AYHAN BERMEK (Panasonic Tekofaks Yönetim Kurulu Başkanı): Forum İstanbul için yurtdışından katılan değerli konuklarımıza ve bu akşam yemeğimizi onurlandıran hanımefendilere, beyefendilere, önce Türkiye’nin öner kuruluşlarından Gülsan, Mehmet Beyin ve naçizane şahsım adına en derin saygılarımla teşekkür ediyorum. Bugünün de dikkatle takip ettiğimiz yoğun bir gündemi vardı. Her yıl Türkiye’nin gündemine oturan ve ilgi ile izlenen Forum İstanbul’da bugün bir başarıya daha imza attı. Akşam yemeğimiz için Bay Ogilvy konuşacak. ‘’Tarihin ve geleceğin ana kapısı İstanbul‘’ başlıklı bir sunumda bulunacak. Ben bay Ogilvy’nin Türkiye’ye gelişinde önemli katkısı olan kendisinin tanımını ona bırakarak Bay David’i davet edeceğim fakat daha evvel bu coğrafyada yaşar ve bu İstanbul’un tadını çıkarırken ve yaşantımız boyunca da tarih kitaplarında okuduklarımızdan gerçekten içimizde herkese evladının güzel göründüğü gibi İstanbul’umuz geleceğe açılan bir kapı olduğunu hep hissettirdi. Dünyadan gelen ziyaretçilerinle, tarihinle, dokusuyla ve özellikle Avrupa’nın ve dünyanın takip ettiği medeniyetlerin buluştuğu Anadolu’nun bileşkesi olarak da yerini hep muhafaza etti. Biz bunu hep kendimiz yorumluyoruz ama bir araştırmacı, bir vizyoner bunu nasıl yorumlayacak, tahmin ediyorum yemeği de ilginç hale getirecek. Ben önce bay David’i davet ediyor, size afiyet olsun dileklerimle güzel bir gece diliyorum.

DAVID JUDSON (Referans Gazetesi): İyi akşamlar, Forum İstanbul adına hepinize hoş geldiniz demek istiyorum ve başlamadan önce ve misafirimizi takdim etmeden önce Gülsan şirketi ve sayın Mehmet Gül’e teşekkür etmek istiyorum. Aynı zamanda Tekofaks başkanı Ayhan Bey’e teşekkür etmek istiyorum. Merak etmeyin ben Türkçe devam etmeyeceğim, daha rahat edersiniz herhalde. Adım David Jodsun, ben Referans gazetesi genel koordinatörüyüm ve misafirimiz James Ogilvy’yi takdim ederken artık dediğim gibi İngilizce’ye geçeceğim. In explaining just who Dr. Ogilvy is, and explaining how he got here tonight to be our guest at Forum Istanbul, I need to explain little bit about the background because it is quite of a Forum Istanbul story. Forum Istanbul as you know is an organization entirely run by volunteers, we find panelists and put this together through personal connections and people we know and we have encountered and 4 years ago, in the second Forum Istanbul event David Kallick thinker and writer from New York who came to speak at Forum Istanbul and at that conversation he asked me if I was familiar with global business network, a think tank in San Francisco, California and I said I was not then he recommended the web site which led me to an essay I found there by Dr. Ogilvy which was called “What businessmen can learn from Jean Paul Sartre” which was a provocative title. I read that and it was about the importance of choice and making choices about the kinds of businesses we want to run and kind of activities we want our businesses to engage in but looking more closely at the website and what the global business network was about was it was new to me, the members of the global network, writers of the books, philosophers that make up the global network were all people that I had been very familiar with at least intellectually for the last at least 30 years. Steward Brand, founder of the business network along with Dr. Ogilvy, I began reading when I was in high school when he founded the magazine called the Whole Earth Catalog, he went on to write many books and do many things but I would say that his philosophy has generally connected biology and natural systems to thinking about business issues. Paul Hawkin who I first red at least 25 years ago was a member. Very successful entrepreneur but he is also author of more then half a dozen books, he argued in one of them in ecology of commerce that only business and corporations have the resources and insight to successfully confront the world’s many environmental problems. Denise Cruso was a member, she was a friend of mine when she was in college and was the music critic for small newspaper in the town of San Hose Bispo where I grew up. Denise went on to become the technology critic of the New York Times and continued to write many books about the relationship between technology and business. And then I got to reading one of Dr. Ogilvy’s books and discovered that it was edited by Eric Best who was my first editor and a dear friend who I hadn’t seen for more then 20 years at a newspaper Stockton Record. So what connected all these many thinkers that had found their way into Jay’s tent. I think what connected them is that they are all what I might call capitalist intellectuals. Not an intellectual capitalist, that is some thing different, that would be Mehmet Gül, I think is an intellectual capitalist, who as philosophers explored many social and cultural issues that interconnect with business. This is what separates the global business network from the more conventional management consultants which we are all familiar McKinsey, Buzalyn etc. and Jay is a philosopher of course. Jay was a professor of philosophy at Yale University for many years before he became management consultant and tonight he is going to share with us bit of his philosophy. I believe the topic tonight will not be what business can learn from Jean Paul Sartre but rather what global businessmen, global business leaders can learn from Turkey. Jay, welcome to the podium.

