This short, tentative essay is shamelessly programmatic. It does not pretend to deal with reality as it is but rather as it should be. More precisely, it aims at digging out the “virtual reality” of intercultural exchanges as they are experienced today in view of making these exchanges a channel conducive to more peaceful, just and fruitful relationships among the nations, cultures, ethnic groups and religions of the world. Or still, to put it another way, it aims at mapping the process through which cultural and religious interactions might nurture a model of humane development that enhances pluralism, tolerance, freedom of choice and community-building, a model that gives special attention to the variety of voices and experiences, starting from the ones of the weakest among the groups and individuals of our global society.

When I say that I will start from the “virtual reality” of intercultural exchanges, I mean that I will single out a set of attitudes, of ways of relating to one’s and to the Other’s culture, faith and moral code. These attitudes and ways of behaving are not dominant today, their potential as tools for peacemaking and for social and international justice are not fully recognized yet, and this is why they have to be spelled out and further elaborated into an approach that tries consistently to nurture the broader ethical goals I have just sketched.

While acknowledging the fuzziness of the wording and the irritation that it might legitimately arise into the mind of the reader, I will take for granted the fact that we are indeed living in the “globalization era.” By this I mean the following: (a) the understanding of our world as a fully closed system, permanently activated by numberless retroactions operating from one extreme of the system to another, is part of our collective psyche; (b) the information era has increased the interchange of hard data, feelings and opinions to an extent that has made this ‘quantitative’ phenomenon a ‘qualitative’ shift as well; (c) This qualitative shift has a deep and long-lasting impact on the intensity and consequences of the meeting and interchange of cultural artifacts, ethical and behavioral codes, world-views and religious creeds.

Four stages for a “meaningful” encounter

The rather simple framework I now wish to present has gradually taken shape in the course of more than twelve years of uninterrupted dialogue and exchange with Chinese social scientists, philosophers, artists, teachers or students, but also with cadres, entrepreneurs and villagers, through the process of reflecting upon the form and content of the relations we were developing, the fruits or obstacles that were gradually arising. How and to what extent was the encounter becoming “meaningful” to the people involved in it, starting from myself? To speak of a “meaningful” relationship among people from different cultural backgrounds is to spontaneously refer to an array of feelings and perceptions: first, there is some kind of a taste developing throughout the exchange, the pleasure that arises from conversation, mixing of languages, exoticism, discovery, friendship perhaps; second, there is the mutual acknowledgment that reciprocal displacements are taking place in the process - broadening of views, change in opinions and prejudices, and, to a certain extent, sharing of emotions and memories, be they collective or personal. A ”meaningful” relationship transforms, creates, carries forward meanings, seen as bits of perception, evaluation and interpretation of facts, people, places, texts or events. Eventually, a “meaningful” relationship develops from or evolves into shared projects and practical cooperation in order to fulfill common objectives, whatever the size of these objectives.

Thus, reflecting upon the process that was making the evolving relationship truly “meaningful”, I was gradually led to formalize it into four stages. Furthermore it soon appeared to me that this framework could help to describe and assess not only private, small-scale exchanges but also formalized, multilateral and long-term inter-cultural endeavors.

The first glimpse of “meaning’ that appears in a trans-cultural exchange, it seemed to me, has to do with the discovery of some commonality. However, ordinarily such commonality is not of a positive nature but rather of a negative one: it is about the sharing of crises and challenges. This might be true of a metaphysical or religious exchange (the sharing of the fact that we are all mortal beings…), but this is also true of cultural and social dialogue as framed and nurtured by the logic proper to the globalization era. Globalization is first and foremost the globalization of crises and challenges. This might mean to discover, not only through words but through shared experience, that deforestation, waste of natural resources, spread of AIDS and drugs, sustainability are indeed challenges for all, not only for one region of the world. This might be the realization that the growing gap between the (rational) language of social/cultural elites and the (symbolic, emotive) language of the marginalized sectors of society is a global phenomenon that makes most of our assumption about communication irrelevant. The feeling of commonality might also arise from a sharing about the collapse of traditional ways to understand one’s world, identity and culture. This might also have to do with the practical and moral challenges arising from the technologies of life. Or it might come from a reflection upon the spreading of a culture of violence at school or in society at large, a reflection upon the difficulty to implement mechanisms of harmony and reconciliation. What we share first is a feeling of urgency and disarray.

