Globalization and Human Values: Promises and Challenges

Values guide life. The values of individuals guide the lives of those individuals. The values of communities guide the lives of those communities. The values of individuals function to guide individual lives in a simple enough manner. I value the taste of oranges more than I value the taste of apples. So I will eat more oranges, assuming that oranges are roughly as easy to acquire as are apples. I value time with my family. So I will choose a job that may pay less, but allows me more time to spend with my family. I value honesty. So I will generally tell the truth. The values of communities function in a far more complicated manner. While the process of value development in communities has always been a complicated affair, it is even more complicated now at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is due in large measure to a variety of aspects of globalization, to the increased levels of commerce, communication, and movement of populations that we experience because of the tremendous advances that we have made in communication and transportation technology. The conflicts in values between classes or occupational groups within a single society have been with us from the beginning of human history. Now we have also those conflicts in values that arise from the mutual encounters of cultural traditions that have embodied conflicting traditional values. There is, however, a common mechanism of value emergence that can account for the mediation and development of values within a traditional community of individuals sharing a relatively common body of cultural-historical experience and the mediation and development of values in a modern multi-cultural community, a community of individuals of widely divergent cultural-historical experiences. This same mechanism, in the context of globalization, provides for new possibilities for the emergence of increased agreement on values at a global scale. Moreover, the emergence of values through this mechanism generally will constitute positive progress in the realm of value. Our optimism regarding this conclusion must, however, be tempered by two important sources of caution. My initial optimistic conclusion about the emergence of common values at a global scale depends upon an analysis of the development of human values that involves two general claims about human beings that generally serve to guide the development of values. While I think it is clear that these claims are generally true of human beings and of human communities, there seem to be important exceptions that should temper our optimism and should help to frame more clearly the question of how to achieve a broader level of global harmony. A century ago William James offered an account of the development of moral values that can be generalized to other kinds of value as well. (1) In at least two important ways, James's account accords well with two basic facts about human beings that seem to be well supported by our emerging knowledge of our biological evolution. The two facts are that human beings are generally social creatures and that we are more particularly linguistic creatures. We have evolved with a substantial concern generally to get on well with the humans around us, and we have also evolved with the abilities required to develop language. The earliest archaeological data we have concerning human beings and our other close evolutionary ancestors show us to be highly social creatures. More general considerations about the kind of biological creatures that we are would also seem to support the view that we quickly evolved as herd animals. We lack virtually all other forms of survival assets. We do not reproduce in prodigious numbers like fish or flies. Therefore the human species cannot survive with only a small percentage of offspring reaching reproductive age. We are not big enough to discourage prospective predators by our sheer size as the elephants and whales do; nor are we swift enough to escape prospective predators. …