Professor John Chircop
B.Educ. (Hons), M.A., Ph.D. (Essex)
Perhaps there is no time more appropriate than one’s graduation – a rite of passage, but also a breathing space, between the world of study and that of professional training, where one is expected to start making an independent living. It is a time for selfreflection, for an assessment of one’s achievements and a renewal of aspirations, but also to ponder on questions of varying significance, from one’s role and responsibilities in society, to the broader existential conditions of humanity. Being able to do so serenely, with a sense of social commitment and a critical mind, is a sign that years spent at university – and the extent of public money having gone into this –have not gone to waste, and that the community at large is profiting through the added social capital and value created through your education.
This evening we find ourselves enjoying such breathing space in each other’s company : an encounter of fresh graduates and seasoned academics from disciplines of study pertaining to diplomacy, European studies and conflict resolution – and hence, politics and policy-oriented fields – on the one hand, and the various sub-disciplines within the ambit of ethics, religious studies and theology on the other. Prima facie it looks as if we are flanked by two very distinct – perhaps even incompatible – disciplines, employing contrasting methodologies, rooted in and expressing disparate philosophical and world views. Yet such an encounter – one that is, perhaps, coincidental – may actually prove how far conventional divisions between academic disciplines can be unreal and unproductive. This is, therefore, a productive occasion in these very terms: it compels us to think on the actual interrelatedness, even the symbiosis, of the political, of international relations and diplomacy on both the local and global scales, in direct relation to fundamental issues of social ethics and morality.
Although academic research at university level has tended to develop strict divisions and boundary-lines between disciplines – through specific faculties and departments – a growing number of scholars in the natural, social and political sciences are increasingly taking on multi and pluri-disciplinary approaches. Many of these are in agreement that modes of governance, diplomacy, regional and supra-regional economic and political arrangements – in other words, all political praxes – have, as such, never been neutral with regard to issues of ethical and moral judgement, diverse fundamental principles, and shared beliefs. Such a consensus of course contests the view that economic, sociological and political studies are value-free sciences which are not engaged or otherwise influenced by ethics and morality.
Historically intermeshed, politics, diplomacy – the conventional arts of negotiation and compromise – and economics, have absorbed complex ethical questions and moral dilemmas. They have, moreover, been consequentially judged through various ethical prisms or, more tellingly, through the ‘moral imagination’ of genuine free-minded thinkers operating in different periods.
A long historical tradition of intellectuals and scholars of huge moral standing – from Tommaso Campanella and Thomas More to
Thomas Munzer and others – have certainly employed ethical judgement to criticise, and even to attempt to subvert, tyrannical governments. Through their literary output they have managed to illustrate the infusion of all politics with questions of social morality and ethical responsibility – an affinity that has all too often been rendered invisible – and to express this in their common inspirations towards communal-libertarian projects.

Along this dissenting line of thought, blended as it is with a sense of social justice, all-round human compassion and care for social-natural ecology, one finds bodies like the Arts and Crafts movement, characterised by a strong scepticism towards the dehumanizing path which industrialisation has been taking since its inception. Drawing from and elaborating on this alternative critical discourse today, a fresh, contemporary political philosophy that seeks to decolonise the concepts of industrially-driven economic ‘development’, ‘growth’ and the so-called ‘world political order’ is steadily gaining social support. And this mainly because it delves into the major social and environmental difficulties and impasses created through hyper-accelerated industrial growth. It is not surprising, therefore, that noted scholars and independent thinkers at the forefront of social and eco-living engagement continue to be attracted to – and to hone their attention on – the plethora of problems that currently emanate from unrestrained industrial and financial exploitation. This at a time when the major industrial and post-industrial powers, with their hands in each other’s belly fat – and with a voracious compulsion to control and gobble up to the last the remaining natural resources upon which their supremacy has rested as of the later 18th century industrial revolution – are now bringing themselves to the verge of the so called ‘peak oil’ predicament.
