromise American independence of action. The pattern illustrated in the antagonism between Wilson and Lodge is repeated again and again during the course of the twentieth century. But there is no need to multiply historical examples here; in a sense both the global role and the insistence on independence have reached as high a level as at any previous time in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century.

In its declaration of a right to preemptive action and its early disdain for multilateral institutions and processes, the administration of President George W. Bush maintained both its indispensability to global order and its independence of the constraints that bind other countries. This position is advanced in rhetoric that is remarkably provincial in its projection of American exceptionalism, even as it claims to formulate principles that are universal. In this sense the rhetoric accurately expresses the double claim to independence and indispensability.

To put it mildly, this position did not earn plaudits abroad. More bluntly, the combination of arrogance and ignorance resulted in the virtual collapse of American standing around the world. Those of us who have spent considerable time overseas in recent decades can report with certainty that the United States had seldom if ever been held in such low esteem as in the early years of this century, not only in Europe but also in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

While negative views of the United States no doubt also reflect such less admirable qualities as envy and resentment, the decline in our international standing in the first years of the twenty-first century is in significant part the consequence of an extended series of bad judgments. These judgments are more often than not a product of insufficient knowledge, a lack of curiosity, or an incapacity to view issues from more than one perspective; of an unquestioning assumption that everyone the world over admires Americans; or of an uncritical presumption that our position is right and good. I would applaud mightily if our colleges and universities could guarantee that such mistakes would never again be made! But I propose that we focus instead on a more tractable challenge that our colleges and universities have substantial resources to address—namely, the provincialism that too often shapes our public policy deliberations.

I would be surprised if I have to document the extent of this provincialism even on our campuses. But in case there are any doubts, I will refer briefly to three recent reports. Here are a few of the findings.

From a National Geographic survey of Americans in the 18–24 age group:

• Almost 30 percent thought the population of the United States amounted to 1 to 2 billion people.

• 11 percent could not locate the United States on a world map.

• Only one in seven could find Iraq or Iran on a map of the Middle East and Asia; for locating Saudi Arabia, the figure was 24 percent; for Israel, 14 percent.

• On a world map, only 17 percent could find Afghanistan and only 19 percent could locate Germany.

• Only 25 percent could identify China and India as the two countries with populations of more than a billion people.

From a recent Asia Society survey:

• 25 percent of college-bound high school students did not know the name of the ocean that separates the United States from Asia.

• 80 percent did not know that India is the world’slargest democracy.

From a recent American Council on Education report:

• Fewer than 1 percent of American graduate students are studying languages deemed by the U.S. government as critical to national security.

• Approximately 25 percent of K–12 schools that are seeking to hire foreign language teachers are unable to find them.

I suspect, of course, that all of us deem the students who attend the colleges and universities with which we most identify to be much more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than the provincials whose knowledge is recorded in these surveys and reports. I certainly hope that is the case. But even if it is, all of our colleges and universities have an opportunity to build from whatever foundation is in place toward the framework we need if the United States is going to play a constructive global role.

Developing Faculty and Curricular Resources

This building process must begin with the basic instruction in language and culture that even many of our best students—and faculty—all too frequently lack. To learn about other languages and cultures may seem self-evident at a time of accelerating interaction on a global scale. Yet the fact that we live in an increasingly integrated world in which the United States exercises enormous global influence may paradoxically serve to undermine this focus on the fundamentals of other languages and cultures.

We have all heard endlessly about globalization. We live in a world that is ever more insistently connected, over previously almost unimaginable distances. We are acutely aware of our unprecedented situation: more extensive international media; less expensive transportation and communication; the explosion of e-mail and the Internet; increasingly efficient transfers of money, goods and services, ideas and intellectual or cultural property of all kinds, and even people across any and all borders.

The paradox is that these powerful processes of globalization may fuel the illusion that it will be enough if our students and faculty understand this increasingly integrated world through a U.S.-dominated perspective. All that is needed in this view is an array of courses and faculty to teach them in such areas as global finance, international relations, development economics, world literature, and comparative cultures. Those are the specializations appropriate for colleges and universities aware of the new global reality that shapes us all.

I appreciate and applaud such courses. I have even taught some with titles that include terms like “comparative cultures,” and I urge support for faculty and courses along these lines. Certainly the United States would be markedly less provincial if every graduate of our higher education system had at least a few courses that exemplify such awareness of globalization. And to get to that point is in itself a major challenge that will require substantial resources.

