“They used to compare diplomacy to a game of chess,” said former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, addressing a packed house in the Baltimore Convention Center as the closing plenary at the 101st AACRAO Annual Meeting. “Today it’s more like a game of billiards—dynamic and unpredictable.”
Certain forces, which Albright called “megatrends,” are changing the face of human interactions, and we would all be wise to attend to these forces.
The first—globalization—is affecting issues from international politics to how higher education professionals are doing their jobs.
“Globalization means we’re interdependent,” Albright says. Collectively, we can tackle challenges that none of us can meet alone. “But that also means that conflict and crisis are impossible to contain. Trouble anywhere can become a problem that affects us all. That’s the central challenge of globalization: everything affects everything. It binds our fates, but complicates our efforts to stand together.”
The convergence toward a global culture allows us to know and appreciate differences among humans, but “the prospect of a world without borders is unsettling for some, who become afraid they will be left behind and cling to their ethnic, religious and tribal identity and see the world in terms of us-versus-them. There’s nothing wrong with pride in one’s identity, but when pride curdles into hate, people can become uncompromising, be consumed by their differences, and lose sight of our common humanity.”
The globalization megatrend is compounded by the second megatrend Albright identified: information technology and big data. Many in the audience nodded in affirmation as Albright, with her characteristic dry wit, noted, “The internet helped to modernize the world – without doing much to civilize it. Technology by itself is not a substitute for leadership.”
“In the 1920s, Nazi propagandists exulted in the power of radio to bring people under the spell of Nazi ideology. And today, social media is used to recruit terrorists,” she continued. “Technology has revealed the gulf between information and wisdom.”
With our current information consumption, we can now customize the sources we follow, and thereby “risk narrowing and hardening world views to the point where compromise to make progress becomes impossible.”
The path through these contradictions and megatrends, Albright proposed, runs right through the audience in that room.
“Education is key,” she said. “Events are determined to a large extent by what young people are taught about the world. Some places in the globe, they’re taught that honor can only be attained by refighting old battles. Others seek a path to paradise in service of an insecure and vengeful god. Many are barely educated at all.”
In order to survive and face the challenges of the future, new democracies must invest in public infrastructure and education. Elections aren’t enough.
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“The challenges we face in the world are relentless,” Albright said. “Democracy can be noisy, inefficient and exasperating. But its greatest advantages are its ability to correct its own faults, to expose misinformation, to shame bigotry, to develop new ideas and create new and visionary leaders. But democracy cannot succeed without citizens who care enough to participate. That depends on moral courage—which is both an individual quality but also a national aspiration.”
“Americans are the most generous people in the world—with the shortest attention span,” Albright said. “I refuse to become silent. When I look around at this messy world, I see we need every voice to speak up for democracy, human rights and peace. So read those applications with renewed attention.”
At the conclusion of her speech, after an engaging Q-and-A moderated by AACRAO past president Stan Henderson, Albright was presented with a special quill pin by designer Heidi Daus as a thank you gift from AACRAO.