Scientists, scholars and independent thinkers are today carrying out intensive research that seeks to find the means and the discourses to articulate, deal with and find solutions to the negative effects left by industrial, post-industrial and hyper-technologic processes. This research effort seeks, especially, to address the terrible fallout of unrestrained globalist capitalism – those compelling issues of social injustice, inequalities and despotism that have brought about the further impoverishment of the most vulnerable and powerless of the world, the post-human wretched of our earth. For the expanding corps of researchers employing trans-disciplinary scientific work – incorporating ecological economics with most of the social and natural sciences – as much as those outside academia but sharing these same concerns, a common ‘moral imaginary’ is re-emerging: one that entails an unprecedented ethical awareness and responsibility towards the communal-social and environmental life systems.
It is this shared moral imaginary that keeps us on our toes today, that re-creates for our contemporary use those deep-rooted and historically dissenting modes of thinking, those alternative world philosophies that keep us ever vigilant to our historical, social and environmental responsibilities. Set against the background of the chaotic, fragmented social and economic global scenario of today, this non-institutionalized ecological thinking is taking on, and shaping, a fresh political philosophy which intends to move beyond and to dismantle the hitherto prevailing theories of economic industrial ‘development’, which has legitimised the exploitation and destruction of entire social, natural and ecological nexuses, a situation which is today spilling over and poisoning international affairs.
Based on scientific research but in an intimate conversation with as many different world-views as possible, the growing corpus of literature that embraces this socio-ecological view is necessarily also drawing on practical concepts from different material cultures and daily practices of livelihood. It is thus becoming able to offer daily, practical and pro-active solutions in combination with the broader alternatives to an unsustainable global economic system and its supporting political order, itself replete with colonialist features. As a matter of fact, this prevalent global economic model classifies – through its indexes which measure rates of
‘economic growth’ and ‘political stability’ – all countries, in a neatly structured hierarchy that ranges from “development” to
“underdevelopment”.
This is a template of economic growth in stages, constructed by the ‘developed’ industrial powers themselves, hence reflecting their own global, geostrategic and hegemonic interests. This linear ‘economic growth’ model has actually been tailored on the
Western classificatory hierarchy of civilizations – founded on prejudiced racial and ‘evolutionary’ criteria – and employed, during the 19th and the first part of the 20th century, to define and legitimise the expansion of European empires with their economic exploitation of ‘non-European’ territories around the globe. Yet even some of the exponents of this model of ‘economic development’ – proclaimed and established as a universal filter through which all countries aspiring towards ‘civilised’ status would need to pass through – have now conceded to the undisputable widening gap between those who qualify as ‘developed’ and those who remain ‘underdeveloped’ today. This is exemplified, in the very logic of the ‘economic growth’ model, by unequal trade inbalances, but also the ‘incapability’ of the ‘peripheral countries’ to achieve the ‘advanced’ state of the top industrial and postindustrial powers.
In their attempt to maintain as much control as possible on the global economic system, the most economically wealthy states manipulate the ensuing divide between themselves and the underdeveloped countries, to try to extent their control on the latter,

by providing them with assistance, mainly in financial loans and expertise on how to proceed to the next ‘stages’ of economic growth. However, and today more than ever, reality is actually showing the absurdity of such a linear step-by-step ‘economic development’ strategy. It is now proven that within this system, the so called ‘undeveloped’ countries can never reach the standards of sophisticated mass consumption enjoyed by the main economic powers: if anything, because of the rapid depletion of finite resources (basically, crude oil and gas deposits) which have historically powered industrial capitalism.
Again, as with the 19th century discourse of the colonial civilizing mission, present conflicts, wars and endemic instability on regional and global levels, which are taking on acts of extreme barbarity, are wrongly attributed by leading international institutions, states and their media apparatus to the re-surfacing, with a vengeance, of an allegedly deep-rooted ‘clash of civilizations’ – between Muslims and Christians – which is now wreaking havoc of the neatly delineated ‘fault-lines of civilizations’. A more candid approach to this question is that the economic and political superiority of the ‘highly developed’ countries – which have reached the (Rostowian) ‘sophisticated mass consumption stage’ of growth – has been founded on the global exploitation of the same ‘peripheral’ regions which, continues to push these impoverished countries into the never-ending spiral of ‘the development of underdevelopment’, as put by Andrè Gunder Frank.