The second stage of the process is to realize anew the variety of the cultural resources we mobilize or could mobilize for answering such challenges. If we do confront common problems and crises, it is true also that there remain tremendous differences among world-views rooted into Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity or among the core values found in Confucian, African or European societies. On life itself, on authority structures, on relationships with Nature or with the Other, on processes of discussion and evaluation, our ground intuitions, logical approaches, canonical texts and ingrained norms of behavior are as varied, divergent or contradictory as one can possibly imagine. Furthermore, our cultural traditions are embedded into historical memories that conflagrate one with another. Discovering the wide array of our differences might be, at the same time, exhilarating and extremely puzzling. Here, ”meaning” springs from the crux of the “Difference”, as we perceive and ponder upon what grounds us and separates us.

This is where a strategic choice is to be made. It seems to me that “meaning” continues to flow and to circulate when we decide to make this tremendous variety of cultural resources the tool box that enables us to interpret anew our own tradition and culture. Our cultures, world-views and creeds are being reformulated through the interpretative resources offered by the other cultures, world-views and creeds – and this operation happens simultaneously for all participants in the exchange. Such interpretative process can become a sophisticated intellectual endeavor when, for instance, it aims at re-interpreting Christian theological categories through the concepts and vocabulary of Mahayana Buddhism. However, the intuition that justifies the attempt to re-interpret one’s tradition through the resources offered by another cultural corpus can be pretty straight-forward. I remember a Chinese friend, expert in Daoist scriptures and history, to whom I was asking what his projects were now that he had at last completed some major publication. He answered me that, for some time, his contacts with Christianity had convinced him that the success met by this particular religious form throughout the world had to do with its capacity to confront the challenges of modernity and to make its thought and vocabulary evolve and develop with the modernization process. He wanted, he told me, explore the ways through which Daoism could similarly become a truly “contemporary” religious form. Similar reflections and intellectual endeavors have taken and are taking shape in innumerable minds and circles. What interests me there, is that, each time, the evolving relationship with the Other makes this very relationship the referent, the set of interpretative resources, through which I assess and reformulate my own cultural identity (the ”I” being collective or personal.) This reformulation can be spontaneous or highly intellectualized, and it challenges to varying extents the very core of my identity, but, in all situations, the dynamics that shapes this ever-evolving identity is the cultural interchange itself that nurtures the web of interpretative resources that I have at my disposal.

In this perspective, all cultures, creeds and world-views are perpetually reshaped, and what defines them is never taken for granted but rather is being discovered and challenged throughout the process of exchange and interpretation. Thus, the core of our identity is never “behind” us, it is always “beyond”, it cannot be “essentialized”, it is rather “related to” the Other whose identity is similarly challenged and reshaped. At the same time, this ever-evolving reshaping of one’s culture, creeds and world-views does not lead to a confusion or a mix, it does define and sometimes sharpen one’s sense of belonging and core values. Though identities are mobile and changeable, they are still discrete entities, and the solutions to our common challenges will remain localized and different in substance. However, throughout the interpretative process these particular solutions will considerably vary from the ones suggested by the traditional understanding of one’s culture and identity, and the array of solutions devised form one’s culture or group to another will then be legitimately understood as a correlated set of attitudes, choices and decisions.

Let me then summarize the four stages of this programmatic model for cultural interaction:

- discovering and pondering a community of challenges, a commonality of crises and problems that the globalization era has made even more stringent;

- acknowledging the tremendous variety of cultural responses and resources that can be mobilized for answering these challenges, and the discrepancies among these resources;

- re-evaluating one’s cultural responses and core identity throughout the interpretative resources mobilized by the exchange process;

- recognizing the fact that these reciprocal re-interpretations and re-assessments do not amount to devising globalized answers to our common challenges; rather, they nurture an ever-evolving sharpening of one’s choices and decisions still rooted into a sense of belonging and identity.

