Had a fun debate today in “Core 350,” an applied ethics and public policy course required of all undergraduates at Whitworth, the little college where I now teach.
The debate was about globalization. I argued globalization is good because it:
- Is the best poverty reduction program in the history of the world;
- Promotes peace;
- Diffuses a host of good things around the world; and
- Doesn’t inevitably trounce local cultures (and to think that it does is ethnocentric).
I think all of that is essentially correct, though of course each proposition begs for qualification, too. But before an audience of 160 restless undergraduates, with only five minutes to speak initially, I’ve learned that a narrow, exquisitely nuanced claim is not the best opening gambit. Better to say something bold, then qualify it subsequently as time allows.
I buttressed the claim about poverty reduction by talking about India and China, of course. I also cited South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore as examples of places that have, through participation in the global economy, jumped from third to first world. And of course I mentioned the counter-examples of North Korea and Iran. The facts simply support the claim that globalization has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of desperate poverty over the last twenty years.
For the “promotes peace” claim I talked about President Obama’s current visit to China, noting that the mutual entanglement if not interdependence of “Chimerica” makes armed conflict seem much less likely (quite unlike the Cold War era with the former Soviet Union). I threw out the canard about how countries that are part of the Dell computer supply chain have never gone to war. To resolve grievances countries in the WTO ask for a “dispute resolution panel.” This is a good thing.
With respect to the “diffuses good things” claim, I argued that, contrary to what some courses or flippant pop commentary may have led students to believe, globalization actually promotes racial and gender equality, environmental protection, good labor standards, civil society and other good things. Jagdish Bhagwati’s book In Defense of Globalization was my inspiration here.
With respect to the cultural resilience argument, I was making a peremptory strike (using the “Bush Doctrine” in debate?) against an argument that I anticipated my opponent would make. I drew on my experiences in China, where it’s common (though I think comical) to hear visitors bemoan the loss of “Chinese culture” when they see a Starbucks, KFC or McDonald’s (but fail to recognize those things stand out to them because they can’t read the hundred other signs on the street, signs which probably tout Chinese medicine, stinky tofu, frogs on a stick or perhaps even a repast of, gasp, puppies). If anybody in the world is culturally resilient, surely it is the Chinese. With 1.4 billion people and a few thousand years of history on their side, it’s hard to imagine a few KFCs marginalizing their culture. I was also inspired by the book Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, whose contributors detail how something much more complex than “cultural imperialism” is going on with McDonald’s global success. I asked the students in the auditorium how many of them eat sushi, have or know somebody who has a Chinese character tattoo (a symbol in a foreign language, permanently on his or her body!) and whether they drive a foreign car (and pointed out that of course they put foreign oil in it). None of these things seemed to make them feel less American, I observed, so I asked why should a few foreign franchise restaurants elsewhere make them feel that another culture is being wiped out in some tragic way?
For the business students that have had my international business class, probably none of this sounded surprising, but most of the students in the course are not business majors, and I imagine that their previous discussions of globalization may have taken a different, less enthusiastic—perhaps even hostile—tack. I hope our students get exposed to both views, and to many more nuanced, in-between perspectives.
The short “debate” was with another faculty member, then a couple of additional faculty members served as a panel of examiners. We also had time for a few student questions. It seemed to work pretty well.
Besides trying to broach this topic (which they will hear subsequent lectures on and will read more about), we wanted to model civil, reasoned discourse. Today’s vitriolic political climate makes this seems like an especially important thing to do with undergraduates.
Even with my somewhat hyperbolic (or at least insufficiently contingent) “affirmative case,” I think we managed to accomplish that objective. During the question period we each acknowledged difficulties in our maximal positions.
I think having other faculty question us was helpful; calling something a “debate,” at least for me, with my “zealous advocate” legal training, tends to make me adopt a ready-for-combat stance, but a “seminar” setting helps encourage the kind of discourse we wanted to model.
This is my first semester on the teaching team for this required public policy/applied ethics course. Today was great fun, but the course is a lot of work and the incentives haven’t been calibrated in a way that makes faculty line up to participate. I’ll be back for the spring version of the course, but I’m not sure whether I’ll participate beyond that.
