GlocalNet

“We must . . . bring religious leaders and believers into a positive role in promoting economic and societal development . . . We must ensure everyone in society’s rights of equal participation of equal development according to law.” President Hu Jinto of China in his opening comments to the 2007 Party Congress. For China to mention religion at a party congress is rare, for it to be postive--this is a first. What are the implications? The world is changing! It has been changing.  It’s hard for those of us in the West to see it because we’ve had one paradigm of seeing the world for so long. Whether you trust the statement or not, the fact that it’s made publicly at the party congress is a major, major shift.

Having just returned from Vietnam and meeting with key leaders, many of us heard similar statements. As a matter of fact, endorsements of helping new Christians be clear about their belief from the government were made constantly. If Christianity was to be present, they want a healthy version!

Having read new book The Black Swan by Taleb, I’m seeing the truth of what he wrote. Change comes in jumps and then is slow for a good while. We must recognize the jumps. We aren’t even good at seeing the jumps in technology. We see the technology and use it in old ways. Newsweek and USA TODAY both recently wrote of how the guys at Google and Facebook and other companies are taking their young execs on global trips because there is no one they can find to train them how to think and process the current world. We are all too “old school” in our thinking of globalization. For them, it’s not a matter of having enough money to do “technology” but how to “use” the new technologies.

For the past few years, I’ve been harping on the fact that globalization is far more than economics or living in a “big” village--that it has it’s philosophy all to itself. It’s a very complex--not simple--philosophy where multiple philosophies and cultures traverse around a handful of syncretistic and/or pragmatic values.

While we, in the West, are dealing with issues of postmodernism, the philsophy of an affluent and disillusioned society, the rest of the world has a radically different philosophy. I get amused at arrogant Western thinkers who call the “world” postmodern--once again defining the world by us - it’s over. Generally, they’ve been to Europe, a little bit of Latin America and stopped over in Jakarta and now have the ability to define the world according to our prism. Sheer arrogance and Western ethnocentrism!

Erwin McManus sees this--he and I have talked about it. I don’t think either of us are ready to label it. Perhaps no one from the Western Hemisphere will be able to label it--just recognize it and observe it. But it’s something, and I’m not so sure it’s bad - I think it might actually be good.

OK, so here’s the question. How do we learn it, how do we understand the world, how do we learn to think differently? One word--ENGAGMENT--that’s the only way you’re going to get it. Be there, smell it, eat it, listen to it, experience it, watch it, flow with it, be intrigued by it, be adventurous, lean over the edge, find a dual culture as opposite from yours as quick as you can and begin to experience it for the next few years.  You’ll stumble on it, and chances are, like me, you won’t have a vocabulary for it, and chances are, you’ll even shift in a good birth of your thinking, and chances are it’ll be good.