Here's a partial transcript of some of the high points of Peter's QuickTalk. Peter says:

I think there are subtleties of globalization we don't normally think about. It's about multiculturalism. ... There are alot of people very angry today, because they feel the American lifestyle being forced upon them around the world. ... This interpenetration of cultures is a fundamental aspect of globalization. Different genders, different nationalities...

As Americans I think we're especially blind to this, because we have this history of the melting pot. All the different cultures, people from all around the world, come to America, and over two or three generations, the cultural differences disappear and we all just become Americans. Right? It's a bad metaphor, because that's not what's happening in the world today. Despite the projection of American culture, believe me, the Chinese have every intention of remaining Chinese... there's a strong drive that they're not going to be "not Chinese." Similarly you see people around the world are kind of raising up and saying, "No, no, no, no. I don't wanna be 'not be.' " Whatever defines their cultural heritage. ...multiculturalism, and the idea that it's not a homogenization process, is actually a very different process. It's learning to live together, with deep differences, respectfully...

So globalization, also at the subtlest level, means, I think, 'How do we live in harmony with one other, and with Mother Earth?' People never had to think about their day-to-day actions effecting somebody on the other side of the planet, and altering the planet's climate. It's kinda crazy, but it's only crazy because we've never been there before and not because we're not there now.

While it is true that "globalization is an interpenetration of cultures" some of the things said here have to be thought more carefully. For example, the term "multiculturalism" is a white western man's term for the co-existence of different cultures (usually ethnicities but this can be broadened to mean subcultures within an ethnic group also). The term assumes an equal playing field for these different "cultures" and elides the histories of subjection that make these cultures unequal and already subsumed by what Heidegger callls "the Europeanization of the earth." Moreover cultures are not static and are in a state of constant mixing and negotiation. This is why "cross-cultural" is a better term than "multicultural" here and refers to the processes of cultural interaction including the intentional politics of negotiated hybridities. IMO it is not accurate to say that "the Chinese have every intention of remaining Chinese". Which "Chinese" is Peter Senge speaking for? And what does he mean by "remaining Chinese"? The complexity of cultural differentiation in an era of "cultural interpenetration" needs much finer articulation than that. It is hare again that Pierre Bourdieu's theories have come in so handy. Leaving aside the issue of nations and the way in which they attempt to institutionally "fix" identity in "culture," and assuming for the moment that peoples with common histories, mythologies and socialized behaviors can be called "cultures" (Luisa Passerini's term "acculumated intersubjectivity" may be more appropriate), these cultures are marked by unquestioned assumptions known as doxa and these doxa themselves can be seen to derive from deeper master-ideas or philosophemes which structure the dynamics of different "fields" within the culture. These philosophemes are known as "nomos." Under conditions of "cultural interpenetration", such as for example, colonialism, or here, globalization, which is not an innocent co-existence of cultures but the extended invasive activity of a specific cultural field, western modernity's economic field signed by the nomos of world capitalism, doxa of all interacting cultures are rendered unstable and relative. There is now no necessity for a "Chinese" to subscribe to the specific customs, rituals, fashions, behaviors or even more subtly, philosophical bases which have accumulated into the intersubjectivity of "Chineseness" over many millenia. On the other hand these doxa and nomos' do not merely disappear as a result - and this is what Peter Senge may be referring to - but either make a bid for survival through a clinging to past forms or through a retention of forms which assume new meanings more adaptable to the nomos of the invading cultural field (revised cultural capital such as the movement from a sacred to an exotic secular context of cultrual arts/tourism for "foreign" consumption) or engage in a variety of ways with the other culture(s) in its field, coming up with hybrid formations. This differentation of cultures can be seen broadly as a branching of doxa into orthodoxy and heterodoxy. I know pf "Chinese" people (as of "Indian", "Japanese", "Mexican") people who would like to become "American." This is part of the heterodox field, albeit culturally impoverished, eroded of all historical "wealth" (cultural capital). On the other hand, those who wish to remain "Chinese" in an age of cultural inpenetration/invasion are usually the orthodox, who will end up selling out to globalization as forms of exotic cultural capital. To engage at the nomos level one needs to understand and assimilate the nomos of the invading field and enter into creative strategic dialog with it, a cross-cultural hermeneutic aimed at destabilizing the doxa and nomos' of the dominant culture and inviting transformations which can create a new world of a higher order of (post-)human (or trans-human) choices. The entire issue of "do cultures/nations have souls?" foregrounded in the context of Auroville's search for human unity and the text of the ideal of human unity from Sri Aurobindo, needs to be understood in this way - "nation-souls" in this context, if they exist, are not visible or accessible as choice except through expanding histories of human freedom. Cultural forms, doxa and nomos' at any one time are in a state of flux, revising themselves through culture contact or through internal reflection, engaging their persistent questionings in new ways to find larger and more integral answers.

