Defending the humanity of humanity

It is a great pleasure to be among you once again. Coming here – to Switzerland, to Sirnach, to the compound at Bazenheid and our good friends there – is for me to return to a kind of sanctuary.
    Ours is a fractured nation, generously populated with good people but severely damaged by a leadership class that has no notion of shared humanity and so is indifferent to the commonweal because it remains bent on domination at home and abroad.
    I come this time to talk about precisely the question of our shared humanity. We touched on this matter last spring, when I asked among you, “Who are we? What does it mean to be ‘we’”? Now I will consider this more deeply to discuss with you “Defending the humanity of humanity.” This is the title of my talk today. And I am immediately struck.
    One must begin any such discussion with mention of the Gaza crisis, or – with the escalating violence in the West Bank, a topic Cara will take up – the wider Palestine crisis. These events are of world-historical magnitude. They challenge any idea of humanity we may have until now held without much consideration – as truths we have held to be self-evident, as we Americans would say. That seems to be over now. It is as if an era in the human story has ended, and we enter upon one that requires us to think again, maybe for the first time since the 1945 victories, when we looked back upon the wreckage of the 1930s and 1940s and asked, where is our humanity? It is possible, on the other hand, that we must look all the way back to the Enlightenment as we ask what we mean by our common humanity. The events that lead us to this point are diabolic, something close to sheer evil. And how strange it is that the nation that leads us to this point represents the first half of what we commonly call “Judeo–Christian civilization.”

The task: To restore
common humanity

I am avoiding the term “tragic” as I refer to the Palestine crisis because in the classical definition of tragedy the tragic figure learns things about himself after passing through a crucible. We will have to see whether humanity will learn from the depths to which Zionist Israel has already begun to drag humanity. If the human community learns nothing from this, as the leadership of the Western powers proposes, we will continue on after this crisis ends just as we were before it. And we will have no right to the term “tragic”. Our task, the task that brings us together, is to begin the work – to wage another war, I would also say – in the cause of restoring our common humanity. This is a war against the indifference various forms of power incessantly encourage us to cultivate. To wage this war against power means learning from the crisis that defines our time – that makes this a world-historical moment – and then proceeding in a new direction. It would be perverse to suggest there is anything positive or good to be had from the Palestine crisis, but in the Greek tragedies new truths are achieved, and the characters in the plays are transformed by a new connection with the truth, a connection previously obscured.
    In the course of my time here I will have numerous things to say about the question I raise today, and I cannot say all of them at once. I have divided my reply to this question, how to defend the humanity of humanity, into two parts. One of these concerns what I will call our public selves, or our civic selves. Here I am thinking of public space, the institutions available to us through which to wage the war I just mentioned – the war against power in defence of our common humanity. And then there is the dimension of this problem that must concern each of us as individuals. Defending the humanity of humanity, I mean to say, is in many large and important ways a question of individual psychology and so imposes itself upon each of us a psychological task. Each of us must consider what defending humanity’s humanity requires of us at once with others and within ourselves individually. “What must we do?” This is, in short, the question.

Post-democracies
with broken institutions …

Today I will focus primarily on the first of my replies, The question of public space and institutions. There is too much that is worthwhile to say in one lecture about the thinking and acting we must do in defence of humanity’s humanity and so I will leave this for another lecture.
    As I have mentioned in various of my published commentaries, the Palestine crisis confronts us with a very bitter reality. This is the reality that as our democracies have devolved into “post-democracies” – the kindest term I have for our shared decline – we find that none of the institutions through which we thought we could speak any longer function in this way.
    In the American case, the institutions that are supposed to represent the popular will are more or less broken. We have no way of expressing our objections to US support for Zionist Israel’s genocide – no way that makes any difference, I mean to say.
    The majority of people in the West favour world peace, not war, to take another example. Surveys prove this. The majority of Germans favour co-existing, mutually beneficial relations with Russia. But in these and many other such cases, What the citizenry favours does not matter to those conceiving of and executing policy. This circumstance may vary in severity from one post-democratic nation to another, but I have the firm impression that what I describe as the American case is more or less similar in most or all of the nations of Europe.
    It is as if the citizens of the Western post-democracies were unaware of this condition before the events of last 7 October and all that followed until the West’s support of the apartheid state suddenly pushed this reality in our faces. I think for many of us this is indeed the case. This presents the citizens of our post-democracies with individual choices, as he or she considers how to respond to these institutional lapses, and, as I just suggested, I am eager to address these.

