Challenges to Morality: Liberalism, Globalization and Postmodernism

By Ararat Kostanian, 1 May 2023

The below long quotation is the concluding remarks of Ararat Kostanian’s wide-ranging essay with extensive bibliography that appeared in International Movement for a Just World. Kostanian is a young author, a PhD candidate, Universitas Islam International Indonesia, former research fellow, National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected]

“This essay has revealed the essentiality of moral values in shaping societies that succeed in integrating into their modes of living not merely the notion of accruing personal benefit and gaining profit from interaction with other subjects of society, but also self-evaluation in regard to spirituality, the patriotic notion of what a society is, and interaction with other communities based on moral values of mutual respect and mutual wellbeing. It has also indicated the challenge to morality posed by liberal capitalism and how that system excluded morality from its ideology by promoting the mentality of material advantage in all aspects of social interactions and even of exploiting society itself as an object for the accumulation of wealth.

Moreover, the greed which is advocated in liberalism is rejected in moral ideology as an act of selfishness. Another challenge to morality in the liberal capitalist system is that that system has tolerated the shifting of foreign policy into a mechanism for waging wars in various parts of the world to gain immense profit by looting the resources of legitimate states.

In parallel, although postmodernism sees liberal capitalism as a threat to cultural traditions and to the wellbeing of those communities that are based on collectivism rather than individualism, the morality that it presents remains insufficient as long as it lacks that morality which is related to faith and to the historical experience of religions, as well as to the ideologies that nations have accrued. In the same manner, postmodernism denies any scope for development or advancement, writing off these notions as pure liberal inventions. That ought to be understood as an irrational evaluation by postmodernism, since it would have been impossible for the emerging great powers such as Russia and China to enter into global competition with the liberal camp without innovation in such fields as economy, science, education and innovation.

The essay has also shown the world’s current dominant paradigm, liberal capitalism, as a substantial challenge to morality, and has examined the deprivation that the West endures by not shaping its societies on the basis of moral, ethical values. At the same time, as we have seen, the new actors in global politics have rejuvenated moral theory by emphasizing its relationship to faith and national belonging. In a world of growing nationalism and declining liberalism, the importance of morality will be on the rise—especially in regions removed from Western influence.”