Thank you so much David, I think I will have David speak at my funeral. And I want to thank the other organizers of this conference and all of you who have so impressed me throughout today with both the quality of the presentations and the quality of the attention that you given to the other speakers. I have also been very impressed with the depth and reflectiveness of a number of speakers, starting last night, I immediately felt at home when I heard Mehmet Idun quote Foucoult and talk about anthology. This doesn’t happen at meetings I go to in the US. So I am very very pleased to be here and I thank you very much for inviting me.

You heard that I might give my impressions of Istanbul; I have to confess this is my first trip to Istanbul so I think it would really be very very foolish of me to tell you about Istanbul. Instead I want to ask you what does it feel like to live on the razor’s edge of history? What does it feel like to be connecting east and West, the old and the new, the Christianity and Islam? You live in an extraordinary place and what I would rather talk about is what the rest of the world needs from you, because I know a bit about the rest of the world and I know a bit about what the rest of us need and it is quite a lot. I want to arrange my remarks in three ideas; the first idea will be about the push back against the Washington consensus. The second set of ideas will be about religious fundamentalism and its rapid rise in recent years. And the third set of ideas will be about what comes next after all we are here to talk about the world in 2023. What will come next, some kind of post modern ideology that I will call nextism, something different from either democratic capitalism or communism, something new, something to which you have a great deal to contribute.

So first, the push back against the Washington consensus, let’s begin a bit about just what the Washington consensus is. It is about a linkage between free markets, democracy and globalization. What is good according to the Washington consensus? Well the privatization of everything, from private property like residential real estate to health care, education and the management of natural resources. What is bad according to the Washington consensus? Any form of interference with market mechanisms tariffs, well let’s point to the EU as a success of the Washington consensus. Let’s eliminate tariffs, look at NAFTA the North American Free Trade Association, what else is bad? Industrial policy and the Washington consensus would count as a triumph the way Japan rose so fast in 70’s and early 80’s and then exercising its industrial policy by the government then went into 15 year long recession proving it seems the truth of the Washington consensus. What else is bad according to this consensus? Well, obviously Soviet Communist Central Planning and we see where that went with the break up of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. So the advocates of this consensus could say we tried letting governments exercise control over economies and we saw that it didn’t work. We’ve come to the end of history not in the sense that nothing will happen anymore that is a foolish interpretation of a fairly complex thesis by Fukoyama but according to this argument we’ve seen the end of ideology, the end of politics in the driver’s seat of history. Democratic capitalism won and that’s the end of the story.

