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1997 Conference |
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Morning session, Part II (Friday, September 5, 1997)
OSCAR ARIAS SANCHEZ
I'll give the floor now to Mr Gareth Evans. Mr Evans is the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Australia, and he is also very well-known for his role in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia and also for founding the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum known as APEC. Mr Evans.
GARETH EVANS
Thank you, Chairman. When it comes to peace and security and protection against political violence, this century has been very tough on optimists. There is a lot of optimism around at the beginning of the century after years of comparative peace and unprecedented economic advances but, as so many people have already said at this Forum, the 20th century proved to be the most ugly and destructive in all human history, with armed conflicts taking the lives of more than 100 million people and political violence responsible for the deaths of another 170 million people. With the end of the cold war, hopes rose again that the madness was over, that not only could we stop worrying about the nuclear holocaust, but that a new era of co-operation between the Great Powers on the Security Council would at last allow the United Nations to come into its own, not just as a voice but as a force for peace. But since the fall of the Berlin Wall more than 4 million people have been killed in violent conflict throughout the world and worldwide there are currently more than 30 million refugees or internally displaced persons. The initial success of the UN, reborn, against Iraq and in Cambodia, was followed rapidly by demoralising failures in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda. Should there be another breach of international law and morality as outrageous as was Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, I guess it might again be possible to quickly mobilise an international response. But, when it comes to intrastate conflicts, occurring within rather than across national borders - which is a far more prevalent source of death and destruction as we approach the new millennium - the international community just keeps shuffling and looking away. I don't blame the UN leadership for that. The UN can't act when its member-states don't want to act. So what can we do in the international community to shake ourselves free from the habits of millennia past, to break out once and for all from this awful, endlessly recurring pattern of deadly conflict, and to regenerate some capacity to act collectively and co-operatively for peace? Well, I had eight years of experience as Australia's Foreign Minister from 1988 until democracy did its work last year, trying with various degrees of success to build international coalitions, to make things happen in the Asia-Pacific region and occasionally in the wider global community. I say varying degrees of success advisedly, because there were certainly many failures and barely half successes, but I have to say I was very comforted by the generous description of a slightly less than totally impossible failure in Indonesia - this coming from a man, it must be remembered for the record, who used to call me the world's greatest hypocrite on matters of human rights. So I was deeply touched, but I also say building coalitions very advisedly, because a country the size of Australia, 18 million people in a world of 5.5 billion, simply hasn't got the economic or military clout to go it alone, and be taken seriously like other small and medium-size guys around the place. Our only power is the power of persuasion, to be creative and imagine solutions, and be effective and argue and organise for them. So some of the bigger things that we tried to do were things like bringing peace to Cambodia, building a new regional and security architecture in the Asia-Pacific, working with France in particular, the stock mining and oil drilling in the Antarctic, bringing the chemical weapons convention to a conclusion, getting the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty done better, and also trying to achieve some fundamental changes in the structure and the functioning of the UN, particularly so far as its peace functions were concerned.
What I learned from all those sorts of efforts, which had varying degrees of success, was that if things are to happen, if the international community is to become mobilised around an issue, and if major change for the better is to occur, then it's only going to be as the consequence of things coming together in harmonious conjunction at three quite different levels: at the level of ideas, at the level of strategies, and at the level of implementation. At the level of ideas, what I am talking about is a measure of intellectual consensus among decision makers and those who influence them, about basic principles, about what's worth doing, worth attempting, and why. At the level of strategies, I'm simply talking about carefully thought through specific practical proposals for a treaty on this, or a structure or reform on that, or a peace plan somewhere else. At the level of implementation, I'm simply talking about hands-on activity to get results, a lot of it simply old-fashioned, diplomatic argument and persuasion by ministers and officials - a good deal more of it these days, it must be acknowledged, is second-track, third-track activity by non-governmental organisations working away at their governments, at their publics.
I'm not saying anything at all original here, but sometimes the obvious needs saying. And, in particular, I thought, as a practising politician, that is worth saying to this group that ideas do matter. This forum and other groups and gatherings like it - diverse in makeup, transient in existence - may not be able to add much value when it comes to crafting detailed strategies, or implementing them in practice, but we can certainly generate support for ideas of a kind that will really help to make the world a better and safer place. Practising politicians in most countries are usually thought to be about as receptive to ideas as dogs are to cats, but my own strong view - for what it's worth - is that ideas are just as powerful motivators and stimulators of human action, including political and diplomatic action, now as they have ever been. Without big sustaining, organising ideas, we tend to flounder and lose our way. We have difficulty in even finding a common vocabulary at international meetings, we can't persuade our publics, we drift into impotence or worse. So let me suggest - necessarily very superficially in the time I have - some important sustaining ideas which I believe must gain or regain international currency if we are to break out of that cycle of deadly recurring human conflict, which seems otherwise distant, to haunt us into the new millennium.
