Forward
By: Betty Reardon
August 8, 1999
It seems most appropriate to entitle this foreword a welcome as that is the response this volume inspires in me. As a troubled world citizen and a struggling peace educator, I welcome Richards' work as a much needed ray of hope in a darkening time on which a deep shadow has been cast by the gross economic disparities and ecological devastation which blight our planet.
It seems a most auspicious time for this volume to appear. Questions, challenges, and crises are emerging in greater and greater number and stridency from what he terms "the neo-liberal juggernaut that is currently wreaking havoc worldwide." It is the turn of a century of great significance to the culture that formed Howard Richards and his way of thinking. And it is the beginning of an International Year and Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence. This book offers a deeply reflective potentially prescriptive response to that juggernaut with scholarly, and lovingly reasoned explorations and arguments that examine the most significant relevant works and provide a basis for the changes required to quell the consequences and reverse the course of the juggernaut.
This is a time that cries out for truly inventive and radical approaches that go to the roots of global problems and use the best of human reasoning to devise resolutions. Richards does that, but also presents an antidote to the pedantic pontifications of the mainstream economists and their critics as he shares his views of the metaphysics and the ethical flaws of what he argues to be the culturally determined global market. He engages us in a style that speaks with us rather than 'to or, in more conventional academic style at, us about the most relevant and useful theories for understanding the present crisis. He communicates the nature and political power, of culture in clear and complex terms that should be most instructive to those who would propose theories and strategies to bring forth a culture of peace. That task, I would argue, calls for us to understand a core assertion of this work, that the global market economy is, in fact, a culture. This unprecedented and radical assertion provides more possibilities for change and cause for hope than most other analyses of the world's economic woes.
As a peace educator, I find “Understanding the Global Economy" to be an especially instructive model of modes of scholarship, argument and exposition that, I believe, should be constitutive to the practice of peace studies. The author not only Advocates -and defines holism as an essential component of his proposed problem solving method, he practices it in his expositions which explore multiple theories from various disciplines, integrating them into a unified and comprehensive view of the global economy and the thinking which conceived and developed it.
He demonstrates that scientific analysis need not be inconsistent with normative -evaluation, and reintegrates ethics and values into economic discourse, as he helps us to understand that we are facing problems that call more for philosophical than for technical resolutions. The work is in powerful contrast to the instrumentalist thinking that is the main fare offered to students to educate them about the global economy.
The narrative, in which he uses the works and theories of others to illuminate his own theories and prescriptions, will also represent an alternative to the standard adversarial argument that characterizes so much of academic discourse. There are no absolutist pronouncements, nor devastating refutations, but rather sources which inform this work, and a refreshingly direct appreciation of what he finds to be the positive and helpful aspects of wanting. It is a style of discourse many peace educators aspire to cultivate in their classes. This book should be used as an exemplar of that style, regardless of whether or not the syllabus includes the global economy.
His use of the concepts of transformation and ecology are particularly instructive of the alternative modes of thinking peace education seeks to cultivate, for the same reasons Richards proposes an alternative way of analyzing the phenomenon of globalization. If we are to escape the tyranny of technology that enthralls us as other forms of magic did our ancestors, we need to learn, as Richards advocates, to think in terms of living systems rather than mechanical constructs. Such thinking may help us to understand that while the power of culture to form our world views and control our beliefs is far greater than we recognize, culture itself is a living thing that changes and evolves into other forms. If we can transform our thinking we can transform our cultures. We can achieve the aspiration embodied in the goals comprehended in a culture of peace. Paramount among those goals is a just global economy.
As is well argued in this book, when we truly understand the global economy we can transform humanize and inspirit it. I welcome the inspiration and the instruction offered by "Understanding the Global Economy" and welcome other readers to the hopeful learning it offers.