DB

And here's an example of the kind of "anger" Peter is referring to in his QuickTalk re the multiculturalism aspect of globalization. It's from the Women Leading Sustainability Project of SoL's Sustainability Consortium.

A WOMAN'S CREED

The Declaration of the Women's Global Strategies Meeting

We are female human beings poised on the edge of the new millennium. We are the majority of our species, yet we have dwelt in the shadows. We are the invisible, the illiterate, the labourers, the refugees, the poor.

And we vow: "No more"

We are the women who hunger - for rice, home, freedom, each other, ourselves.

We are the women who thirst - for clean water and laughter, literacy, love.

We have existed at all times, in every society. We have survived femicide. We have rebelled - and left clues.

We are continuity, weaving future from past, logic with lyric.

We are women who stand in our sense and shout "Yes".

We are women who wear broken bones, voices, minds, hearts - but we are women who dare whisper "No".

We are women whose souls no fundamentalist cage can contain.

We are women who refuse to permit the sowing of death in our gardens, air, rivers, seas.

We are each precious, unique, necessary. We are strengthened and blessed and relieved at not having to be all the same. We are the daughters of longing. We are the mothers in labour to birth the politics of the 21st century.

We are the women men warned us about. [Emphasis added.]

We are the women who know that all issues are ours, who will reclaim our wisdom, reinvent our tomorrow, question and redefine everything, including power.

We have worked now for decades to name the details of our need, rage, hope, vision.

We have broken our silence, exhausted our patience. We are weary of listing our suffering - to entertain or be simply ignored.

We are done with vague words and real waiting; famishing for action, dignity, joy. We intend to do more than merely endure and survive.

They have tried to deny us, define us, denounce us; to jail, enslave, exile, gas, rape, beat, burn, bury - and bore us. Yet nothing, not even the offer to save their failed system, can grasp us.

For thousands of years, women have had responsibility without power - while men have had power without responsibility. We offer those men who risk being brothers a balance, a future, a hand. But with or without them, we will go on.

For we are the Old Ones, The New Breed, the Natives who came first but lasted, indigenous to an utterly different dimension. We are the girl child in Zambia, the grandmother in Burma, the women in El Salvador and Afghanistan, Finland and Fiji. We are whale-song and rainforest; the depth-wave rising huge to shatter the glass power on the shore; the lost and despised who, weeping, stagger into the light.

All this we are. We are intensity, energy, the people speaking - who no longer will wait and who cannot be stopped.

We are poised on the edge of the millennium - ruin behind us, no map before us, the taste of fear sharp on our tongues.

Yet we will leap.

The exercise of imagining is an act of creation.

The act of creation is an exercise of will.

All this is political. And possible.

Bread. A Clean Sky. Active peace. A woman's voice singing somewhere, melody drifting like smoke from the cook fires. The army disbanded, the harvest abundant. The wound healed, the child wanted, the prisoner freed, the body's integrity honoured, the lover returned.

The magical skill that reads marks into meaning. The labour equal, fair, and valued. Delight in the challenge for consensus to solve problems.

No hand raised in any gesture but greeting.

Secure interiors - of heart, home, land - so firm as to make secure borders irrelevant at last.

And everywhere laughter, care, celebration, dancing, contentment. A humble, early paradise, in the now.

We will make it real, make it our own, make policy, history, peace, make it available, make mischief, a difference, love, the connection, the miracle, ready.

Believe it.

We are the women who will transform the world.