First of all, there is the idea of community. We all use the expression in talking about the international community, or this or that regional community, but we have to mean it. It's not a matter of sentimentally asserting that we're all brothers and sisters under the skin, and hoping that such a perception will somehow banish conflict. Family feuds are, after all, often the ugliest of all. But it is a matter of getting a better understanding, not least in places like the US Congress, that what happens almost anywhere can have an impact almost anywhere else, whether it's health pandemics of the kind that Joshua Lederberg was talking about, spreading internationally from very small beginnings and faraway places, whether it's the fact that a failed state in central Africa or central Asia or anywhere else can become a haven for international terrorists or criminals, whether it's the fact that drugs grown in Burma do in fact kill people in Europe and north America and Australia. In the age of the Internet, of mass travel, of globalised business and the creeping universalisation of the English language, it really is easier than it has ever been before in human history to give content to the idea of a single human community, existing across cultural and ethnic and national lines. And I believe that the task for international opinion leaders is to ram that message home at every available opportunity. Its acceptance may not be a sufficient condition for the avoidance of deadly conflict, but it is close to being a necessary one.
The idea of community needs to be accompanied by a new way of thinking about international security, which might be called co-operative security. Three particular ideas about security have had a lot of currency in recent decades. One of them is collective security, essentially a military idea that a group of states should renounce force among themselves and come to each other's aid in the event of an attack. Another is common security, promulgated in particular by Olof Palme, the core theme of which is to achieve security with others rather than against them. More recently a fashionable concept has been the idea of comprehensive security, which holds that security is multidimensional in character, demanding attention not only to traditional political and diplomatic disputes, but also to factors such as economic underdevelopment, trade disputes, and human rights abuses.
The virtue of the idea of co-operative security seems to me that it effectively captures the essence of all three of those perhaps more familiar ideas and it also emphasises the process virtues of consultation, of reassurance, of transparency and prevention. There may be some continued attraction in a little residual realpolitik, for example in preserving a stable power balance in East Asia, but co-operative solutions to security problems, and by extension co-operative solutions to economic, environmental and other sensitive problems, are simply bound to be more productive, more durable, than confrontational responses. The third important idea is, I think, universal and indivisible human rights - not just any old claims to rights, but human rights that are culturally non-selective in their application and embrace economic and social and cultural rights with just as much fervour and relevance and resonance as the familiar political and civil rights with which Westerners are traditionally more preoccupied. There is a lot of debate these days, particularly in my part of the world, about how universal human rights fit in with so-called Asian values. The most robust answer I have heard in response to that issue, in fact comes from the deputy prime minister of Malaysia, N.W. Ibrahim, who said in a recent speech, and I quote him:
"If we in Asia want to speak credibly of Asian values, we too must be prepared to champion those ideals which are universal and which belong to humanity as a whole. It's altogether shameful," he says, "if ingenious, to cite Asian values as an excuse for autocratic practices and a denial of basic rights and liberties".
We in the West equally have to understand that nothing grates more patronisingly in Asian or African ears than to hear political and civil rights being promoted without any sense of the equal importance of economic and social rights. This habit of talking about political and civil rights as the only relevant rights is one into which Western political leaders slip all too effortlessly, all too regularly. On the particular question of democracy, I don't think there is anything intrinsically patronising at all in emphasising the virtues of democracy as a political system. After all, even the most authoritarian communist regimes appropriated the terminology of democracy. But the important thing is to do so in a way which emphasises that democracy, in the crucial sense of participation in the choice of one's government, is a subset of universal and indivisible human rights reflecting the worth and dignity of the individual. It's not a gift from the West to the benighted. The fourth sustaining idea that I think needs to be emphasised is the related one of legitimate intervention: that some so-called internal matters are legitimately everybody's business. There should be nothing sacrosanct about national borders when human rights and human security are at stake. Nobody, other than some white South Africans, had much difficulty in accepting this when the fight was being waged against apartheid. But that idea has become less fashionable since less overt forms of racism and other forms of conflict have moved to centre stage.
