What a wonderful idea it is for all of us to articulate our vision for a better world and how much there is to learn from one another!

My vision for healing our broken world is simply to make globalisation good. In a more formal way, it is to create and guide our growing organisation, Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative (GCGI), to help build a world that is just, free and prosperous for everyone.

In what follows, I will describe my vision and discuss what GCGI is and how it might contribute to creating a better world. Of course, behind every vision is the story of a journey. This is why I will also shed light on what has happened during my lifetime that has made me who I am, influenced what I stand for, and shaped what I do. It has truly been an intellectual, emotional and spiritual journey. It has involved wrestling with a diverse range of ideas concerning the relationship between economics, theology and spirituality, as well as concerns for human dignity, socio-economic justice and sustainability.

Today, many people, from all walks of life and different parts of the world are questioning many aspects of the prevalent moral and spiritual free-zone life and existence- the everything goes mentality. Are there sources from which we can draw meaning and wholeness to our lives? Are there resources of spirituality that would nourish and sustain our lives in this complex, pluralistic and ever changing world?

These questions and many more are being raised in our day not only by those traditionally identified with religious traditions; they are the questions of scientists, politicians, economists, educators, psychologists, people in the business world, working people, and all who experience an emptiness and a lack of purpose and orientation to human life. Young people in particular call for an alternate vision that is centred in values that give meaning to human existence.

There is no doubt in my mind that, we need a new direction, a new path: a globalisation of kindness, compassion and justice. We need a globalisation that understands that sustainability demands that efficiency and equity should go hand-in-hand. We know there must be a convergence of these values, rather than a competition between them.
I hope that my path will inspire others, especially the younger generation to strive whole-heartedly for what they believe to be right and just. For what good is an individual life that is not dedicated to the common good?

Globalisation for the common Good: In a nutshell

We live in difficult and troubling times, facing unprecedented global challenges in the areas of climate change and ecology, hunger and infectious disease, international relations and cooperation, peace and justice, terrorism and war, armaments and unprecedented violence.  It is precisely in times like these – unstable and confusing though they may be – that people everywhere need to keep their eyes on the better side of human nature, the side of love and compassion, rather than hatred and injustice; the side of the common good, rather than selfishness, individualism and greed.

People need to see that there are serious alternatives to the world’s present failing policies, rules and institutions, and that there are likeminded global citizens who share a vision of hope and common values that can lift them out of the deep sense of powerlessness and despair that is now affecting so many parts of the world. We are grateful to be contributing to that vision of a better world.

Globalization for the Common Good Initiative (GCGI) has come a long way over the past six years. Six successful annual conferences and an increasingly influential journal and web site mark our progress. We have cultivated a diverse group of scholars, leaders of civil society, religious and spiritual leaders, and global activists for intense explorations of a value-centred vision of globalisation and the common good.

How well we succeed in changing our world for the better, so that we can build a world that is just, free and prosperous for all, will depend on our collective capacities to mobilise interest and master enthusiasm around our common vision and our collective action. This call to action should be heard loud and clear.

Globalisation for the Common Good: How It All Began and what it is

I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1952. In 1971, after finishing high school, I came to England to further my education. In 1974 I married my English wife, Annie, and two years later we emigrated to Canada. I received my BA and MA in Economics from the University of Windsor in 1980 and 1982 respectively. We returned to England in 1982, and in 1986 I was awarded my PhD in Economics from the University of Birmingham.

From 1980 onwards, for the next twenty years, I taught economics in universities, enthusiastically demonstrating how economic theories provided answers to problems of all sorts. I got quite carried away by the beauty, the sophisticated elegance, of complicated mathematical models and theories. But gradually I started to have an empty feeling. I began to suspect that neo-liberal economics was an emperor with no clothes. What good were elegant theories which were unable to explain all the poverty, exclusion, racism, corruption, injustice and unhappiness that exist in the world?

