Our Common Humanity in the Information Age. Principles and Values for Development

NATURE AND GLOBALIZATION
Roberto Savio, President, Inter Press Service
We need to consider why we are behind schedule for the MDG. We can see that none of 
the MDG goals will be reached on time and we can debate how far away they will be 
reached.
The growth of the sustainability is based on two things which are under attack now. One 
is the issue of common goods and the other is the inter-generational solidarity.
I find it very distressing that the political institutions, before they abandoned ideology, 
they had abandoned idealism and started looking for pragmatism. But pragmatism 
without values like solidarity, equity, social justice, and without the conceptual 
framework in which you can act pragmatically becomes something different – it becomes 
utilitarism. And utilitarism certainly does not feed into sustainability anything which can 
pay you back.
In addition, our national political solutions are extremely weak on global issues – not 
only globalization, but everything global. And this has created a situation in which the 
issues transcend the ability of political institutions to discuss anything which is beyond 
the national boundaries.
In addition, the United Nations which are crippled by the fact that the two engines of the 
market-oriented globalization – finance, which was never here, but trade, which was 
before here, now are both out of the United Nations.
We are witnessing two different paradigms: the paradigm which my generation created, 
which is the paradigm of development, international cooperation, social justice, respect of 
law, and yet there is another paradigm, which has just come out, which is this market-
driven globalization. In order to put the difference into words, I would like to say that the 
paradigm of development was based on the idea that people will earn more, and the 
paradigm of globalization is simply based on the idea that people will live more. There is 
a big difference because the first one can only deal with values, but the second one does 
not deal with values.

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64 | Our Common Humanity in the Information Age 
We live in a world today, in which, in ten years, the investment in advertisement will 
exceed the investment in education. In other words, there will be more money spent per 
capita in advertisement than in education.
There is a pattern of production and consumption that must be changed. In November, 
before Christmas, shops open at 5 o’clock in the morning and at 5 o’clock in the morning 
there are already long queues of people outside waiting to get inside, this level of 
consumerism and consumption shows that we are in a world in which we have to take 
into serious account a very simple fact: either we can bring back the debate on values as a 
basic element of how we establish ourselves nationally and internationally or otherwis e, 
we will continue to decline, which is due to the fact that we do not have common values 
on which to build.
But also there are hundreds, thousands people who joined together to discuss about 
values. And this ideology is picking up, but we are very far away from the moment in 
which we will have sustainability.