There is one section of the UN charter that may seem to elevate to pre-eminence claims of national sovereignty, but I believe it is strongly arguable that references to security in the UN Charter should be taken as extending to human security that can be put at risk by major internal as well as purely international conflict. Equally, and perhaps more obviously, the UN Charter obligation to protect human rights would appear to justify intervention when the most basic right of all, that of life, is being violated on a massive scale in intrastate conflict. I think an additional point worth making here is about group rights: this can be a very helpful way of dealing with a great many claims for self-determination by ethnic or national or religious groups. Those claims would be characterised as claims for the recognition or protection of group rights within the states rather than as necessarily amounting to challenges to state sovereignty. Understood in this way, external support for claims for group rights may well be seen as less confrontational and threatening and be less dangerous as a result.
The last idea I want to mention - probably the most important one of all - for which I think it is necessary to now build an international constituency, is the idea of prevention. How often do we say in our daily lives that prevention is better than cure? And how often do we ignore that principle in public and international affairs? How often do we misapply scarce resources by meeting huge bills for political disasters that could much more cheaply have been averted? For example when preventive diplomacy failed to prevent Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the dollar cost, leaving aside the human cost, of fighting the Gulf War for the UN coalition partners alone was 70 billion billion US dollars, and that's about ten times the annual cost for administering the United Nations and all its core related programs and organs. It was about 175 times the UN's total peacekeeping budget that year. And it was almost 7,000 times what the UN spent that year on preventive diplomacy. Successful prevention involves initiatives in many different dimensions. It means being better able to cope in the face of looming crisis by strengthening the preventive diplomacy role of the UN and many other organisations around the world. It means working on the underlying causes of conflict by giving new priority to the concept of peace building. It means, as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, arguing for the necessity and achievability not just of major reductions in the world's nuclear arsenals, but of their complete and outright elimination. Above all, prevention means educating new generations, and especially new generations of leaders, about both the sterility and the horror of deadly conflict, and how it might be prevented. All of us here have a responsibility in our own ways with our own audiences to carry forward that educative process - I hope with not only a common commitment, which I am sure we all have, to make the world a better place, but with a common bank of sustaining, readily communicable ideas. Thank you.
OSCAR ARIAS SANCHEZ
Thank you, Mr Evans. I offer the floor now to Bishop Belo. Bishop Belo shared the Nobel Peace Prize last years with José Ramos-Horta for his work towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in east Timor. He will be speaking in Italian.
BISHOP BELO
Mr Chairman, honourable guests, ladies and gentlemen, because of my poor English I will deliver my speech in Italian.
It is in history that we try to answer some of the questions that are faced by humankind. By these questions I mean those situations, and those events, that have an impact on cultural trends. Nowadays we are facing a major crisis. Our generation is not only approaching the end of this millennium, but what we are seeing also is chaos in the world around us. Our current generation is in fact losing the very foundations of values upon which we have built. It is not just one value or another as was the case in major historical events. Today what is at issue are values per se, and very often their existence, i.e. the existence of these values is not endorsed at all. Hans Jonas says these words: "I am frightened when I think about this situation around us. Today we have enormous powers - but it seems to me that all values have lost their meaning. In science the capacity of man has reached its climax, but that's only in science. Relativism has been everywhere around us, there are no well-founded values, no value seems to be strong enough to be permanent enough and this in fact is regression from the very meaning and purpose of life."
I notice here that we see subjectivism being promoted, and this subjectivism is then projected to all walks of our life, including international life. But within this context, within this crisis, there are three issues, three challenges that we need to face. The first challenge is economic. It is a result of the gap between the North and the South, which have been pursuing goals using two different speeds.
On the one hand, what we are seeing developing is the world of wealth as against the world of poverty and misery. At the same time nature is being exploited, human resources are being not only used but also misused, and all this has an impact on the environment. What is at stake is maximum profit for minimum cost and these two parameters are used as a basis for the further build-up of a neo-capitalist system that derives its behaviour from these foundations. The second problem was environmental, the third is the question of information and the information technology. Today it is very easy to communicate ideas and information. We all know that to know means also to be powerful, but very often this information is also controlled by economic and political powers - and information will always support the capitalisation of data which will reassess neo-capitalism but will repeat its mistakes and will reuse its structures. We should move from the problem of analysis to truly ethical questions. It is therefore important to focus on ethical and anthropological questions. Today's conscience needs to build on such values that will not be changed or eliminated. It is important to identify, to define all the problems, to look for a correct therapy. It is also important to respect all the diverse situations and expectations of peoples living in different parts of the world - all this in the name of equity.