… and their revival

Here I want to turn our question another way and think about institutions. Given the failure of our domestic institutions, and the craven indifference to our aspirations and preferences among those who purport to lead us, I propose we think about multilateral institutions, chiefly but not only the United Nations, and suggest that it is by way of a revival of these institutions that we find the most promising means of defending the humanity of humanity.
    There is an extensive debate concerning whether ours is an age during which the nation-state is fated to pass into history, and I consider this an interesting discourse, but I will leave it aside for now. I am concerned with the viability and potential effectiveness of what we call “the multilaterals” after many years during which they have been neglected, undermined, commandeered by the United States and its Western allies.

Human rights

Let us consider at this point the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, known inevitably as the UDHR among those who insist on polluting language with acronyms. The UN General Assembly advanced The Declaration in Paris on 10 December 1948, just three years and two months after the UN was formally established. Here is Article 1 of the Declaration. It is short and suitably to the point:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Let’s pause for a moment, for a bit of enlightening fun, and try to imagine any group of world leaders speaking in such terms today. This brief exercise gives us an idea of just where we are today in the matter of defending humanity’s humanity. There are 30 Articles in the UN Declaration, all of them brief, some only one sentence.

Article 6:

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

And some remarkably pertinent to the crisis that defines our time.

Article 15:

Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

 Again, it is interesting to reflect on how very far we have come, and in the wrong direction, from the time when this was written. It gives us a good idea of the work we have before us. And then, resisting the obvious causes for discouragement with which we live, we can remind ourselves that the Declaration was drafted in direct response to the catastrophes that led to the Second World War and implied in every syllable of it a belief in humanity’s shared capacity to right the wrongs that had so recently come close to destroying it.

Manifestations of power

Very soon after the UN’s founding the United States, in pursuit of the global hegemony it decided was its right after the 1945 victories, set about subverting the high purpose that the community of nations shared when they convened to found the UN. This corruption of purpose is now common knowledge and is something close to complete. The gross manipulation in recent years of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the OPCW, is but one of very many examples. Maybe you will remember the statement of John Bolton, an odious man the second Bush Administration preposterously appointed as its ambassador to the UN to the effect that it would make no difference if the top ten floors of the Secretariat in New York were removed. It would make no difference.
    O.K. But let us not miss this: America’s determination to prolong its global primacy has led the world to another point of danger wherein violence and lawlessness have reached catastrophic proportions not unlike those of the 1930s and 1940s. We should see the Palestine crisis from this perspective: It is without question among the most egregious manifestations of American power in all of history, but it is of a piece with the rise of Fascism, the Holocaust and the Atomic bombings of 1945 – and for that matter Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the rest.
    The US is now generally recognised, according to various surveys, as the primary cause of global disorder. And it is in response to this, direct response, that we find new and very important efforts to reconstruct the “global commons” that the founding of the United Nations represented. Let us consider together a few of these.

Restoring the “global commons”

Just a few years ago a number of nations, all of them Non-Western, formed a group advocating a return To the UN Charter as the basis of international law and the conduct of UN member states. This was not a very large group, and, as will be obvious, this group has not made a significant mark In and of itself. It is the intent I wish to draw to your attention. The members of this group included, among others, Russia, China, India, Brazil, and I think South Africa. We know from things stated at the time that these nations acted in response to the wild disorder occurring as the US advanced its now-infamous “international rules-based order,” a misnomer if ever there was one. I recall when Moscow and Beijing issued their Joint Statement on International Relations Entering a New Era, in February 2022, that is was very clear they did so in part because They had become genuinely frightened that the disorder of “the rules-based order” had become a grave danger to global stability. I still consider the Joint Statement the most significant political document to be made public in this century. We now speak familiarly of an emerging “new world order,” one worthy of the term. And in the years since the Joint Statement, we have seen the markedly rising influence of organizations such as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. We should understand these developments as of a piece with the small group calling for the restored primacy of the UN Charter and the Sino–Russian initiative. When we see them in this way, they provide us with a pole with which to reshape our thinking.
    I will propose now that we must push aside the waves of propaganda that inundate us daily – anti-Russian, anti-Chinese, altogether anti-the non-West – while also setting aside what objections we may have that the forms of government we find among non-Western nations do not match ours:
    Our forms of government, after all, do not any longer match what we think they are ours any longer. And then we can recognise that these efforts I describe very briefly are at bottom in the cause of the validity and purpose of multilateral institutions and altogether the betterment of humanity – in our terms today in defence of humanity’s humanity. I know all about the charge that these thoughts are hopelessly idealistic, a token of sheer naïvete, and of misplaced trust. They reflect what the French call angélisme, it will be said. These are the thoughts of those who cannot see forward and do not matter to me at all. Why to put this matter to rest, do none of the Western post-democracies, rather than mouthing empty platitudes, stand squarely for a restoration of the principles embodied in institutions such as the UN and expressed in the UN Charter?

