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Tavis: Dr. Benjamin Barber is the director of CivWorld Citizen's Campaign for Democracy, and professor of civil society at the University of Maryland. He's also the founder of Interdependence Day, a movement created to address global concerns in the wake of 9/11. Last week in Morocco, Dr. Barber and prominent voices from around the globe gathered to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Interdependence Day. He joins us tonight from New York. Ben Barber, as always, sir, nice to see you.

Benjamin Barber: Good evening, Tavis; great to see you.

Tavis: Glad to have you on. Let me start, in terms of full disclosure, by telling the audience that I happened to be in Casablanca a week ago today with you and those other prominent voices from around the globe, to be a part of this fifth Interdependence Day. And I thought I would, again, full disclosure, continue some of our conversation in Casablanca here, stateside, on PBS. Before I get into that conversation that we had on 9/11 in another part of the world where the Muslim faith is the order of the day, we'll come back to that in a moment. But you are the professor, as I mentioned, of civil society at the University Of Maryland. What does a professor of civil society teach? I'm fascinated by that title.

Barber: Well, he tries to teach an uncivil society, which is what we live in today, unfortunately, that civility and citizen relations and civic institutions at the local level are the foundation of Democracy. And that if we want to have a successful Democracy, whether here or in Turkey or in Casablanca, Morocco, we have to build a foundation of civility which is rooted in mutual civic respect, the work and participation of citizens.

So we teach courses about Democratic theory in practice, the history of political thought, American government, foreign governments, all around issues of citizenship, civility, and Democracy.

Tavis: I was just reviewing a book the other day that I'd read some years ago, and came across my desk again by an author named Thomas Lacona. He's calling for, in this book, a values education curriculum in our schools. I raise that only because I wonder whether or not you think that this kind of discourse, these kinds of classes about living in a civil society, given your point that we live in an uncivil world, ought to be required, or we certainly, if not requiring it, ought to encourage more students and more dialogue on college campuses about living in a civil society. Or is that too much of a pipe dream?

Barber: No, I don't think it's a pipe dream. On the contrary, Tavis, I think they ought to be, that such courses need to be taught in our schools, in our colleges, and maybe in the White House, as well.

Tavis: Interesting. Let me ask you to take me back to five years ago, when you decided to, in the wake of 9/11, create this thing called Interdependence Day, which now travels every September twelfth, the day after 9/11, to various parts of the globe. Tell me about this idea that you came up with five years ago.

Barber: Well, Tavis, what happened is after 9/11, I realized, and a lot of Americans realized, that we do live, like it or not, in a world that is deeply interdependent. Meaning that everything that happens here is affected by the rest of the world, and everything we do here affects the rest of the world. We're no longer nineteenth century sovereign nations surrounded by frontiers and oceans who can go our own way. Every job, every dollar, every disease, every technology, has an impact throughout the world.

We are interdependent. That's not an aspiration, it's simply a fact. And 9/11 proved that even national security is not something that we can handle by ourselves here in the United States. So the question was, can we, could we, establish on September 12, the day after September 11, a day on which it would be possible for Americans and others around the world to consider the alternatives to national independence? The alternatives to a war on terrorism? The alternatives to unilateralism? The alternatives to trying to go it alone?

I would love it if America could go it alone, but it can't. The question is, what kinds of cooperative strategies are demanded by the real challenges of interdependence? And we set this day, every year, on September 12, to bring together people from around the world in a different world capital to consider the alternatives to independence, and the realities of interdependence.

Tavis: So this year, on the fifth anniversary, as I mentioned moments ago while our American brothers and sisters were commemorating 9/11 here, we were on the other side of the world in Morocco, in Casablanca specifically, in a Muslim nation, no less, five years later, talking about 9/11. Tell me why you chose a Muslim country, Morocco, this year.

Barber: Well last year, as you know, we had been in Paris, the year before in Rome. And the first year, we'd actually been in Philadelphia, the site of the Declaration of Independence, but the origin of our Declaration of Interdependence, which we promulgated that year. But we felt it was time to move out of the western hemisphere, out of Europe, into Africa, into the Muslim world, into the Arab world, and bring the idea of interdependence, a constructive interdependence, to people who in fact themselves know very well what that means.

And Morocco, I think, was a particularly terrific choice, because as you know, Tavis, from our experience there, Morocco is a Sufi Islamic nation. It's Arab, it's Berber. The old Berber tribes are there. It is Islamic, but it's very different than the kind of Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia. The Sunni-Shi'ite split is not a problem there. They have a version of Islam that is rooted in music, in tolerance, in openness.

There are Jewish members of the government there. We had, at our Monday memorial for 9/11, we had the Jewish rabbi of Casablanca, the leader of the Jewish community. We had a Sufi Muslim from Jerusalem with us. We had the Minister of Islamic Affairs, Mr. Abbadhi, Minister of Islamic Affairs, Mr. Abbadhi, (sp?) there with us. We had an extraordinary religious dialogue which the Ford Foundation helped bring to the world, in order to show that it is possible, even in the Islamic world, particularly in the Islamic world, to conduct the kind of civil discourse among peoples, among religions, that we so desperately need.

