Rade, Development, and the Broken Promise of Interdependence: A Buddhist Reflection on the Possibility of Post-market Economics

Bhutan's stated intention of keeping the value of happiness central to the development process is a suitable counter to the values and karma that prevail in most development strategies and ideals. Given present day realities of unprecedented, accelerating changes and paradigmatic shifts in economic, political, and social practices, any successful strategy for integration into global development processes must be creative in nature. It must, in other words, consist of an ongoing improvisation that is at once virtuosic and virtuous and that brings both greater resolution and resolve into the development process. In this essay the author wants to contribute to this effort by considering the broad landscape of development and trade concepts and practices and their implications for the trajectory of innovations needed to insure that development processes and greater economic interdependence are, indeed, liberating. The auhtor starts by reflecting on the context of present day patterns of development, raising some issues related to history and scale in assessing the effects of increasing global interdependence. He suggestes that present day patterns and scales of globalization have both generated and been generated by the extremely rapid and practically irreversible commodification of subsistence needs—a commodification that (paraphrasing Ivan Illich) has the effect of institutionalizing entirely new classes of the poor. Beyond a critical threshold and unless redirected—that is, informed by radically different values—present day patterns of interdependence will continue bringing about the conversion of communities that have been faring well into aggregates of individuals in need of welfare. Unchecked, the promise of globally extended, deep community will be broken

Buddhism in the Public Sphere

The core teachings and practices of Buddhism are systematically directed toward developing keen and caring insight into the relational or interdependent nature of all things. Hershock applies Buddhist thought to reflect on the challenges to public good, created by emerging social, economic, and political realities associated with increasingly complex global interdependence. In eight chapters, the key arenas for public policy are addressed: the environment, health, media, trade and development, the interplay of politics and religion, international relations, terror and security, and education. Each chapter explains how a specific issue area has come to be shaped by complex interdependence and offers specific insights into directing the growing interdependence toward greater equity, sustainability, and freedom. Thereby, a sustained meditation on the meaning and means of realizing public good is put forward, which results in a solid Buddhist conception of diversity. Hershock argues that concepts of Karma and emptiness are relevant across the full spectrum of policy domains and that Buddhist concepts become increasingly forceful as concerns shift from the local to the global. A remarkable book on this fascinating religion, Buddhism in the Public Sphere will be of interest to scholars and students in Buddhist studies and Asian religion in general

Media, Markets and Meaning: Placing Sustainable Development and Environmental Conservation and Enrichment at Risk

This paper critically assesses the globally dominant pattern of complex relationship that obtains among mass media, market economics, and both cultural and environmental change. Making use of Buddhist conceptual resources that link the meaning of development, environmental conservation and attentional enrichment, the effects of consuming mass media commodities are evaluated in ways that are compatible with Bhutan's overarching commitments to enhancing Gross National Happiness (GNH). Contemporary media are a complex result of historical processes shaped by the interplay of wide-ranging social, economic, political, cultural and technological forces and systems. Understanding how media affect public culture and environmental quality requires gaining critical perspective on these processes and the multi-dimensional context of their consolidation. The author wants to focus on a particular pattern of connections obtaining among mass media, communications technology and market economics— a pattern of interdependence that has crossed key thresholds of intensity and scale to begin globally transforming the quality and directional character of attention itself, thereby affecting the very roots of public culture and effecting a systematic erosion of environmental diversity. In spite of its complex texture, the broad outlines of this pattern of connections can be relatively simply formulated. As a result of compounding efficiencies correlated with specific advances in transportation, manufacturing and communication technology, by the mid-20th century there had emerged global markets of sufficient reach and density to bring about a commodification of the entire range of goods and services needed for basic human subsistence, including food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, sensory stimulation and a sense of belonging. In the early phases of this process, mass media played a key role in coupling markets and consumers by transmitting advertising content specifically designed to manufacture consumer need. In later phases, positive feedback circuits emerged between market growth and media consumption that did not depend upon media content performing a coupling function. As a result of advances in communication technologies, the scale of media consumption crossed a decisive threshold beyond which the explicit content of the media has come to be less crucial to furthering market growth and the proliferation of consumer needs than the summative effects of media consumption as such. The most salient among these effects is the mass export of attention from local environments, resulting in a depletion of the basic resource needed to appreciate or directly add-value to those environments, as well as a concomitant impoverishing of relational capacities and commitments. Beyond certain thresholds of reach and density, markets attain sufficient complexity to begin producing not only goods and services, but also populations in need of them—populations that experience themselves as living in increasingly elective environments open to and yet also in deepening need of management or control. For individuals in such populations, opportunities for differing multiply geometrically, but those for truly making-a-difference to and for one another contract. Expanding powers for exercising (consumption mediated) freedoms-of choice come at the cost of diminishing strengths for relating-freely

