TeachingRE Issue 4.pdf - the Second Level Support Service

GLOBALISATION:Between Religion and PoliticsBy Peadar KingSincere thanks to Peadar King for this thought-provoking article on the theme of globalisation.Peadar King, KMF Productions is presenter producer of the What in the World? RTE televisionseries. He would like to thank his colleague Liam Ashe for his comments on this article but theusual conventions apply, the views are those of Peadar only. I would like to thank Peadar forsupplying Religious Education Support with copies of the DVD ‘Keeping your head above water inTuvalu’ from the ‘What in the World?’ series, which we will distribute to schools in the near future.SYLLABUS LINKLEAVING CERTIFICATESECTION ASECTION FWith the exception of advertisements for breast-feedingand other public health issues, the revolutionarySandinista government in Nicaragua actively discouragedall advertising when they came to power in 1979. It wasa signal that they were going to do things differently.Andfor a while they did. Literacy levels soared, health carewas transformed and the deadened downtrodden spiritsof the majority of the hitherto impoverished werereawakened. And then it all came crashing down thanksto that “ole Gipper” Ronald Reagan, President of theUnited States from 1981 – 1989.By my first visit to Nicaragua in 1999 over a decade afterthe end of the Sandinista dream, the advertisingbillboards had returned. Huge things - advertisingproducts that were not just at odds with what the vastmajority of people could afford but also at odds with theculture and very identity of the country. Ever-beaming,pale-skinned-scantily clad women selling everyconceivable item under the southern sun – everythingthat is except for the advantages of breast-feeding babiesand safe sexual practices in an HIV / AIDS-ridden age.And so it is with advertising, and its dominant masterconsumerism. In this globalised age, both are ubiquitous.In my travels as part of the What in the World? televisionseries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, it’s the sameproducts that dominate. With some exceptions ofcourse, communist Laos being the most noteworthy.And the scale of the advertising is mind blowing. Fortyfoot high hoardings as if the message might escape us.Asalways the promise is illusory. Whether it is Coca-Cola,Nike, Boss, Marlboro or any of the other top-twentybrands that have become global household names, it’sthe same message in English, Spanish, Portuguese or anyof the other big colonial languages that have spread likea giant octopus across the globe: consumerism is goodand advertising shows you the way. Even if we wanted tothere is no escape from their ever-pervasive presence.This computer on which I write is a product ofglobalisation as is the cup of coffee on my desk, themobile phone by its side and most probably the paperon which this will be printed.It is often presumed of course that globalisation is arecent phenomenon, that our grandparents’ generationif not our parents were untouched by globalisation. Notso. Globalisation is as old as the world itself.There wasalways a movement of people, ideas and products evenif that movement was limited to more confined spheres.This year we travelled to Mongolia to do a story aboutthe threats to nomadic herders’ way of life in Mongolia.The Mongolians are enormously proud of what theyperceive as the extraordinary achievements of theironce-great colonialists Genghis Khan.And if size matters,nobody did it better that he did. Forget about theRomans, forget about the British, forget about the UnitedStates. Nothing compares to the size of the medievalMongol empire. China, Korea, Iran, Russia, Indochina,Burma, India, Iraq, Syria,Turkey Hungary, Poland Belarus,Japan Egypt and even Western Europe were all affectedin one way or another by the arguably greatest empireof them all.That all started in the 13th century. Of coursethere were other efforts at rolling out the empire - theRomans spring to mind but so too do the Iranians whohad their own nowadays less remembered empire datingfrom 247 – 224BCE.Here I am conflating the terms ‘colonialism’ and‘globalisation’ and of course some of the purists mighthave issues with this. Maybe that is a subject forstaffroom lunchtime discussion. But even if they cannotbe used interchangeably, they are certainly related.Whenit comes to agreeing definitions opinions differ widely. JanAart Scholte in his book Globalization a criticalintroduction 1 identifies five key components ofTEACHING RELIGIOUS EDUCATION ISSUE FOUR SEPTEMBER 200923