Tavis: To your point, there was great conversation about that. One particular conversation comes to mind, only because I saw, not only because, in part because I saw a moment ago our director, Jonathan, put a picture on the screen of one of the conversations featuring the Princeton intellectual, Cornell West. A part of a conversation about faith and about how religion is, in fact, at the moment, part of the conflict that we grapple with in the world today, but doesn't have to be.

Talk to me about how you think we get to having a civil conversation about religion when as you and I both know, religion seems to be these days at the center - or differences in faith, oftentimes, seem to be at the center of the crises, not just here but indeed around the globe.

Barber: Well, one way we did it was to start with a blunt reality. We didn't just pretend that religion's a 'because thing.' We acknowledged that religion is the source of differences, the source of conflict, even the source of hatred and war, as well as a potential source of unity, a potential source of harmony, a potential source of global ecumenical harmony. And we tried to look at what it is that made religion divisive, as well as unitary.

Professor Cornell West, a distinguished academic from Princeton University, but also a great American, was there and talked about those issues. Lord Biku Parekh from the House of Lords in India, who is a Hindu, talked about it. We had the Minister of Islamic Affairs. And I think what we agreed is that a lot of what this is about is how people understand what they mean by their religion.

There is a narrow conception of religion that divides and keeps us apart. People kill in the name of their love of God. But clearly, the love of God, whether it's a Hindu god, whether it's an Islamic god, whether it's a Jewish god, whether it's a Christian god, killing in the name of a loving god seems to be a deep contradiction in terms. And the question is, can we bring the love of God to extend to a love of humankind that allows us to live together with our different religions, rather than to make war in the name of those religions?

Tavis: One of the things that struck me, sitting in one of the gatherings, and I've been to places all around the globe and from time to time had this kind of revelation, which is that it's fascinating and wonderful for everyday people, as Sly Stone would say, to come together in rich, deep, and meaningful dialogue. It is quite another to get nation states, to get leaders, to have this dialogue. And it's never lost on me when I'm in one of these rooms, and I'm reminded that humanity still matters, that most of us still believe in this thing called humanity.

So much so that we can come together again as everyday people and dialogue. But the leaders of so many nations have difficulty doing that. How do you juxtapose those two things?

Barber: Well, Tavis, it's a sad divide between the conversation we had among Jews, Hindus, Christians, Muslims in Casablanca, and the kind of lack of dialogue that sometimes goes on in Washington or at the United Nations. I read a couple of days ago, you probably did too, that President Bush, in arguing that America could not stay with Common Rule Three of the Geneva Convention, that it calls for policies that do not outrage human dignity.

That's what rule three says. And he said, 'I don't understand what that means, outraging human dignity? That means lots of, there are too many different interpretations. We can't accept a definition like that. Now when the President of the United States doesn't understand what the meaning of outrage human dignity is, then we do have a deep problem. And of course, we know very well on the other side there are many people in the Hindu world among radical Hindu nationalists, in the Islamic world among radical Islamic nationalists.

Here in the United States, among radical Protestant fundamentalists, there are many people who don't seem to understand what it means to outrage human dignity. But it's my belief that not just the people who gathered in Casablanca, that extraordinary group that we had together, but also the wider population. And remember, on Monday night after our interfaith dialogue, we went to a concert in which thousands of young Moroccans were drawn, by among other things, a Ugandan rapper named Abd Al Malik.

A beautiful young man who sang - he rapped, he didn't just sing - in French about the possibilities of dialogue in an angry, difficult world. And I wanna remind you he had this wonderful phrase he used in one of his rap songs. He said, we are always saying, 'It's not my fault. It's the other's.' (speaks in French) He said, 'It's the others.' It's always the others. We're always blaming the others.

And he said, 'It's time we took it back on ourselves,' and said, 'It starts with us.' And that's true for Americans, it's true for Moroccans, it's true for Syrians, it's true for the President of the United States.

Tavis: I gotta run; I got Jamie Lee Curtis standing by. Let me ask you right quick, though, before I let you run, since you are a professor of civil society, how you sense that we are doing five years later on the question of civil liberties in America. We sacrificing too much?

Barber: I don't think we have yet learned the full lesson of 9/11, which was not just a lesson of hatred and how much of the world despises the United States. Not to our doing, but because of the divisions in the world. But we have not learned that we cannot overcome that hatred and that division without the cooperation and collaboration of the world. Interdependence is our reality. We have to learn to make a constructive interdependence. We have to do that in our schools, in our jobs, in the marketplace, but we also have to do it in Washington, DC.

Tavis: The founder of Interdependence Day, professor at the University Of Maryland and professor of civil society, Benjamin Barber. Professor Barber, nice to have you on. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you.

Barber: Great to talk to you. Thanks, Tavis.

Tavis: My pleasure. Up next, actress and best-selling children's author, Jamie Lee Curtis. Stay with us.