This also is the basis of Emanuel Mounier, when he speaks about communitarianism. What is at stake is the need to bring together the pole of the individual and the pole of community. An individual should not think of himself only; each individual should remain open, should pursue a certain purpose in the future and should be also ready to accept all the values that are essential for a community. A community should be something tangible. It should be a diverse community, where one can live next to the other and where one also works for the benefit of everybody else in the community. This will then help to distribute all the assets available according to the merit and the needs of every individual.
I know that I am short of time and therefore I would like to focus now on some spiritual values and also on the hope that we are discussing here today. All religions should see to it that we have a form of solidarity built in the world that would lead to securing peace for the world of today. Religions at this time should be based on some of the fundamental principles we are talking about. Ten tasks or ten issues that could be summed up like this: the first is love for God, which is a guarantee of authenticity and stability of love for our neighbours. It is important that religious moments become a factor of unity and peace building in the world. All the errors, all the mistakes of the past should not be seen as something committed by religious leaders, or people who believed, who had some religion, but these mistakes were made by people who did not understand the very fundamentals of religion. Religion can enrich us but it can also be misused. What is important is that man has a purpose, has an intention, and no scientific research can generate this purpose.
Religious thinking, religious research, is extremely topical, extremely urgent, especially today, when this question of how we should live leads us to another question: that is, why do we live? Man is by nature restless, and very often he is full of nostalgia for something different, for something other. God is presence, something from which one cannot be alienated, something which supports our existence and something binding. Different religions that accompany churches on their way to the third millennium can play a very important role in the world today, which is characterised by materialism, by a lot of selfishness. On the basis of different cultures full of narcissism, individualism and other characteristics, religion must help us promote the feeling of openness, at the same time guaranteeing self-reliance for each of us, but we should always understand the transcendentalism of God. Is God within the framework of Abraham's faith - be it in Judaism, Christianity, Islam - the only creator, the only creator of the unique mankind? Our return to this transcendentalism should always respect the dignity of all other people.
In conclusion, I should like to say that reconciliation, co-operation and the very patient building of a constituency by dialogue is absolutely essential. We need to mobilise everybody, we need to change humankind to be able to cope with such threats as nuclear weapons, but not only for the bad, also for promoting some very fundamental human values. We are at a crossroads of history: to be or not to be? There is still a very dangerous possibility: we would be no more and yet we need to be more. And being more will also mean getting rid of all oppression. The question is whether we shall manage to be this "more" as I call it, or whether we shall not be at all. In other words, we need to get out of this pile of death, we need to make use of the operative capacity that is available to us for further development. To be more than we are or not to be at all.
Feelings of anxiety, anxiety of death, for example, create a culture of death, that leads to the destruction of authentic culture; instead an empty culture develops this idea of emptiness. In Moses we read: "I call Heaven and Earth to witness against you this day and I have set before you life and death". It is up to man to decide now what will be the best, not only for himself, but also for his offspring. There are certain rights that have not yet been born but are absolutely vital. Man is called upon to wake up, is called upon to get rid of the anaesthesia of non-values and to rise to greatness. He is responsible before God and before History. His conscience is then linked to the collective conscience. Hope is the soul of history and it is also the responsibility .
OSCAR ARIAS SANCHEZ
Thank you very much, Bishop Belo. As you are aware, Leila Shahid is not with us this morning, so our last panellist is Professor John Polanyi. Professor Polanyi is the recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and he is currently a professor of Chemistry at the University of Toronto.
