World Citizens Party: Some Ethical Actions
Presentation to
the Ethical Society of
Thank you for inviting me in your presence. You have embodied a strong tradition of
ethical action and I would like to share with you some views concerning the World
Citizens Party and the ethical actions its origins and planned future actions represent. In
doing so, I would like to create a context, using the history of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights as an example, because that history holds some lessons for us, in the
the search to realize the ends sought by the World Citizens Party.
The idea of human rights is old—very old, indeed. But the current public version of it
began during World War II, as Western leaders of that War
sought to find a source of
inspiration for their war effort. In short, leaders (particularly Franklyn D. Roosevelt and
Winston Churchill, in this case), convinced that their previously announced purposes for
which the War was being fought were not enough, sought to invite the type of collective,
world-wide inspiration they thought necessary to ensure victory. So, as has been the case
when human communities—at different times and places—have faced crises (one has but
to look at the Magna
Carta, the Declaration of the Rights
of Man, and the Journey of
King Melinda of
restatement of the spirit.
The first public remark in search of this
restatement came in
message from President Roosevelt to Congress. In that message, he hinged the purpose
of the war to what has now come to be called the four freedoms: freedom of speech and
expression, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. On August
14, 1941, there was a complementary declaration called the Atlantic Charter, which was
a joint effort by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. That Charter defined
the purposes of the War as those of pursuing the abandonment of the use of force by all
nations, respecting the right of all peoples to choose their own governments, ensuring
“security for all,” improving labor standards, promoting economic advancement, and pro-
viding social security. Adding a pulse of immediacy, they promised that these
purposes would be realized “in our [their] time and generation.”
All of those who became aware of these purposes were spiritually mobilized for the
War, during the conduct of which vile and morally disfiguring assaults on human rights
took place. And yet, despite those assaults, despite the announced purposes of the War,
in the initial draft of the UN Charter, which the Great Powers completed in October 1944,
there was but a single reference to human rights, and that reference had to do with the
former
crisis: what was to be done to further the cause of human rights?
Between October 1944 and June 1945, when the UN Charter was adopted at the San
Francisco conference, some eight additional references to human rights were added to the
Charter. Those references varied from the inclusion of human rights as part of the
purposes and principles of the UN to the pledged obligation of states to take separate and
joint action to promote and protect those rights, and the creation of a Commission on
Human Rights—the very organ which sponsored the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. There was also the promise—and this was critical to the receiving of the sought
support for the bringing into being of the UN itself—to sponsor the drafting and adoption
of an international bill of human rights.
How were these changes achieved? Through the determined action of some small
States, including
through the redoubtable efforts of a number of non-governmental organizations, what we
today call civil society groups: labor unions, veterans organizations, agricultural bodies,
women’s associations, legal societies, as well as educational and religious institutions.
A third crisis developed in respect of the manner by which the commission to draft
the international bill of rights was to be constituted. Should it be peopled by independent
experts or by representatives of governments? It was decided that it should be composed
by representatives of governments, since those governments would find it more difficult
to repudiate the work of their own representatives than that of people who did not re-
present them, and civil society groups thought that they would be more effective in
influencing their respective governments than an independent group of experts. The
crises, in part, resolved itself, because members of the commission made a rediscovery.
As members of the drafting committee--such as Peng C. Chang
of
Roosevelt of the
of
they re-discovered that residing in each of them was a wider, richer self, one which was
not simply the representative of their respective governments, but the people of the
world. This is part of what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was designed to
teach or remind us—that to be fully human, an individual must have a self which is
part of a greater self we call humanity; and that to be for human rights is to be a citizen
not only of the country or county where one lives or was born, but of the world at large.
This is the meaning of the majestic non-discrimination clause of the Declaration that
invites our commitment to everyone, regardless of nationality, race, ethnicity, religion,
gender, social class, birth, language, or other status; those commitments include the right
to work, to a fair trial, to social security, to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,
to food, to associate, to medical care, to freedom of speech, to education, to nationality,
to housing, against torture, to freedom of movement and residence, and—among other
things—to a social and
international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in
the declaration can be fully realized. I repeat, because we rarely hear reference to Article
28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: to a social and international order in
which the rights and freedoms set forth in the declaration can be fully realized. We do not
now have that order of framework, so all the rights just mentioned are either non-existent
for most people or are seriously compromised.
