What is a global perspective?

This page is a work in progress by the founders of Berkshire Publishing Group and selected authors and experts contributing to its global publications. for more information, contact Karen Christensen.

A global perspective does not mean working in international markets, or that you have traveled a lot. In fact, people who travel a lot often seem to have less idea about the world than other people. It doesn’t come from looking out over the world, but of being able to put yourself, as the Indians said, in someone else’s moccasins. It’s a natural sympathy, that stretches across boundaries and borders.

A global perspective requires imagination, appreciation, and curiosity. It comes from a sense of being connected, as a human being, to people in the past, in other places.

A global perspective can be scary. It is much more comfortable to think that everyone should live and think just the way you do.

But a global perspective is comforting, too. It comes from a realization that we humans are all very much the same, deep down. Sociobiologists can easily explain this: after all, human beings have the same basic set of parts and need the same fuel.

We do, however, see the world in very different ways at times, and that is where there is potential for tremendous conflict. Working towards a global perspective is a way to expand our minds, to become aware of the nuances of difference between different cultures, religions, and age groups. Some people say that social classes are more common across the world than nations.

It can be amazingly difficult to get outside our own point of view, and it is not just ordinary people watching Fox News that fail to understand the world. Experts…..

The more powerful a nation is, the more its culture dominates other places, the less likely its people are to understand that there are other views. Americans are the most limited, and the British are probably next. China would be expected to have an insular world view, but as a developing nation they seem to be especially alert to other views (though not being much affected by them).

W.E.B. Du Bois Award for Global Perspectives

Berkshire Publishing was founded by two people obsessed by the idea of cross-cultural understanding and global perspectives, and its efforts derive from that obsession. In order to encourage scholarship that is truly global, that tries to move outside the limitations of a single nation or culture to assess informational and create knowledge, Berkshire is sponsoring the W.E.B. Du Bois Award for Global Scholarship. Named in honor of the eminent African-American intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who grew up in the small New England town where Berkshire is based. Du Bois was a person of global perspective and his life and work is testimony to the fact that people can develop a gp even when they come from a small town, a disadvantaged background, and the U.S.A.

The award of $2,000 (or more) will be given to the writer who in the opinion of the judges has during the preceding year written the book or article that most typifies and encourages a global perspective on a major issue of the day.

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