Asian Traditions and Cultural Differences: An NEH Bridging Cultures Project

The East-West Center develops a professional and curriculum development project that engages community college faculty and academic administrators in an examination of "the historical dynamics of cultural interaction in China and Southeast Asia," focusing on the arts, literature, religious traditions, knowledge systems, and trade. Participating campuses are organized in geographically based clusters led by Middlesex Community College (MA), Community College of Philadelphia, Johnson County Community College (KS), City College of San Francisco, and Community College of Baltimore County. Project activities open with a ten-day symposium in Honolulu where participants engage in intensive study with leading scholars and develop plans for new courses or curricular revisions. Symposium readings include historical studies of East and Southeast Asia, The Analects of Confucius, and a philosophical examination of the concept of diversity, as well as supplemental readings on the regions drawn from history, politics, philosophy, religion, art, and literature. Over the next two years, Asian studies scholars visit each community college cluster in order to mentor participants as they implement plans developed at the opening symposium. In addition to conducting faculty development workshops, the mentors give public lectures. These activities are supplemented by an online conference featuring project-related research. The project concludes with a two-day conference (site to be determined). In addition to the project director, lead scholars include Thomas Kasulis (philosophy, Ohio State University), Stanley Murashige (art history, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Morris Rossabi (history, Columbia University), and University of Hawai'i faculty members Roger Ames (philosophy), Paul Lavy (art history), and Barbara Andaya (history). Mentoring scholars are chosen based on the interests and needs of the participants

Valuing Intelligence: Buddhist Reflection on the Attention Economy and Artificial Intelligence

This talk by Dr. Peter D. Hershock (director of the Asian Studies Development Program at the East-West Center) makes use of Buddhist conceptual resources to assess how the emerging global attention economy and the confluence of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are reshaping the human experience. Like the Copernican revolution, which de-centered humanity in the cosmos, the intelligence revolution is dissolving once-foundational certainties and opening new realms of opportunity. The results are almost sure to be mixed. Smart cities will be more efficient and more livable; smart health care can potentially reach and benefit the half of humanity that now lacks even basic health services. Yet, smart services and the algorithmic tailoring of individual experience have the potential to first supplement and eventually supplant intelligent human practices, rendering human intelligence superfluous. Focusing in particular on the karmic dimensions of these transformations, the talk will consider who we need to be present as in order to resist the allure of digital sirens and direct the intelligence revolution toward a truly equitable and ethical re-centering of the human

Climate and Compassion: Buddhist Contribution to an Ethics of Intergenerational Justice

Over the last century, the world\u27s urban population increased from 224 million to over 3.5 billion, and advances in manufacturing, transportation, and communication technologies brought virtually limitless lifestyle and identity options, as well as the greatest inequalities of wealth, risk, and opportunity in history. Yet, as momentous as these changes are, they are dwarfed by the fact that human activity is now affecting planetary processes like climate. Justice concerns about future generations are no longer academic curiosities; they are global ethical imperatives. This talk by Dr. Peter D. Hershock (director of the Asian Studies Development Program at the East-West Center) builds on recent efforts to craft an ethics of global justice around the social emotion of compassion, making use of Buddhist conceptual resources to de-link justice from fictions of equality and conceive it, instead, as a dynamic function of relationally-achieved equity and diversity

Liberating intimacy : communicative virtuosity and the realized sociality of Chʻan enlightenment

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 320-323).Microfiche.xxi, 323 leaves, bound 29 c

Higher Education, Globalization and the Critical Emergence of Diversity

Complex, risk-generating and predicament-laden patterns of global interdependence pose significant imperatives for radically reframing the purposes and provision of higher education. Changes already ongoing in higher education reflect and respond to global dynamics that are intensifying interdependence and, at the same time, deepening inequalities both within and among societies. Recognizing this is to recognize the need to question whether the arcs of change in higher education should remain passively entrained with globalization-driven magnifications and multiplications of difference, or whether higher education can and should play a unique and critical role in reorienting the dynamics of global interdependence. This paper argues that if current trends toward both institutional and epistemic differentiation can be inflected toward enhancing diversification—rather than mere variation—21st-century higher education can come to serve as a global relational commons crucial to realizing ever more deeply shared and equitable expressions of global flourishing and public good