I came to feel that my life as a lecturer was like a make-believe movie: sit and relax … in the end models dreamt up by detached economists will sort out the world’s ills! My classrooms were becoming unreal places. I began to ask fundamental questions of myself. Why did I never talk to my students about compassion, dignity, comradeship, solidarity, happiness, spirituality – about the meaning of life? We never debated the biggest questions. Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going to?

I told them to create wealth, but I did not tell them for what reason. I told them about scarcity and competition, but not about abundance and co-operation. I told them about free trade, but not about fair trade; about GNP – Gross National Product – but not about GNH – Gross National Happiness. I told them about profit maximisation and cost minimisation, about the highest returns to the shareholders, but not about social consciousness, accountability to the community, sustainability and respect for creation and the creator. I did not tell them that, without humanity, economics is a house of cards built on shifting sands. Where was the economic theory that reflected my students’ real lives? How could I carry on believing in such an unreal world? I could not go on asking them to believe unbelievable theories in the name of economics.

I wanted to run away from all the white elephants: the barren theories and models in my textbooks, the department of economics, the MBA programmes and more.  I could not carry on defending the indefensible. How could I respect modern economics when it had no respect for other disciplines?

These conflicts caused me much frustration and alienation, leading to heartache and despair. I needed to rediscover myself and a real-life economics. After a proud twenty-year academic career, I resigned from my position as lecturer and, after a debilitating year of soul-searching, decided that I would become a student all over again. I would study theology and philosophy, disciplines nobody had taught me when I was a student of economics and I did not teach my own students when I became a teacher of economics.

It was at this difficult time that I came to understand that I needed to bring spirituality, compassion, ethics and morality back into economics itself, to make this dismal science once again relevant to and concerned with the common good. It was now that I made the following discoveries:

• Economics, from the time of Plato right through to Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, was as deeply concerned with issues of social justice, ethics and morality as it was with economic analysis. Most economics students today learn that Adam Smith was the ‘father of modern economics’ but not that he was also a moral philosopher. In 1759, sixteen years before his famous Wealth of Nations, he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explored the self-interested nature of man and his ability nevertheless to make moral decisions based on factors other than selfishness. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith laid the early groundwork for economic analysis, but he embedded it in a broader discussion of social justice and the role of government. Students today know only of his analogy of the ‘invisible hand’ and refer to him as defending free markets. They ignore his insight that the pursuit of wealth should not take precedence over social and moral obligations, and his belief that a ‘divine Being’ gives us ‘the greatest quantity of happiness’. They are taught that the free market as a ‘way of life’ appealed to Adam Smith but not that he distrusted the morality of the market as a morality for society at large. He neither envisioned nor prescribed a capitalist society, but rather a ‘capitalist economy within society, a society held together by communities of non-capitalist and non-market morality’. As it has been noted, morality for Smith included neighbourly love, an obligation to practice justice, a norm of financial support for the government ‘in proportion to [one’s] revenue’, and a tendency in human nature to derive pleasure from the good fortune and happiness of other people.

• The leading figure in the establishment of the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1885 was the progressive economist Richard T. Ely. He sought to combine economic theory with Christian ethics, especially the command to love one’s neighbour (as did Adam Smith). He declared that the Church, the State and the individual must work together to fulfil the Kingdom of God on earth. Few economists or economics students today know much of this history: that, for example, twenty of the fifty founding members of the AEA were former or practising ministers. Ely himself was a leading member, in the 1880s, of the Social Gospel movement; he was better known to the American public in this capacity than as an economist. He believed that economics departments should be located in schools of theology because ‘Christianity is primarily concerned with this world, and it is the mission of Christianity to bring to pass here a kingdom of righteousness.’ As a ‘religious subject’, economics should provide the base for ‘a never-ceasing attack on every wrong institution, until the earth becomes a new earth, and all its cities, cities of God.’