JOHN POLANYI
Thank you, Mr Chairman, and I'd like also to thank the organisers of the meeting for including me in this remarkable gathering. I'm an oddity here, in that I am a scientist, with a lot of young people in my laboratory, who are waiting for me to finish my holiday in Prague and get back to work. I've listened attentively to the two previous speakers and been stirred by both of them. Gareth Evans spoke of the need for ideas and the power of ideas, and gave us an exciting ray of them. Bishop Belo spoke of values and did so with eloquence. And now I am going to talk not about the subject matter of science, but about what science is. And I am going to claim, following the previous two discussants, that science is of course an embodiment of ideas, but also an embodiment of values. And so let me start by saying where science came from. I think it's terribly important that we scientists do talk about what science is, where it comes from. Misunderstandings about the nature of science have lead to disastrous consequences. Where did science come from? Well, from the liberation of the intellect that took place five centuries ago and of which we see the fruits around us here in paintings and in buildings. The idea became evident that the Creator, in giving us free will, had also intended to that we exercise our intellect in support in that free will and so instead of the tree of knowledge being off limits as it was in the old testament it became desirable that we eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge and that gave results of a staggering sort, particularly evident to you here in the arts, but also evident in one particular art, which I think became the greatest art after that, and that was the art of science: an art which deals with shapes, an art which we think of when we are here in connection with Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler who worked a few kilometres away from here. Kepler thought of the shape of the orbit in which the planets move, and the shape that he came upon, and it was a dazzling moment, was the shape that we see in these lunettes, these windows around us here that the architect chose the ellipse. So the question is, how does science advance? My simple mind answers that it gradually persuades people that the shapes it has identified are shapes that one can readily believe to be part of creation. Just as we accept those shapes up there as being fitting, we accept the shapes that the physicists come upon. Now that sounds like a sort of flabby statement, but I think it's an important statement because what I am saying is that science advances by persuading and so I am saying just the same thing that Gareth Evans said in the realm of structuring a world in which we can hope to survive.
Science advances by persuading. There are no particular birthdays for scientific discoveries, because in fact what is happening is a sort of diminuendo of doubt and eventually reasonable people become persuaded of something and it becomes conventional to say it has been proven. But that is a very dangerous description, one that scientists unfortunately accepted because they found it very flattering, I suppose, or they were busy with their students in their laboratories and paid no attention. But to say that something is proven opens the way for a misunderstanding of science, namely that scientists are in possession of some sort of machinery of proof that is not available to other people who discuss other things. That is not true. Science is done by human beings, is subject to human error. Scientists must persuade other human beings and therefore use just the same thought processes. So, I wanted to move on from this to the dire consequences of casually accepting the notion that there is a machinery of proof. Those dire consequences take us from a period which in this paper I am presenting here I have called not the liberation of intellect, but the enslavement of intellect.
The Nazis, I hardly have to remind you, came up with some trashy science, which was a part of biology, they thought, and the communists came up with some trashy scientific history, a science of history. Now, the fact that those were bad science, that is not unusual, I've done a lot of bad science too. But the fateful moment came when they said that it was science and therefore it had been proven and therefore it could not be contested. If you want to contest that two and two equals four, you have no right to live, they said. Now, I know of two particles physicists in this audience, who will tell you that two particles and two particles don't in fact necessarily make four. And science requires that every new discovery is examined and re-examined. Science advances by questioning, not by stating that this fact has been proven and that you as a human being have no right to live if you contest it. So, it was that misunderstanding of what science is that led from a glorious period of the liberation of the intellect to a horrible period of the enslavement of the intellect, which had such dire effects around us here for decades and decades.
I have a third heading, which I want to say something about because I don't want only to talk about the nature of science. I want to talk about the responsibility of scientists, which is a big subject, and in this paper I have talked about looking ahead, about the responsible intellect. What did I have in mind under the responsibility of the scientist? Well, two responsibilities. One should be patently obvious, but it's taken the scientific community a little while to embrace it, is that scientists are human beings, scientists are citizens and scientists have the responsibility to use their education in science as citizens. So where a topic under debate has a technological aspect to it, scientists are required to - if you like - pay a tax on their specialised knowledge, by devoting some time to participating as educated citizens, something everybody in this room does, whatever their education. Scientists have to do this to a special degree and have only in recent decades been doing it in connection with armaments - that is, the control of armaments - in connection with the environment, in connection with the technological impact of all sorts of knew discoveries. They enter the debate, they don't dictate the answers, they don't know the answers, but they must be part of that debate and take part conscientiously. That is one responsibility. The other one that I want to mention, and with that I will close, is a good deal more subtle, and it really ties in with comments we heard in this room yesterday about the fact that we live in a single world. Whatever we may pretend about our national boundaries, we do live in a single world.
And a question then arises: How do we feel a sense of community within that world? If we lack that sense of community, then there is a danger that we will lapse into ethnicity or fundamentalism, some good deal less desirable forms of partisanship. So this is a problem with which we have to grapple, and we should use those international communities that have a moral basis and that do exist and they include guilds - meaning people who have a common profession - and professions, and notable among those professions is science. The international community of scientists should provide a sense of belonging and should, I think, reach out as a non-governmental organisation if it is to do the things that go beyond the discussion of topics that are technological, to topics that have a moral dimension. This sounds very airy, but it isn't. In fact, it's already happening and has been happening for decades. Scientists have become involved wherever human rights are threatened. Well, let me explain, I mean Linus Pauling in the United States, Kovalyov, Sacharov, and so on.
