a new culture of peace can we hope that global society will：一种新的和平文化，我们可以希望全球社会.Image.Marked.pdf

A New Culture of Peace: Can We Hope That Global Society Will Enter Into a Harmonious Information Age? © Evelin Lindner Paper written at the request of Dr. Leo Semashko, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2006 Abstract Can we hope that global society will enter into a harmonious information age, as Russian sociologist Leo Semashko suggests? Or is this nothing more than an illusionary wish? Currently, the gap between rich and poor widens, both locally and globally, and the have- nots watch how elites overindulge in luxury goods. We live in a ramshackle global village, resembling what John Stewart Mill in the nineteenth century called a ramshackle state. In many ways we face the anarchic world that Robert Kaplan (1994), describes in The Coming Anarchy, with overpopulation, resource scarcity, terror, crime, and disease compounding cultural and ethnic differences and rendering us a chaotic, anarchic world. A central question of our times is whether the deplorable state of the global village is an expression of the essence of globalisation or a side effect that can be remedied. My proposition is that the current obscene state of the world is indeed a side effect and that we need more globalisation and not less, however, that we have to create a new kind of globalisation, namely globalisation wedded to what I call egalisation. I believe that we have a chance to build a decent global village, following the call for a decent society by Avishai Margalit (1996), if we manage to harness globalisation with egalisation. I suggest that we need to begin by looking at human history in a different fashion than is usually done, namely by using a larger time horizon. William Ury (1999), anthropologist, and director of the Harvard University Project on Preventing War, drew up a simplified depiction of history.