• The focus of economics should be on the benefit and the bounty that the economy produces, on how to let this bounty increase, and how to share the benefits justly among the people for the common good, removing the evils that hinder this process.

• ‘Economic rationality’ in the shape of neo-liberal globalisation is socially and politically suicidal. Justice and democracy are sacrificed on the altar of a mythical market as forces outside society rather than creations of it.

• Every apparently economic choice is, in reality, a social choice. We can choose a society of basic rights – education, health, housing, child support and a dignified pension – or greed, pandemic inequality, ecological vandalism, civic chaos and social despair. Modern neo-liberal economics ignores the first and promotes the second path as the way to achieve economic efficiency and growth.

• The moral crises of global economic injustice today are integrally spiritual: they signal something terribly amiss in the relationship between human beings and God.

• Where the moral life and the mystery of God’s presence are held in one breath – because the moral life is the same as the mystical life – the moral agency may be found for establishing paths towards a more just, compassionate and sustainable way of living. ‘Moral agency’ is the active love of creation (for oneself as well as for other people and for the non-human creation); it is the will to orient life around the ongoing well-being of communities and of the global community, prioritising the needs of the most vulnerable; it is the will to create social structures and policies that ensure social justice and ecological sustainability.

• In contrast to this sensibility, which weds spirituality and morality, stands modern economics’ persistent tendency to divorce the two, in particular to dissociate the intimate personal experience of a close relationship with God from public moral power.

• It is the belief in collective responsibility and collective endeavour that allows individual freedom to flourish. This can only be realised when we commit ourselves to the common good and begin to serve it.

• There are three justifications for the common good which are not commonly discussed in economics:

1. Human beings need human contact, or sociability. The quality of that interaction is important, quite apart from any material benefits it may bring.
2. Human beings are formed in the community – their education and training in virtue (their preferences) are elements of the common good.
3. A healthy love for the common good is a necessary component of a fully developed personality.

• The marketplace is not just an economic sphere, ‘it is a region of the human spirit’. Profound economic questions are divine in nature; in contrast to what is assumed today, they should be concerned with the world of the heart and spirit. Although self-interest is an important source of human motivation, driving the decisions we make in the marketplace every day, those decisions nevertheless have a moral, ethical and spiritual content, because each decision we make affects not only ourselves but others too. We must combine the need for economic efficiency with the need for social justice and environmental sustainability.

• The greatest achievement of modern globalisation will eventually come to be seen as the opening up of possibilities to build a humane and spiritually enriched globalised world through the universalising and globalising of compassion. But for ‘others’ to become ‘us’, for the world to become intimate with itself, we have to get to know each other better than we do now. Prejudices have to disappear: we have to see that the cultural, religious and ethnic differences reflect an ultimate creative principle. For this to happen, the great cultures and religions need to enter into genuine dialogue with each other.

• Finally, today more than ever before, given the collapse of Communism and the increasing human and environmental cost of capitalism, there is a pressing need for alternative economic models. Activists are renewing Martin Buber’s search for what in 1943 he called ‘a genuine third alternative … leading beyond individualism and collectivism, for the life decision of future generations’. Crises for our species such as mass starvation, Aids, unrestrained violence and the degradation of our biosphere – crises that transcend economic systems, political dogmas and national boundaries – are bringing us face-to-face with questions about self-preservation and self-restraint, personal and communal responsibility, moral authority and political power – questions that are at the very core of our religious traditions. If the idea of divine authority offends contemporary sensibilities, the environmental imperatives of creation may be seen to be as pressing as any divine commandments. The ‘market value’ of the world’s great faiths is at an all-time high in the ongoing enterprise of human liberation. It is time to call for a theological economics which can bring us sustainability for the common good.

After concluding my theological studies, I wrote a number of books and articles on my newly discovered areas of interest and founded an annual international conference, ‘An Interfaith Perspective on Globalisation for the Common Good’, to address the problems and challenges of globalisation not only from an economic perspective but also from ethical, moral, spiritual and theological points of view.

