Privacy versus openness

I have noticed many times that when I (and, of course, others) attempt to raise an important or sensitive issue to discuss a graveyard silence starts to prevail throughout, especially when communicating with people from the West. I have not inquired deeply into this particular issue yet, but I tentatively connect it to a Western tradition of privacy, with its explicit and implicit cultural agreements. In Russia there is considerably less sense of mental boundaries and rational taboos (taboos and boundaries are multiple but more premental-rational).

By being a creature of a postcommunist country sometimes I realize that the notion of capitalist/individualist privacy seems to avoid my immediate conscious grasp. And sometimes I am just left astounded by the fact that my Western friends and partners in communication suddenly become silent or say a very superficial remark to a question that I am wondering about as of crucial and related straight to the matters of life and death, even if psychological. At times like this I am left thinking, "Oh shit, did I again address an issue too directly?" Also, I start to feel some kind of sorrow regarding the fact that this particular intersubjective space somehow self-contracted and closed from being dialogical.

And now I am perplexed in regards to one question: where does a sense of authentic privacy ends and a cunning mechanism of self-defense against the truth, the truthfulness, and the goodness starts? In therapy when a therapist addresses a sensitive trauma-related issue, the client does everything to build up resistance and avoid looking and feeling into the issue and recognizing it as one. He or she invents numerous ways of escaping the cruel reality. One of the ways to defend oneself is to simply ignore the therapist's provocations and invitations to exploration of transferential systems.

There is a striking drive in a person who was brought up in the West not to get involved and to keep distance. "This is not my business." "I have lots of, lots of things to do, no time for discussing this." In some cases it seems to result in an impulsive/compulsive reaction of building excessive boundaries and closing one's own eyes with one's own hands so as to keep ignoring a delicate but important issue; especially in the cases that require making a (even if workable) value judgment regarding, e.g., other person or community and so on.

What somehow relates to this is my increasingly growing awareness that the idea that one has first to take care of one's own backyard before doing the global work is utterly failing in the context of the global crisis. Among some of American conservatives there is an idea that USA should withdraw from any involvement with the world problems, conserve itself, solve its own problems, and only then go to take care for the world. (The same basic view, a kind of "we should take care of our asses first," is widespread around the world.) There is an important part of the whole picture in this point of view: when taking into consideration an integral picture and doing integral action one is ought to take oneself into account; if one secludes oneself from one's care, it may lead to a catastrophe or at least significantly diminish the effectiveness of actions.

But if one actually forces this idea of self-conservation into reality as the only means to fight against the crisis, this will actually lead to serious consequences. The world is highly interweaved nowadays; and one's attempts to seclude oneself from global action will not succeed; for instance, most Americans consume products manufactured in China; and this is one of the world powers to dialogically come to terms with (and we do not to mention here lesser powers such as Somalian pirates imprisoning American cargo ships or Russian leaders not being able to take care of the weapon-grade plutonium waste lying near Ural mountains in huge amounts—enough to destroy the entire world several times in a row).

There is no way to avoid the world and to become autistic and private again; there is no way for America or any other country to retreat into its previous monological autism... We are all too interconnected now. No freaking way you can take care of your own backyard before you take care of the planet; you have to do it simultaneously with setting priorities that are actually global (and highly sophisticated), otherwise everything built without a necessary awareness will fall apart (in a sense, your backyard is a part of the global backyard called the Earth). It especially relates to the US because it became so dominant in the world in the second half of the 20th century; there is just no way to regress back into the cave after Americans have engulfed the entire world with their capitalistic system, worldview, and action.

(I would add here that one of the examples of everything falling apart is contemporary Russia which is said to be reigned, as Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, somewhat biliously formulated, by a "bunch of cowboys," the cowboys, I would add, who are basically incapable of single-handedly tackling the complex societal issues; hence, the suffering of the entire nation and a demise of an important, if neglected, sociocultural part of the European civilization. It will probably take the entire world to rebuild Russia and re-integrate its people into the global community; and now I sense that Russia is predominantly seen as a mean but persistent distraction and disturbance to the Western rationalistic plans for global peace and paradise. So much attention is paid to Africa now; but doesn't Russia deserve an equal amount of attention—or even more attention, given its difficult history, its influence in the world, and the multiple ways it is still being marginalized/ignored/oppressed both by the West and the East? I remind you that statistically and qualitatively Russia is probably not in a better shape than Nigeria; right now people are suffering in both places enormously—more than any human being in the world deserves—even if they are suppressing the suffering into the personal and collective unconscious and making themselves numb to and detached from their own pains.)

The global economic crisis as well as the global climatic change as well as many other global issues are positively not the national-level issues. They may have causes in each country's poor and imbalanced choice of politics and strategy over a certain period in history, but the systemic resolution of the global economic crisis requires a paradigm of global actions. Global climate change, or in general a worsening of environmental conditions due to industrialization and natural disasters that is undeniably occurring, is a vivid example of why taking care of one's own backyard first doesn't work: there is no point of trying to save your attachment to your home if the entire world is going to collapse. You can take care of grass in your backyard but the acid rain or radioactive waste will prove all your private efforts futile.

We ought to let go of being so much obsessed with privacy.

Evoking Global Citizenship

What follows is a part of the text I have been writing so as to apply for a small US Department of State grant which is available to me because I am an alumnus of the Future Leaders Exchange program (FLEX). In 2003 this program allowed me to become a US high school student and live with a host family in the glorious state of Virginia for one academic year. The cross-cultural depth of this adventure (and of several others) has been unfolding ever since; and this experience still influences my life and fuels my dreams in many ways. If you ever have an opportunity to live in another culture, do it.

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.]