Still, as important as such courses are, the learning they impart also requires serious engagement with the particular languages and cultures that are compared or, worse, are homogenized into a global world culture that has English as its preferred language. Not every student needs to be closely acquainted with the other traditions that are incorporated into a globalized view. But if there is no deeply grounded knowledge of those other traditions, the danger is that we will assimilate them into our own views and erroneously assume that we have understood them.

Rather than presume that the world is more or less like us—or, at least in its heart of hearts, wants to be like us—we must do the hard work of learning about others who are different from us. And this imperative is not confined to the patent need for us to know more about the Middle East and the Muslim world. Clearly the world’s largest countries, China and India, pose a stark contrast to us and will play a major role on the global stage in the decades and centuries ahead. So too will the current plight and the future prospects of sub-Saharan Africa affect us all, as will our neighbors in Central and South America, who are once again becoming vocal in their disenchantment with our high-handed dealings and dismissive stance toward them. Even apparently so similar Europe is more and more vigorously asserting its distinction from U.S. economic, political, and cultural values.

The challenge of learning about our neighbors around the world is a daunting one. Certainly it will require a division of labor! While no one can hope to understand the full variety of cultures worldwide, each of us should play a part. And if any institutions should take the lead in assembling an ensemble, if not a full orchestra of players, it is our colleges and universities.

Yet how many of our institutions of higher learning still have a language requirement for graduation? In how many languages do we provide instruction? I recognize that it is soberingly expensive to mount courses in a full range of languages, including ones spoken by only small numbers of people. Maybe not the Central African language of Bangando. Maybe not Mongolian. Maybe not even Thai or Croatian. But can we claim to offer an education adequate for the twenty-first century if we do not make available instruction in Chinese and Arabic and perhaps also Russian, Japanese, and Swahili in addition to usual options of French and Spanish? Many colleges and universities may find it advisable to participate in consortia so that a fuller range of offerings is available at an affordable cost. But by whatever arrangements, our educational institutions cannot execute their core responsibilities if we do not undertake to counter American provincialism as embodied in our students and our communities.

Language courses are of course only the tip of the iceberg—or better yet, the base of the mountain—of the instructional resources required. For an earlier generation, so-called “area studies” offered one approach to allowing at least minimal coverage of regions seldom examined in depth. With the decline in government resources for area studies, many of these programs have become smaller or have even been discontinued. But the challenge remains to provide curricula in the history and contemporary economic, political, and cultural life of nations around the world.

In response to this challenge European and American institutions of higher education are stunning in their continuing provincialism. In leading South Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, African, or Latin American universities, it is unimaginable that the natural sciences or philosophy or economics would be taught without some reference to Western European and American materials. Even social sciences other than economics, as well as history and literature, include references to Western European and American parallels at a quite early stage. In contrast, American and European educational approaches too often refer to other traditions only in passing, as a special side interest, or at a very advanced stage of study.

As one who has invested decades in working for change in higher education, I certainly appreciate how difficult it is to respond to this challenge of moving toward a more globally responsible curriculum. I will not pretend to resolve all of the tough implementation issues. But I do insist that all of us who care about this country and are in positions of leadership in colleges and universities or other similar institutions must address the fact of American provincialism in every way we can.

Cultivating Global Students

I realize that the curricular issues I have raised require tough choices among competing priorities and almost endless deliberations with the appropriate faculty bodies. I will not claim to assess the pros and cons of the tradeoffs that I know each institution will have to make. But I do have one strategy that I would like to commend in grappling with this set of issues. It has to do with one of the variables in the equation that always needs to be solved. That variable is the students at the heart of the education offered.

In regard to this variable I have two recommendations. The first is to diversify the student body as much as is feasible. The second is to facilitate a semester or preferably a year of study abroad for all students.

The first recommendation has received substandard attention in recent decades. Even so I note this recommendation anyway, and call attention in particular to its educational significance for the entire campus community. It is an important objective in its own right to offer educational opportunity to all prospective students. But beyond opening the doors of our colleges and universities to a broad range of applicants so that those too often excluded can benefit from higher education, having a diversity of students is itself a resource for countering provincialism. To be maximally beneficial, this diversity should include a significant range in terms of the income and ethnicity of American students and also a substantial contingent of international students from a broad array of countries and regions.