My first conference (‘Common Goals, Common Crises, Common Call and Common Hope’) was held in Oxford in 2002. I did not know what to expect, or how many would turn up, but I was convinced it was the right thing to do. We succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. We had sixty senior speakers and many other participants from different parts of the world. I felt humbled and honoured. It was during this Oxford conference that I was pressed by many delegates to make it an annual event.

I enthusiastically took up the challenge but decided that, as we were concerned with globalisation, the conference should be held in a different country each year, extending the opportunities for dialogue and of learning from each other. Moreover, each conference was to be in association with a local organisation with aims similar to ours. So our first conference in Oxford gave birth to a global movement to promote and serve the common good.

The second conference, ‘Ethics, Spirituality and Religions: Transforming Globalisation for the Common Good’, was held in St Petersburg in 2003. The third conference, ‘Integrity, Spirituality, Ethics and Accountability: Transforming Business, Corporate Social Responsibility and Globalisation for the Common Good’ was held in Dubai in 2004. The fourth conference, ‘Africa and Globalisation for the Common Good: The Quest for Justice and Peace’ was held in Kenya, in April 2005. The fifth conference, “East Asia and Pacific Island Communities: The Quest for Identity, Justice and Peace” was held at the Chaminade University of Honolulu in Hawaii in June 2006. The sixth conference, “A Non-violent Path to Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding” was held at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey in June 2007. Our seventh annual conference, “From the Middle East to Asia Pacific: Arc of Conflict or Dialogue of Cultures& Religions?” will be held at Trinity College, University of Melbourne, Australia in June 2008. Future conferences are currently being planned.

In short, the mission of Globalisation for the Common Good is to promote an ethical, moral and spiritual vision of globalisation and encourage adoption of public policy at all levels that builds the common good of our global community. In this way we nurture personal virtue in our relationships with each other and the planetary environment, while investing our understanding of economics, commerce, trade and international relations with values centered on the universal common good. We will advance understanding and action on major global issues by civil society, private enterprise, the public sector, governments, and national and international institutions. We will promote collaborative policy solutions to the challenges posed by globalisation. We are committed to the idea that the marketplace is not just an economic sphere, ‘it is a region of the human spirit’. Reflecting on the Divine dimension of life can not be divorced from consideration of economic questions and issues can not be considered. Economics can not be effectively practiced without an understanding of the world of heart and spirit. Therefore we view the problem and challenge of globalisation not only from an economic point of view, but also from ethical, spiritual and theological perspectives.

We affirm our conviction that genuine inter-faith dialogue and co-operation is a significant way of bringing the world together supporting the creation of a harmonious environment needed to build a world of peace, justice and prosperity for all. The call for Globalisation for the Common Good is an appeal to our essential humanity to deal with some of the most pressing concerns of peoples the world over. Business and wealth creation, when they contribute to the common good of the global community, are blessed and vital for human survival. Bringing religions and business together for the common good will empower us with humanity, spirituality and love. It will raise us above pessimism to an ultimate optimism; turning from darkness to light; from night to day; from winter to spring. This spiritual ground for hope at this time of wanton destruction of our world, can help us recognise the ultimate purpose of life and of our journey in this world.

The Essential Dimensions of Globalisation for the Common Good

1. To champion the highest cultural evolutionary values and aspirations of the early twenty-first century, in full awareness of their strategic interdependence:

• Respect for belief in God, Ultimate Reality, or the One, and the right of each person to religious freedom and practice
• The investment of spiritual capital
• The practice of selfless love
• Deep Interreligious and intercultural dialogue and engagement for the common good
• Cultures of peace and non-violent conflict resolution
• Economic justice, social justice, solidarity, and universal human rights
• Ecological sustainability, stewardship, and commitment to an interspecies ethic
  Global empowerment of women
• The rights of the child
• The elimination of global hunger, thirst, preventable disease, and poverty
• Cosmopolitanism: the harmony of local, national, and global citizenship