A world based on ethics, international law and multilateral institutions

Just the other day Jeffrey Sachs, the scholar, author, and prolific commentator, whose work has appeared in Current Concerns and its associated journals, privately circulated a paper he calls, “Achieving peace in the new multipolar age.” It goes straight to our point today and so gives me a graceful way to conclude my remarks. Sachs notes America’s declining share of global GDP, its overstretched military, and its perennial budget crisis, and concludes, “We are already in a multipolar world.” What kind of world will this be, he then asks, and he then outlines three possibilities: One is continued great-power rivalry. The second is, as he puts it “a precarious balance of power.” It is the remaining idea that he favours and that interests me.
    “The third possibility, scorned in the past 30 years by US leaders but our greatest hope, is true peace among the major powers”. Sachs writes. “This peace would be based on the shared recognition that there can be no global hegemon and that the common good requires active cooperation among the major powers”. “There are several bases of this approach,” Sachs continues, “including idealism (a world based on ethics), and institutionalism (a world based on international law and multilateral institutions).”
    I love this observation for its combination of things we do not commonly think of together. In so many words, Sachs is writing about a world order in which humanity’s humanity is recognised as paramount and defended.
    My thought today is that we can and should look beyond the failings of our institutions and those who purport to lead us to exactly such a possibility and count it just what Sachs calls it, “our greatest hope.” Sachs mentions idealism as part of what is necessary to make a world wherein it is possible to raise high humanity’s humanity. This especially pleases me because I have been called, disapprovingly and more times than I can count, an idealist as against a realist. Yes! I can now say. In this I am not alone. As if to reinforce the point, Eva-Maria handed me A book after we arrived the other day. Its two authors are Richard Falk, who I know and count a friend, and Hans von Sponeck, both of whom served in the course of their careers as high UN officials.
    They call the book, “Liberating the United Nations”, With the interesting subtitle, “Realism with Hope”. This text is part history and part prognosis. Falk and von Sponeck begin as I have, noting the unfortunate extent to which the UN is, as they put it, “Less relevant as a political actor today than at any time since its establishment in 1945.” They then proceed through a lengthy account of how this state of affairs came to be, and I admire their unsparing honesty as they do so. Then they rotate their gaze and tell us,

We believe that there will arise a new movement for revitalizing democracy, a stronger UN, and a more benevolent global leadership, and we write with faith that in the end prudence, rationality, empathy, expanded time horizons, and mechanisms facilitating cooperation and imposing accountability will emerge.

I take issue with only two things in this wonderful statement of purpose and expectation. No need for the future tense when looking for a movement for reform at the UN: This is already evident, and these two long-respected professionals are part of it.
    Equally, however high we may hold faith as we look at life and find our ways through it, the world Falk and von Sponeck anticipate will not come about by way of faith. It will come about as a result of what each of us determines to do to bring it about in our common defence of the humanity of humanity. And it is these I will take up in a second lecture. •

*   Patrick Lawrence is a long-standing foreign correspondent, mainly for the “International Herald Tribune”. He is also a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His penultimate book is “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century”, Yale 2013. His new book “Journalists and Their Shadows” was published by Clarity Press in 2023. His website is patricklawrence.us. Support his work via patreon.com/thefloutist.