To have a curriculum that includes attention to minority perspectives in this country and is as full as is feasible a representation of non-American traditions is a crucial educational resource. But having colleagues who embody in person those other perspectives and traditions is an invaluable way to ensure that even students whose coursework moves in other directions will confront personalities and positions that are different from prevailing American views. Consequently, the educational opportunity is not only for the minority or international students but also for their classmates and the faculty, who of course also need to become more diverse.

As crucial as it is to attract a diverse student body to our campuses and to provide a cosmopolitan curriculum for their education, even the best execution of this responsibility still labors within the limitation of location in a more or less provincial American community. I know of no better way to counter that limitation than to encourage our students to study abroad for at least a semester and preferably a year. To facilitate such study abroad—for undergraduates, for graduate students, and for faculty—should be a priority for individual institutions and for American society as a whole, as represented in such government programs as the Fulbright Program and such nonprofit organizations as the Institute of International Education.

I can testify from personal experience that devoting substantial time to living and learning in another country offers an unparalleled opportunity for understanding not only another complex of traditions but also what is at the core of our own deepest commitments.

This point was impressed forcefully on me during 1962–1963, the first time I lived abroad. It was my junior year in college. My parents were both immigrants from Germany—my father coming to the United States in 1930, my mother in 1937. I had learned German before English yet I had never been outside North America. My parents had also emigrated from culturally very different regions of Germany—the Black Forest in my father’s case and the Rhineland for my mother. So my year of study there, which included multiple visits to relatives on both sides of the family, was personally very intriguing. I saw in effect two sides of my personality embodied in two sets of relatives, each of whom assured me that I looked and acted just like the parent that was from their side of the family. While I was growing up, I had no small amount of tension with my father. As I was about to depart for the year, my mother said to me that after I met my father’s family, I would understand him for the first time. And she was right.

But I learned more than just a better understanding of my family’s psycho-cultural dynamics. Growing up, I had been quite critical of some of the social patterns taken for granted in the United States, including in particular widely accepted racial prejudices. This critical stance toward the United States did not disappear during my time in Germany and traveling more broadly in Europe. But as I came to learn more about these other societies and in particular about Germany, I also became much more aware of what I valued in America—and why, for better or worse, I would always be a convinced American. (I continue to feel that way—though the first part of the twenty-first century strained that allegiance more than at any previous time.)

I will note one further example from my own living abroad, this time in 1969–1970 when my wife Nancy, our older daughter Kathy, and I lived in Kandy, Sri Lanka, which was then still called Ceylon. I was there to study Buddhism, in significant part because I was intrigued with how different it was from the Christianity I had known all my life. In the course of that year I came to appreciate the enormous varieties within Buddhist traditions. But I also learned an important lesson about how preconceived ideas can profoundly shape our perceptions both of ourselves and of others.

As I got to know Buddhist acquaintances better, I realized that they had a very definite view of what a Christian must believe. Christians, they insisted, subscribed to the beliefs that there was a God outside the world, who created and governed it, and that individuals had immortal souls. They were confident that Christians held these positions because these tenets constituted the beliefs that in their view most clearly distinguished Christianity from Theravāda Buddhism (the version of Buddhist tradition prevalent in Sri Lanka as well as Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and parts of Vietnam). I considered myself a Christian, but I affirmed neither of these positions. Indeed, my views in regard to the questions of the existence of God as a being outside the world and of the immortality of the soul were more akin to some Buddhist views than to prevailing Christian ones. Facing this unanticipated situation, my Buddhist friends did not revise their view of what Christians must believe; rather, they informed me that, given my positions, I could not be a Christian.

I refer to these illustrations from my own experience to call attention to what I deem to be an enormous two-fold benefit of living abroad in a way that deeply engages local traditions and is not simply in an American enclave. On the one hand, we indisputably learn about the historical patterns and contemporary personal, social, and cultural experiences of traditions different from our own. On the other hand, we also attain a kind of bifocal vision that allows us to see our own core values and deepest commitments more clearly because our perception includes a comparative perspective.

I apologize for what may seem to be a self-indulgent focus on my own experience. I have recalled the first two times I lived abroad in the hope, even the confidence, that my experience will trigger similar memories in others of you. In any case, such personal experiences are what colleges and universities can and should facilitate through opportunities for research and study abroad.

Conclusion: Another Look at American Provincialism

Developing greater depth in faculty and curricular resources devoted to a wide range of languages and cultures; increasing on-campus diversity, including robust representatives of in...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Education as a Resource
• Part 2: Action for Inclusion
• Conclusion
• Index
• Series List