Now another way to frame what the Washington consensus is about would be to use the term Professor Bulit I thought developed very nicely this morning a meta narrative, looking at it progress through time. Once upon a time according to this Washington consensus meta narrative once upon a time you can call it a religious era where priests and the pope were in the driver’s seat of history then came the reaffirmation and the separation of church and state. Then from the time of the treaty of West failure and the rise of the nation state until very recently we had what we might call a political era. Then as of only the end of 20th century we got what we could call a second reaffirmation and this second reaffirmation involved the separation of state from corporation by way of privatization and deregulation so after the second reaffirmation we enter the economic era. So this Meta narrative begins with the religious era, moves to a political era and now puts us in an economic era. Part of this meta narrative would say once upon a time power was held in the hands of the priests and the pope then in the political era power passed to presidents, princes and prime ministers and now more recently in the second reaffirmation power passed from those presidents, princes and prime ministers to chief executive officers and chairman of a large corporations. So that’s how that Meta narrative goes but now there’s a push back. There’s been a push back against the Washington consensus and this Meta narrative. Not just from the point of ideology but from the point of view of actual historical events. Think of 1997, back in 1995, 1996, 1997 the Mahatir of Malaysia was one of the people refusing to accept this Washington consensus. He introduced capital controls in Malaysia and then come the financial melt down in South East Asia in 1997 and my o my, Malaysia was much better protected then Thailand, South Korea, the rest of the Asian nations, that should not be according to the Washington consensus. Look next at those protests in the streets outside the meetings of the WTO, remember Seattle, Geneva, Toronto, all those kids in the streets protesting the WTO. Then think of August 1998 when the Russian Ruble crashed following the shock therapy of the introduction of the market mechanisms in Russia. Then we come to of course September 11, 2001 when 19 people said we don’t want your world trade. Look at the continuing strength of China defying the Washington consensus view in order to get economic growth you have to have democracy. And finally look at new alignments in Latin America and I’d like to look little more closely at these developments. I think we are deceived by an old Meta narrative by Ugo Chaves in Venezuela who clearly is a classical leftist, a friend of Fidel Castro, but t is not so clear that Lyola in Brazil is quite such a leftist, he’s managed Brazil in a way that works fairly well with the rest of the world. Look next at Abrador in Mexico who will probably be the next president in Mexico, it is wrong to think of him simply as a leftist and most clearly look at the very recent events in Bolivia where Morales has recently nationalized the energy resources. These movements in Latin America, I want to say are really something quite different from a move back to the left in old ideological terms. Against deregulation and privatization of everything it turns out that there are public goods not just private property. It turns out that the privatization of everything doesn’t work. It is not only a matter of needing police to get after the criminals like Kenlay the head of Enron or the head of World Com, criminals. More fundamentally and more positively it is a matter of understanding genuinely public goods in addition to private property and the inadequacy of markets alone to protect the commons are shared goods.

Let me state it as an axiom, wheresoever there was a mandate to universal service, market mechanisms alone are not adequate why because markets by their very nature produce winners and losers. And where public goods are involved we cannot afford losers. Let me give three examples of this, communication, education and healthcare. The logics are slightly different in each case but the conclusion it is the same wheresoever you have the mandate to universal service, market mechanisms are not adequate. Think of communications, it makes no sense whatever for me to have one telephone on one end of my desk that connects me to half of the people that I know and another telephone at the other end of my desk that connects me to the other half of the people I know, that would be a stupid communication system. I mean in the very nature of communications you want a system that will connect everybody to everybody. So you may need some government regulation to maintain such a public monopoly. Second education, we’re all worse off the higher the rate of illiteracy in our society. Third healthcare, we are all worse off the more sick people there are in our society and I have to say in the US we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, which is highly privatized. We have not regarded health as a public good and we have 44 million people uninsured for healthcare. The system is not working.

So it turns out that this Meta narrative of the second reaffirmation story is inaccurate it is too linear just as the poor will always be with us so too will governments. They have a job to do and so to will the gods and goddesses for they too have a job to do which brings me to the second set of ideas around fundamentalism. Here I want to make 4 points; first fundamentalism is a global problem. I am not just talking about radical Islamic fundamentalism; I am talking also about Christian fundamentalism, Hindu fundamentalism and Jewish fundamentalism. All of these movements share similar dynamic. They are not to be confused with that old time religion and this is the second idea about fundamentalism that they are not traditionalist or pre-modern movements, they are post modern. They arise in reaction to modernity in reaction to rapid pace of change in reaction to the confusion caused by exposure to other cultures. Speed and the challenge of otherness are confusing and threatening to those who cannot keep up with the pace of change so they react. They dig in their heels, they say stop the world, I want to get off and the way they get off is to seek simple answers to the very complex questions posed by the speed and novelty of modernity. Simple answers like the drawing of very sharp distinctions between good and evil, between us and them, either you’re with us or you’re against us and if you’re against us you must be evil and you deserve to die. This is a very dangerous way of thinking.