What is the use of the model ?

The mere spelling out of this simple framework raises a number of very valid objections:

- On can first wonder whether a normative model of cultural interaction is of any use at all. Cultural interactions just happen, and there is no way of making people react to the meetings of other cultures and creeds in a way that an outsider finds more positive, rational or creative than other patterns of behavior.

- Second, there is the question of the primacy here given to “interpretation.” Does not a strategy that relies on the “interpretative use of the Other’s resources” reflect the dominance of a given cultural model that can be legitimately challenged by alternative world-views, suspicious of the “interpretative” paradigm, this on the ground, for instance, that it relies too much on the Biblical exegetical tradition ?

- Going one step further, is the proposed framework finally about “substance” or “process” ? (I will further argue that the relevant question here is: in which language(s) does the interpretative process take place?)

- Finally, the proposition according to which a globalized process of interpretation ultimately gives birth to localized answers, decisions and identities deserves further discussion. What then about the project of agreeing upon a “global ethics” if the proposition proves to be valid?                      

In fact, these questions are correlated. Rather than confronting them one by one I will make an attempt at an integrated answer, hopefully furthering the paradigm sketched above.

The basic fact, here, is that cultural interactions happen through languages that are necessarily subject to a process of translation. First and foremost, the standpoints that define people’s and cultures’ sense of crisis and identity happen in the variety of their languages. Second, within a given society, “translation’ is also needed between the various sets of symbolic and rational languages that coexist within the social and political field. Speaking a language that is widely shared and understood always requires to go through a process of translation, interpretation and cross-fertilization that makes the discussion possible while modifying from the start the interlocutors’ standpoints. Third, a double-bind translation process is needed each time the gaps between “natural” languages and “cultural” languages combine together; this is the case when, for instance, marginal classes from marginal countries are confronted with a discourse originating from power centers, such discourse being exemplified by the structure and vocabulary of globalized, technocratic English.

In this view, intercultural exchange is always about allowing a group of people to express itself in its mother tongue while understanding other participants’ mother tongues and being understood by them. This is at the same time a highly sophisticated process and something that cannot happen just because sophisticated procedures are being set up. This can take place first and foremost because there is a shared conviction that such is indeed the communication process that will allow everyone to go to the heart of the matter at stake. “Interpretation” here can be understood as a philosophical and exegetical metaphor only if it is first understood in its literal sense, the fact having been recognized that ‘literal’ translation is not a burdensome necessity but rather the crux and the dynamics of intercultural exchange. In other words, the above-proposed model is normative insofar as it males the point that “translation” is not only a practical necessity but indeed a normative one as well.  

This is also why the exchange being conducted in such a mind setting is at the same time about process and substance. The very fact of debating from an interpretative standpoint modifies our perceptions, our ways of expressing ourselves as well as the solutions we propone, and all this happens simultaneously. In the same vein, local solutions to global problem are to be understood as solutions anchored into a shared language. They are essentially ”language solutions”, which does not mean that the differences that they articulate vis-à-vis other ways of solving challenges are only formal, void of content, but that the language in which they are expressed grounds the logic they develop. In this sense, the “global ethics” that the world community is insistently looking for is inseparable from the translation process itself. In many ways, this is the fact of sticking to the interpretative process that constitutes the global ethics. Global ethics is not about forms, it is not about content, it is about the evolving form of an evolving content. To put it another way, a global ethics is a language ethic.

This does not mean that the interpretative process will never deliver content. It means that this content will be a language creation, a process of inventiveness, rather than the discovery of an “essential ethics” that would have lied deep down throughout the history of humankind without anyone having noticed it. Interpretation is also invention. This is only by interpreting anew our particular ethics that we are able to draw the lines of a shared ethical standpoint.

Identity is always interpreted and invented, and it is only by acknowledging this process that identities can be shared, communicated and enriched. Consciously interpreted identities become agents of ethical inventiveness. Understanding identity, interpretation and inventiveness as the three tenets of contemporary cultural encounter might be the only way to draw the road map of a global developmental process rooted in shared ethical concerns.

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