And this brings me to the discussion of the World Citizens Party. Its founders believe
that, as during the times of the creation United Nations and the adoption of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, human communities are in crises—global warming,
degradation of the environment, increasing poverty, ethnic-racial-linguistic-national-
religious antagonisms, genocide weapons of mass destruction, economic insecurity, and
war—and that we need a continuing restatement of the spirit to respond, effectively, to
them. Instrumentally, we also need the support of civil society groups, in particular, as
well as human beings, in general, who will affirm the indivisible links between the
individual and the human self, and the fact that, implicit in the idea of human rights, is
the principle which contends that the community of human beings is morally prior to the
society of states. Hence countries, in formulating their policies, should first think not in
terms of how a contemplated course of conduct agrees with national security (national
interest) but the extent to which it comports with the concerns of community of all human
beings, including those of the country devising the policy. In short, the most important
focus of political leaders should not be the self-chosen claims of national security, but the
collectively understood human security.
As you know, the culture of the national security state, with which we have been
dealing since the seventeenth century, espouses the opposite principle, although it gives
lip service to the human. It encourages the focus on things local, teaches that ultimate
loyalty is to the nation-state, and teaches the view that those outside national borders,
those who are not nationals or citizens are unlike, may even be strangers (notice the word
alien), have interests that are inimical, and are, at all times, potential enemies. So, while
it is illegal to build bombs in one’s kitchen, intending to kill humans who are one’s
neighbors, it is legal (and even heroic) to build nuclear weapons plant intended to build
bombs kill humans who happen to live across the borders and even the societies in which
those people live; it is also illegal to poison another’s milk, but legal to poison the rivers,
lakes, the skies—the very ecological sources which make milk possible; and it is illegal
to organize to kill people across the street it is legal and morally praiseworthy to kill them
across the ocean; this is an ethics based on geography, not humanity.
Let us take this organized violence we call war, to illustrate, why we have organized
the World Citizens Party. Albert Camus reminded us that while we have claimed that
such violence is necessary, we have also said it is also morally inexcusable. We have
gone about our lives, however, focusing on its necessity, while forgetting that we should,
were we truly morally responsible, devise means to make it unnecessary. So, people have
consoled themselves in the name of history (national security) with the thought that war
is necessary and have by so doing, added murder to murder to the point of making that
history nothing but a continuous “violation of every thing in [human beings] which
protests against injustice.”
The creation of the World Citizens Party was sponsored by the felt obligation to
make the inexcusable unnecessary, to protest against injustice, and to deal effectively
with those problems—such as global warming, genocide, environmental degradation,
and increasing poverty—which cannot be solved by local or national governments alone.
To do so, it must try to help bring into being the social and international order, which can
ensure the realization of the rights individuals human beings and groups enjoy. A first
step in that direction is to help educate humanity about its common fate, promote broad
collaborations and interest aggregation among groups, to mobilize the moral sentiments
and sensibilities of human beings to sustain the needed social transformation of societies,
and to ensure the common security of all human beings and societies, through the earliest
possible achievement of a democratic federal government at the global level.
Political parties are concerned with raising monies, distributing literature, developing
policy positions, training volunteers, recruiting leaders—potential and actual--and in
electing some to public office. But they also, at their best, are moral agents, conferring on
human beings a sense of moral coherence, grant moral identity, solidarity and purpose.
They can also help build a sense of human completion, not to be understood as a finality
of becoming but a more comprehensive condition of being. This is the basis of the
spiritual power of political parties, even when some with narrower aims seek to subvert
their purposes. Seeking peace and security (including the abolition or the death of war),
through a democratic federal government at the global level peace and security, is a
grand moral purpose, and it requires a political party whose moral and social compass is
co-extensive with that purpose. The World Citizens Party seeks to be such a party.
We have a right to peace, from the standpoint of history. That history is not so much
what the books generally share, but the quiet murmur, the unspoken pain, the defeated
hope, the murdered innocents. It is a right implicit in the promise to save succeeding
generations from the scourge of war and a sacred responsibility to honor that promise,
in part meeting in honesty of the self-sameness that “enemy soldiers” in the field who
come to know as dying men shout for their mothers or some other, deeply loved.
The task of the World Citizens Party is not an easy one. As was the case in the
creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there will be betrayals, questions
about representing the peoples of the world versus the nation-state, agonizing confront-
ations about loyalty, patriotism, and attacks on principles of human dignity and universal
responsibility. But, to paraphrase the poet Shelley, with the proper moral purpose--
We can suffer woes which seem infinite;
We can forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
We can defy powers, which seem omnipotent;
And we can love and bear, and hope, ‘til hope
Creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates…
The open moral wound we call war, an institution whose practice requires that we, as
some juncture, violate every norm of human rights, is a continuing wreck of the hope that
brought us the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That wound and the crises areas
we earlier identified urge us to invite your support the World Citizens Party as it seeks a
to extend the “restatement of the spirit,” including what Shostakovich (in our coming
music today) sought—the creation of meeting places for human imaginings.
Let us imagine and help build a world democratic federal government to prevent and
abolish war, to honor the elementary norms or imperatives we call human rights, and
address—in common with other human beings—the other daunting social challenges we
collectively face.