Third point about fundamentalism, why the rapid rise of these fundamentalist movements in the last 10 or 20 years, here I want to make a quite simple point about the difference between the progress of our all specious and we have made progress despite what post modernists say we have reduced infant mortality, we are feeding more people, we have expanded the human life span, we have added to the record of science and technology and history. There is progress for the species but for the individual we are biologically indistinguishable from human beings 10.000 years ago so while the species makes progress each day we repopulate the earth with little babies who are ignorants. Now for those little babies to grow up, to mature and make it they have to learn the accomplishments of all of human history so what I want to describe here where the finishing line of the human race keeps getting further out, it keeps getting extended but the starting line is exactly the same place as it was 10.000 years ago in human biology.

Now as a result of a structural feature of the human condition progress of the species on the one hand but stable biology on the other the gap between those who make it and those who are left behind keeps growing. This is a structural feature of the human condition. The relationship between biology of individuals and the progress of the species, now this phrase left behind has a certain irony to it, in the US our public education system is now being influenced by an active congress called ‘no child left behind the act’ that was put forward by the Bush administration. We’ve also seen the amazing success of a series of novels called ‘left behind series’ these are novels about the fundamentalist Christian rapture and the idea is that the followers of Jesus will be swept up by the rapture and people like me the heedan will be left behind. What I find kind of beautifully ironic about this is that it is the fundamentalists and yet they bought 60 million copies of these novels that make me and my friends left behind while they go up with the rapture.

Now, I want to review these points about fundamentalism once again the first point fundamentalism is a global problem. It is not peculiar to one culture or another. It is a structural problem that results from the quickening pace of change and producing this very dangerous view that justifies killing. And the third point is this structural gap widening. From these several points I want to make the fourth and final point about fundamentalism that I think is particularly relevant given all that we’ve heard today about Huntington’s famous Clash of Civilizations. The important clashes today are not between civilizations; the important deadly and dangerous clashes today are the clashes within each of our cultures between those who make it and those who’ve been left behind. That is where the danger is. Within Hindu fundamentalism, within Islamic fundamentalism, within Christian fundamentalism, within each of these cultures the clash between those who made it and those who are left behind, that’s the important clash. How can we overcome this problem because it is so deep, so structural, so universal, one way would clearly be education.

During my talk, earlier I described nextism as a new ideology but that sounds very much like the language of the political era may be a better term would be a new belief system which almost sounds as if it came from the religious era. As I said earlier that linear meta-narrative about the religious, political and economic eras is inaccurate. Religion has not gone away; neither will politics; the gods and goddesses have a job to do as do governments protecting public goods from market mechanisms. The new belief system “nextism” must satisfy several demands not only for social justice for those who loose out in the market place which will dominate state central planning but also a demand for some sense of meaning among those left behind by the rapid pace a modernity. Let us admit that the fundamentalists have one thing right the worldview, the believe system behind secular modernity leaves humanity in a world that is meaningless. It is a world of matter and motion and space and time, a world of atoms and molecules bouncing against one another with no purpose and no value as Nobel prize winning physicist Carl Weinberg said and I quote “the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems pointless” this is a philosophy of nihilism and people have good reason to reject it. but what do they put in its place, fundamentalist believes that are childish and dangerous. Now I am not a religious man, I began my carrier as a philosopher partly to find an alternative to religion, I do not pray, I think and I feel, I am not a member of a church, I am a member of a community, a family and friends for whom I care very deeply but I have had experiences that I can only begin to understand as mystical that I can only describe in the language of the sacred. Experiences that give a sense of our relatedness to one another and to the earth and the rest of nature and it seems to me though I cannot be certain that the simple claims of the fundamentalists are idolatries, those who are left behind grasp on to idols that actually stand between themselves and the sacred web of life. The idols lead to hate not love; they lead to violence, not justice. But physicists, the scientists of the modern era from Darwin to Carl Weinberg have nothing to offer as a substitute for idolatry on the one hand or nihilism on the other nor does the Washington consensus with its faith and markets as the old cliché has it, market knows price of everything and the value of nothing. But values have a rism, honor, justice, beauty, these things are not nothing, nor were they handed down to us by some paternal god on high. I think there is a better story to tell about value and meaning then the stories we get from either the physicists or the fundamentalists. I think that the new story of nextism will be more then a secular ideology.

