The coronavirus has accelerated a reversal of globalization which has been underway since the global financial crisis of 2008. Nations have been closing in within their own borders, to keep out refugees, to stop imports of products and workers that can reduce employment for their citizens, and to shut out terrorists and hot money. The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted trans-border supply chains and shut-down international travel. People are being forced to live and buy locally. The pandemic has high-lighted that, while virtual life can remain global, real life must always be local.
Companies make their offices great places to work to attract employees. They provide comfortable spaces to work with recreational areas and bright cafeterias. Larger companies build open campuses with gardens. Even before the pandemic, there was a counter trend. To attract employees, companies were offering them options to work from home, and be closer to their families, rather than trundling into their fancy offices every day. With the spreading pandemic, governments are quarantining people in their neighborhoods, and companies are compelled to close their offices.
Forms of enterprises have been changing for some years, loosening bonds between companies and their workers. Employers want more flexibility to hire and fire and manage their costs. Technology enables it. For example, Uber drivers work out of home and in their cabs. They are not even Uber’s employees. Propelled by these mega trends, humans are returning, by choice or compulsion, to bond within their communities, rather than binding tightly with corporate brands.
Companies in many countries compete to be recognized as ‘Great Places to Work’, a concept promoted by Robert Levering. Levering developed the Levering Trust Index which assessed companies on parameters that mattered most to employees about their work environment. Salary levels were not what mattered most. What mattered more were ‘soft’ qualities—pride in the work they did, trust in people they worked for, and camaraderie with people around them.
Citizens need great places to work as well as great communities to live in for their well-being. Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out that the strength of American democracy lies in its local associations. Jane Jacobs analysed that well-being of citizens in American cities was determined by the quality of social relationships in their neighborhoods much more than by the city’s grand layout and infrastructure. (There is a lesson here for India’s Smart Cities’ program).
There is an intellectual churning within economics. Economists are rethinking the value of GDP as a measure of human well-being. They have realized that the qualities of the societies in which people live —inclusion, justice, harmony, etc., and the condition of the natural environment, matter more to people than the size of the economy (which economists are finding harder to measure anyway).
India lives in its villages, Gandhiji said. While the majority of Indians still do, large numbers are now living in India’s mushrooming towns and cities, where they search for good places to work and good places to live. There, Indians, who follow different religions and speak different languages, come together to earn incomes and also contribute to the growth of India’s GDP. Life is not easy for them. Tensions surfaced in the recent riots in Delhi. As did the care of citizens for each other, regardless of religious differences.
Globalization has enabled trade across national boundaries. Social media has enabled people to connect with people everywhere. The unintended consequences of these global trends are that people do not have the time, and less interest, to meet their immediate neighbors. Thus, bonds within communities have been fraying. Videos of women in Australia fighting over toilet-paper in a local market, worried by the pandemic, are amusing. More seriously, social media, has been dividing communities into ‘people like us’ and ‘people not like us’. Conversations across these boundaries have become impossible.
Global jetsetters fly across the world and meet people who are like them. Living within gated communities back home, they are not concerned about the people not like them across their narrow domestic walls.
The world is a complex system. Many parts of it are ailing—the economy, the environment, and society and politics too. Economists alone cannot fix it. Nor environmentalists. Or sociologists. The solution lies across these disciplines. It must be a systemic solution that improves the health of the whole.
Yoga provides an idea for the solution. The human body is a complex system with many complex sub-systems—a cardio-vascular system, digestive system, a neurological system, etc. Yoga shows that breathing well—which is a very simple solution—can tone up the whole body.
Listening is a very simple solution too. Yet, it can improve the health of complex societies. Those who speak well are celebrated, not those who listen well. Children are taught to win debates and elocution contests. They are not taught how to listen to and understand others. Especially those who are ‘not like them’. ‘Well-educated’ professionals are divided by the languages and ideologies of their disciplines. Economists listen to other economists. And sociologists to other sociologists. They too are divided by intellectual walls.
The time has come for people everywhere to listen across the invisible walls that divide us even within the localities in which we live and the places in which we work. In offices, and in our communities, let us set aside some space and some time to practice dialogue amongst people who are not like each other. A time and space for ‘apni dil ki baat subke sath’ (speaking from the heart with others; and listening to each other).
Dialogue is the art of understanding another’s point-of-view, and discovering who the person really is, behind the stereotypes we have in our minds. A dialogue is not a debate to be won. It is a process of discovery. Of discovering not only the humanity in others. But also, the humanity in ourselves.