The idea for this grant application emerged from a creative insight and includes organizing an event or series of events devoted to exploring the notion of global citizenship (also called world citizenship), a concept that becomes increasingly meaningful in my life. I connect this growing realization of myself becoming more and more a citizen of the world with the fact that my homeland is currently in a deep crisis better described as a sociocultural catastrophe. Intracultural tensions and a very poor, shallow life in Russia stimulates identity to weave oneself more and more intimately with the worldcentric values and seek for global expansion so as to include, among other things, the crying, corrupt, and hopeless motherland in a more compassionate embrace. But there would have been no ground for that development if I hadn't personally been so connected in terms of living emotions and actions with so many friends in different parts of the world. I love you all.
There is, however, a time pressure in terms of my university graduation paper on consciousness; and the deadlines for both the grant application and the first draft coincide (both must be finished in February). Consciousness research is my top priority for the coming months; I am basically waking, dreaming, and sleeping about it for seven days a week. This is why I don't know if I am going to make this particular dream come true this year. I also look into the possibility of attracting some larger partners, communities, and organizations who would be interested in this kind of social project. There's no fun to have dinner alone. I will be discussing this idea; and I am sure that even if we cannot make it this year it is certainly a project that is worth doing some time in the nearest future.
I am publishing this text because I believe it is important given the recent events in the world. A few months later it might not be as fresh as it is now. Incidentally, if you are interested in discussing it in detail, please let me know. — Sincerely, Eugene.
Evoking Global Citizenship: How Cross-Cultural Experience Helps Fostering Integral Consciousness (Excerpt)
The world today is increasingly evolving toward greater complexities in terms of cross-cultural integration. American philosopher Ken Wilber, one of the major proponents of transdisciplinary and transcultural studies, noted: “During the last 30 years, we have witnessed a historical first: all of the world’s cultures are now available to us. In the past, if you were born, say, a Chinese, you likely spent your entire life in one culture, often in one province, sometimes in one house, living and loving and dying on one small plot of land. But today, not only are people geographically mobile, but we can study, and have studied, virtually every known culture on the planet. In the global village, all cultures are exposed to each other” (Wilber, 2006).
This awareness presents new challenges and opportunities to virtually every individual and community on the planet. The issues of world economic crisis, of poverty, famine, global warming and natural disasters can be solved only through cross-cultural international cooperation. From a moral standpoint that becomes increasingly influential in the today’s world, a disaster in one country cannot be left ignored by anyone in the world, no matter what their national identity, race, gender, creed or financial fortune is. Recent catastrophe in Haiti that, according to some estimates, caused more than 200,000 casualties proved the necessity of developing and implicating new mechanisms for integrating resources of individuals and organizations from multiple cultures so as to be more effective in dealing with these kinds of problems. In USA only, in a couple of weeks over 20 million individuals donated their personal funds to help resolving the crisis in that country (which was achieved through establishing such initiatives as the transpartisan by its nature Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund); the response of people in many other countries was the same, despite of all the differences we share. This proves the fact that cross-cultural awareness is important not only on the level of governmental regulation but also on multiple levels, including the level of common individuals’ civil initiative that is naturally sensitive to the issues of spreading the touch of compassion and mutually shared wisdom globally.
On July 2008, Barack Obama in his famous Berlin speech titled “The World That Stands as One” influenced millions of people worldwide by speaking of the ideals of global citizenship. He started his speech with these words: “I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen—a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.” As a fellow citizen of the world he proceeds to address the fact that the world community should be perceived more and more as a closely interconnected global network: “As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya. Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all.” And he invites every one of us, clearly speaking to the entire world community, to follow this ideal of global citizenship, cooperation, and trust: “Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic. Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads, and people to assemble where we stand today. And this is the moment when our nations—and all nations—must summon that spirit anew.”
This speech is a remarkable historic wake-up call to the planet Earth. The challenge is, however, that the ideas of global citizenship and cross-cultural initiative cannot be adopted and implemented as a set of doctrines just in one day. The paradigm shift of the dominant mode of discourse in various parts of the world requires stable transformation of moral consciousness and other streams of psychological development in masses toward postconventional altitudes. Every individual has to go through a long journey of self-discovery prior to recognizing the truth of unity-in-diversity of all of us.
If we refer to the studies of moral consciousness by L. Kohlberg and of ego development by J. Loevinger and S. Cook-Greuter, we realize that the majority of world’s population still remains uninvolved with and detached from this altitude of morals, values and actions. Sufficient sociocultural, economical, and psychological conditions must be established in order to achieve the goal of transcultural planetary integration—the kind of integration that acknowledges both individual differences and commonalities shared among individuals in communities all over the world. How to reach more people is the issue to be addressed by everyone who is involved in this kind of global action.
The need to foster development of a more integral consciousness in individuals around the world so as to be able to fulfill ideas of global citizenship in practice becomes increasingly acknowledged by leaders in many socially-relevant fields of action-inquiry. Ken Wilber who developed a theoretical framework that offers a comprehensive account of complexities in individual and social evolution (along with other important thinkers, such as Jürgen Habermas and Jean Gebser) influenced a number of world leaders to address these issues in a more sophisticated manner than had ever been conceived before.
For example, at the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, former U.S. President Bill Clinton described these ideas as crucial to successful development of programs based on the principle of global initiative: “I worry about all these grand ideas that we all promote here working to benefit ordinary people. If ordinary people don’t perceive that our grand ideas are working in their lives then they can’t develop the higher level of consciousness—to use a term that candid American philosopher Ken Wilber wrote a whole book about. He said, you know, the problem is the world needs to be more integrated, but it requires a consciousness that’s way up here, and an ability to see beyond the differences among us” (quotation from the Ode Magazine article, April 2009).
In his more recent interview, Bill Clinton pointed out: “I was influenced by Ken Wilber's book A Theory of Everything, because he tries to point out that throughout history we get connected to people who are different from us before our heads get around the implications of that, and then as soon as they do there is a parallel level of interconnectivity and we have to get our heads around that. All of the public intellectuals in the world need to be thinking quite a bit about this question of identity and need to recognize that in view of the findings of the human genome about the similarities of all of us, even the husband and wife who at the minimum are 99.5 percent the same…” (Foreign Policy, December 2009).
We believe it to be self-evident that the important role of being real agents of change and cross-cultural integration in the world is played by the very people who in their living experiences were exposed to different cultures and traditions and who are embodied hosts of cross-cultural awareness. The cutting edge of social transformation toward global citizenship, raised mutual understanding, and integral consciousness can be found in the melting pots around the globe in which multiple cultures converge. One of such melting pots is situated in Northern Europe, in such places as Finland and the close-to-border with EU North-West region of Russia (especially St. Petersburg and its environments), which in the recent years became the point of convergence of multiple cultures, including members of Finnish-, Swedish-, and Russian-speaking communities. . . .
[Helsinki, Finland, was the first place within the direct reach that came to my mind when contemplating such a project. I have personal experience of cross-cultural interaction within a small trilingual community (actually, quadrilingual, for English serves as the international language there). There a profound mutual recognition emerged among members of three different and yet mysteriously interwoven cultures. The general notion, however, is relevant for many many other places in the world.]
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