I think it will combine elements of feminism and reverence for the natural environment with the sense of social justice that is not just a swing to the left. The kids in the streets at the riots against the WTO were not communists, it would be wrong to call them leftists, they were opposed to unregulated market forces and global trade but not because they wanted to collect tariffs for national governments. They were opposed to un-federate global trade because they wanted to protect the earth, the natural environment, the Rainforests, the oceans, the ozone layer, and the genetic diversity. They wanted to protect Gaya, the goddess of the earth. This was just not a political movement; it was also a religious or spiritual uprising of protest against violation of the earth. There were many woman involved, many mothers, many sisters of the earth. Analysts of those protests remarked on the lack of strong male leaders, it was a self organizing network bound together by cell phones, the internet and a deeply felt conviction that the rape of the earth had to stop. I take these protests, which are now almost forgotten after 9/11 and the war on terror. I take these protests to be an early indicator for what I am calling nextism.

Now, if you look again at the recent nationalization of energy resources in Bolivia through the lenses of nextism, you will see it very differently then as a swing to the left. Instead you will see this recent nationalization as a natural result of the water revolt several years ago. Under the guidance of the Washington consensus the IMF made loans to Bolivia for the construction of an improved water infrastructure on condition with the requirement that the waterworks be privatized back till corporation was then paid tens of millions of dollars to undertake construction and then suddenly the price of water rose so dramatically that many peasants were denied access to this basic resource, this common good water. Globalization, corporatization and the Washington consensus came in conflict with the native culture, the wisdom of the endies and people took to the streets not for the leftist revolution but for water. I know something about this; I care about it because one of my best friends is married to a woman who is the sister of one of the leaders of that water revolt so I have had a very close look at that particular piece of history. Now, why do I dwell on this story about a water revolt in far away Bolivia? Because I want to use it to illustrate what the world wants of Turkey. The world needs a way to connect deeply held values; the world needs to connect deeply held religious commitments with political action to save the commons. The world needs a way to connect economic growth to those deeply held values. And the seeds of those connections may be present here in Turkey, here in this room but you tell me, but from the outside, coming here to Istanbul with kind of beginners mind, in the eyes of this first time visitor it appears that Turkey is a place that somehow manages to connect the religious and the political and the economic. The old story relied on separation, the separation of church and state and the reaffirmation, the separation of state and corporation through privatization and de-regulation. The new story this nextism that has yet not been written is less about separation then connection. It is not just a political ideology left or right; it is also a worldview a philosophy, a belief system that sees men and women not so much as competitive individuals but men and women in relation to one another and to the earth to local land and to planetary environment. The Washington consensus prices individual liberty and freedom from tyranny and political oppression is a great thing but now coming from the US where global studies of values show that the US is just off the charts favoring individualism versus collectivism. I want to say with number of my friends people like Robert Bella who is written eloquently on this that may be we have too much of this good thing individualism. I think when thinking about it as a worldview I go all the way back to Aristotle who said “to be is to be an individual” unlike what Dr. Udon said last night “to exist is to coexist” I would put it “to be is to be related” but no Aristotle said “to be is to an individual and to be an individual is to be a substance” and then philosopher Benedict Benutsa defined substance is that which is self sufficient and needs no other. I shiver when I read those words they are so cold, they sound rather like an American man who needs no other. We have experienced a degree of individualism in America that is pathological; we call it by names like narcissism and autism. In Japan there are over one million young men who have withdrawn into the privacy of their family’s bedrooms and almost never come out to see the light of day. It is a national problem much written about in Japan and another early indicator of the need for something like a nextism that can connect person-to-person humanity to the earth and give meaning to life.

So what does the world want of Turkey? Perhaps a laboratory for learning how to connect the old to the new, the east to the west, private property and public good. The world needs lesson in connecting the religious to the political and the political to the economic. We had enough of separateness and separation of men from men, men from women, men and women from earth. We had enough of separation of church from state, of state from corporation, of east from west. Now it is time to listen to and I conclude with a quotation from Ian Forsters novel, Howard’s End which deeply moved me when I read it as a very young man, “only connect that was the whole of her sermon, only connect the pros and the passion and both will be exulted and human love will be seen at its height” live in fragments no longer, only connect”

Thank you.