For one thing, being able to escape from – and to critically deconstruct – the alienating effects of the international media is imperative for any one aspiring to make as objectively as possible an analysis of the state of the contemporary world, and more so for those of us who try to seriously engage with some of the most pressing problems collectively. Eluding such alienation effects is, in other words, the first step towards empowerment – a clear, principled stance of opposition towards the degradation of our ecolife system, and the interrelated disruption of traditional communal relations, of objection to the taking over and the pillaging of common land property and resources, with their resulting economic, social and health liabilities to whole populations – another basic irony of the Western ‘economic growth’ model. Ever more clearly, we are becoming aware that these problems are found in our very midst - in Europe –this being another contradiction of the Western ‘economic growth’ model wherein large numbers of the working poor, the growing reserves of unemployed and immigrant labour are, to put it mildly, finding it ever more burdensome to live fulfilling lives.
The dramatic outbreak of such intense contradictions within the prevailing, industrially-propelled model of ‘economic growth’ – and which are now exacerbated by economic policy-making in China and Asia with gargantuan force – are creating new problems which demand a shared academic, scholarly and public effort. This needs to be an effort based on a common moral standing towards the protection of our nourishing human-ecological life system. Any kind of long-term sustainable solutions to these crises require the full participation and agency of local people, that is, of us all. We must act as depositors of intra-generational, transmitted knowledge, of customary practices of social solidarity, of prudence and re-use, of reciprocal assistance, of care and respect towards nature, of the responsible employment of common property resources. Such grass-roots activity, such social and ecological knowledge, such skills and survival strategies and work practices have today become indispensable for any alternative and sustainable ecological economy – and they need to be entrenched in alternative economic programmes at both local and global levels.
In the academic world today, the many expressions of social-ecological thought and vision are coming of age – due, mainly, to the burgeoning scientific evidence of the failure of the historical industrial paradigm with its basis on economic growth and overexpansion, and thanks to such works as those of Serge Latouche, Ivan illich and Arturo Escobar, among others. This literature is now posing a theoretical challenge to, and is actually deconstructing, ‘development growth’ discourse. It is confronting the legitimation of the depletion of natural resources and the polarisation to extremes of the so-called ‘advanced’ or ‘highly civilised’ countries against ‘the rest’. And ‘the rest’, one must keep in mind, are those who actually constitute the largest part of this world which the forces behind ‘economic growth’ continue today to exploit. The latter, we must also remember, perceives all poor societies as requiring authority, guidance and assistance through the ‘developmental aid’ of the ‘advanced’ states, International aid organisations and NGOs. But, in actual fact, the various forms of international – financial and health – aid and charity interventions continue to reproduce today the structured economic and political dependency of these countries, and casting their populations in the subservient status of ‘recipients’ further weakening their negotiatory power on the international scenario.
While modestly acknowledging that solutions are never right at hand –and that no one, in fact, holds absolute truths – scientific research and good old common sense, compelled by a sense of ethical responsibility, do form a basis for any serious endeavour to deal with local and planet-wide social and ecological urgencies. In practical terms, we are coming to appreciate as a practical solution what is known as ‘the art of living’, created and moulded out of the experiences and knowledge of local communities as they struggle to protect or reclaim their commons – through social solidarity, and their creative abilities to fuse traditional and modern means of sustainable livelihood. This is helping our passage through a ‘healing process’ of our collective ecological being.

In this process, this also signifies opening up to, and sharing in the essentials of a multiplicity of beliefs, faiths, value systems, and of actively accepting a hybrid inter-culturalism. In one sense –and to conclude –this means embracing a fluid ‘dialogical dialogue’, as put by the theologian Raimundo Panikkar when expressing his own experience of internalising different religious and spiritual beliefs. As he recalls: “I left Europe as a Christian, I discovered myself Hindu, and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian”. It will, in all hope, be this multiplicity of beliefs, this vigilance towards our common eco-social well-being, and these thought-processes that lead us to respect those who beckon to us from the coming decades, that we celebrate as we gather here today to mark our academic achievements.
Arturo Escobar, ‘Discourse and Power in Development. Michel Foucault and the Relevance of His work to the third world’, Alternatives, 10,
377/400; Serge Latouche, Per un’ abbondanza frugale. Malintensi e controversie sulla decrescita (2012); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How
Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998); Raimond Panikkar, Il Dialogo intrareligioso (1988); The Rhythm of Being:
The Glifford Lectures (2013).