Page 461 - Cultures and Organizations

426 IMPLICATIONS

societal phenomena, Dutch readers should at least be cautioned when inter-
preting U.S. data. Surprisingly, few Dutch journalists would dream of pro-
ducing Japanese or German statistics with the tacit assumption that their
conclusions apply in the Netherlands.

Global Challenges Call for
Intercultural Cooperation

Humankind today is threatened by a number of disasters that have all been
man-made: they are disasters of culture rather than the disasters of nature
to which our ancestors were regularly exposed.
Their common cause is that people have become both too numerous
and too clever for the limited size of our globe. While we are clever about
technology and are getting more so each day, we are still naive about our-
selves. Our mental software is not adapted to the environment we created
in recent centuries. The only way toward survival is getting to understand
ourselves better as social beings, so that we may control our technological
cleverness and not use it in destructive ways. This goal demands concerted
action on issues for which, unfortunately, different cultural values lead
people to disagree rather than agree. In these circumstances intercultural
cooperation has become a prime condition for the survival of humankind.
A number of value-laden world problems have been signaled in this
book. There are the economic problems: international economic coopera-
tion versus competition; the distribution of wealth and poverty across and
within countries. There are the technology-induced problems. In the past,
whenever a new technology was invented, it could also be applied. This is
no longer the situation, and decisions have to be made regarding whether
some of the things people can produce should be produced, and if so, sub-

ject to what precautions. Such decisions should be agreed upon on a world
scale, and if countries, groups, or persons do not respect the decisions or
the precautions, they should be forced to do so. Examples are certain uses
of nuclear energy both for peaceful and for aggressive purposes, certain
chemical processes and products, certain applications of information sci-
ence, and certain applications of genetic manipulation. An example of the

latter is influencing whether a baby to be born will be a boy or a girl. In
some cultures the desirability of having boys over girls is inordinately
strong (see Chapter 5). In view of both ethical and demographic consid-