2. To seek solutions to the great challenges facing the planetary community:

• The estrangement of global North and South
• The urgent need for a restructured global economy
• The increasing necessity of global public governance
• The elucidation of a global ethic identifying the rights and the responsibilities of Earth’s people
• The elimination of the scourges of actual and virtual slavery and torture
• The creation of sustainable energy policies
• The realization of planetary sovereignty by the peoples of the Earth
• Cherishing and protection of the global commons
• Commitment to service

3. To contribute to the creation of a global interdisciplinary agenda for the common good.

The Aims of Globalisation for the Common Good are:

• GCG commits itself to a wide range of activities that are all aimed at promoting and teaching, through cutting-edge scholarly activities, research and education on Globalisation for the Common Good. Our emphasis is on providing progressive perspectives that are increasingly hard to find because of the reliance on, and promotion of, neo-liberalism as the sole philosophy behind the current globalisation process.
• GCG therefore, rather than espousing and defending a single discipline or paradigm, seeks to engage a broad, pluralistic range of viewpoints and models to be represented, compared, and ultimately synthesised into a richer understanding of the inherently complex systems it deals with.
• GCG nurtures a commitment among academics and practitioners to learn from each other, to explore new patterns of thinking together, and to facilitate the derivation and implementation of effective policies for the realisation of Globalisation for the Common Good.
• GCG is committed to the idea of global cooperation and dialogue between scholars, business leaders, policy makers, opinion leaders and leading NGOs. Our aim is that such co-operation will lead to a more informed and balanced understanding of the behaviours, motivations and objectives of the various forces, agents and policy makers that form the globalisation process.

Among research topics carried out by GCG in fulfilment of its mission are:

• Ethics, Philosophy, Theology and Globalisation
• Eastern and Western spirituality in Dialogue for the Common Good
• Global Governance, Business, Economics and Globalisation
• Ethics and Spirituality in Higher Education
• Global Consciousness and Spirituality
• Faith and Action in the age of Globalisation
• The Virtuous Economy- Business as a Calling: Doing Well by Doing Good
• Environment, Ecology and Globalisation
• Psychology and Globalisation
• Politics, International Relations and Globalisation
• Non-violent Conflict Resolution and Peace building
• Civilisation, Culture and Globalisation
• Media, Global reporting and Globalisation
• Global Activism for the Common Good
• Enabling, Envisioning and Empowering: Young People Leadership Programme in Common Good
• Regions & Globalisation for the Common Good

Globalisation for the Common Good, by addressing the crises that face us all, empowers us with humanity, spirituality and love. It engages people of different races, cultures and languages, from a wide variety of backgrounds, all of them committed to bringing about a world in which there is more solidarity and greater harmony. This spiritual ground for hope, arising at this time of wanton destruction of our world, can help us to recall the ultimate purpose of life and of our journey in this world.

Kamran Mofid, PhD holds dual British and Canadian nationality, was born in Tehran, Iran in 1952, received his BA and MA in economics from the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, in 1980 and 1982 respectively. In 1986 he was awarded his doctorate in economics from the University of Birmingham, UK. In 2001 he received a Certificate in Education in Pastoral Studies at Plater College, Oxford. From 1980 onwards he has been teaching and supervising undergraduate and graduate students in development economics, business studies, international business and the political economy of the Middle East. Dr. Mofid is currently carrying out research on the relationship between economics, spirituality, ethics, cultures, faiths and globalisation. These are highlighted in his co-authored recently published book, Promoting the Common Good: Bringing Economics and Theology Together: A Theologian and an Economist in Dialogue, Rev. Marcus Braybrooke and Kamran Mofid, ( Shepheard-Walwyn, London, June 2005).

www.globalisationforthecommongood.info/