In the ‘real world’, national and personal interests are normally at the heart of decision-making. We are almost always run largely by ‘interest’ – and then we dress up the result in the best clothes possible: humanitarian or philanthropic. For example, Britain had good reasons for entering the Second World War: to honour her treaty obligations to Poland, invaded by the Nazis. But it had also been a fixed star of British foreign policy over centuries never to let any one continental power to dominate Europe. Our motives are almost always mixed. But perhaps we could broaden the context of ‘our interests’.
Europe, and the United States, indeed ‘the rich world’ faces a flood of would-be immigrants from the poorer parts of the world. We wrestle with this aspect of globalization, improve our ‘defences’, talk of reinforcing barriers. We strengthen and improve our abilities to intercept this flood of humanity in search of a better life. In the US, the National Guard are mobilized to tighten the border with Mexico. In the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, naval and air patrols are reinforced to stem the flood of ‘boat people’ from North Africa.
But there’s no getting away from the awkward fact that we live in one world. Problems unsolved anywhere will come to visit us wherever we are, if we don’t deal with them. Poverty and inequality in a world of easier travel and communications inevitably produce massive migrations, and we cannot build walls high enough to protect ourselves.
For nearly seven weeks through the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, several hundreds of people from all continents and many backgrounds will be meeting in the Initiatives of Change Caux conference centre in Switzerland, on the theme of ‘Globalizing Integrity – Personalizing Integrity’. This year, 2006, the centre marks its 60th anniversary.
The invitation reads in part: ‘Integrity - personal and public - liberates forces for global change. Whenever anyone, prompted by compassion and conscience, faces one fragment of their hypocrisy and takes honest steps of individual transformation, that action communicates to others. It kindles an inspiration for initiatives to bring justice and dignity. This integrity could be the energy for social transformation in the 21st century - a growing momentum of people who become agents of change and reconciliation, forging relationships of trust across the world’s divides.’
‘Morality is integral to the ecology of hope because it locates social change at a level at which we can make a difference through the acts we do, the principles by which we live, and the relationships we create,’ writes Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,* a great Jewish thinker – who spoke in Caux for the 50th anniversary of the centre. Sacks underlines the importance of what Initiatives of Change calls ‘honest conversations’. He says, ‘Conversation – respectful, engaged, reciprocal, calling forth some of our greatest powers of empathy and understanding – is the moral form of a world governed by the dignity of difference.’ He calls for a global covenant, ‘in which the nations of the world collectively express their commitment not only to human rights but also to human responsibilities, and not merely political, but also an economic, environmental, moral and cultural conception of the common good, constructed on the twin foundations of shared humanity and respect for diversity.’
May this summer and these encounters forward this covenant and this ecology of hope. Optimism, Sacks concludes, is the belief that things will get better, whereas ‘Hope is the faith that, together, we can make things better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one.’
(*The Dignity of Difference – how to avoid the clash of civilizations, by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Continuum, London, 2002)
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