These are all people who belong to that community and who naturally get involved in the defence of human rights and should be vigorously supported by the scientific community in doing so. Why, what authority does science bring there? It's not a technical question. It brings the authority of its values. Science has to respect minority views, because without dissidence, without heterodox views, science is dead. The only way new ideas ever come about is by the challenging of old ideas by minority groups. Science is international, science is tolerant; otherwise science is dead. And I would only link that up with a wider area, where I think that scientists, as an international community, should be active. That is contained really in Gareth Evans' remarks. In one of his categories of ideas he moves smoothly, and without adding an additional number, from human rights to democracy. Democracy after all rests on the foundation of human rights. If scientists are seen now at last as natural defenders of human rights, and they should be, they should also be involved in building democracy and supporting and assisting in every country where democracy is threatened. So, with that, I end. Thank you.
DISCUSSION
OSCAR ARIAS SANCHEZ
Thank you very much, Professor Polanyi. I offer the floor now to Mr Jostein Gaarder.
JOSTEIN GAARDER
Thank you. I would like to make a comment on the statement by Dr John Silber and many comments around the table. We are talking about pessimism or optimism towards the future and the new millennium. We are talking about ethics, morals, human rights, and I would like to add some words combined to these questions about identity. First I would like to say that I firmly believe in the progress of humanity, the progress of human standards of behaviour. When we had the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, its principles were not taken out of that era, but were based on human reflection, philosophical reflection, on Locke, Voltaire, Kant and so on. I actually think that these declarations may be the most important achievement of philosophical reflection. OK, the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, then we had the Declaration of Women's Rights, and some years ago we had a new declaration in the frame of the United Nations of Children's Rights, and I certainly believe and will fight for the emergence of some declarations for Animals' Rights in the coming years. Actually, it is a shame how, for instance, we in Europe treat cattle.
I believe in the progress of human reflection, the human mind, so the other question is the practice. I think that international conventions are really important. Without these conventions we couldn't have had the Nuremberg Trials, we couldn't have any Hague Trial. We need the conventions before we can have the trials. We need the prescriptions to be launched before the practice; they always come before the practice. So, I also think, as a philosopher, that it is important to learn from history. The Chinese wise man, philosopher Confucius said that learning without thinking has no value - and thinking without learning is dangerous. We are talking about the Golden Rule. Many have mentioned the Golden Rule and Dr Silber also mentioned the more precise formulation or extension of the rule formulated by Kant. That the principle of your act should become a universal law. In what you are doing you should follow a universal law. Now, this sentence of Kant needs today another extension or application, or at least a new footnote. According to Kant, I would say: "You should do to your grandchildren what you would have wanted your grandparents to have done to you." Now only one example: Would I have wished that my ancestors had put a lot of nuclear waste in, say, mountain caves or at the bottom of the sea? Would I have wished that they put nuclear deposits in mountain caves 100 years ago? 500 years ago? 5,000 years ago? 30,000 years ago? Obviously not.
Actually, I am happy that I shall not be worried when I walk in the Norwegian mountains that somewhere 2,000 or 5,000 years ago some people were pouring out some dirt that is really dangerous even today? Now, railways. We often see a sign at the toilets, asking us to leave the toilets in the same state that you would wish to find them. I was in Bangkok and I met my editor from Thailand. She was an elderly woman, and she told me she was brought up in Bangkok, and I asked her: how was it to be a girl, here in Bangkok, to grow up as a young girl? And she actually started to cry. I thought that maybe she could see that everything was much better now, but actually she was weeping because she told me that everything was actually much better for her in her society when she was a young girl. For me it's important to emphasise that what we are now discussing is very much a question of identity. We are actually discussing and debating the question: Who are we? Who am I?
Now who am I? I am not just this physical body. That is a misunderstanding. And I am a part of, and I certainly also take part in, something that is bigger and even more important than myself. I have a deeper and more profound identity than this human body. If not, I would be a hopeless person. But I have hope, because I identify with something more than myself. That is why I am not only angry, but it hurts when I feel that the rain forest is being cut down in Amazonia, for instance. I am not only on this planet: I am this planet. The former president of India, Radhakrishnan, put it this way. He said: "You shall love your neighbour, because you are your neighbour."
It's an illusion, or a misunderstanding, that your neighbour is different from you, or separated from you. I think I am the planet earth. It's a major challenge to try to internalise this wisdom. It's especially important towards today's consuming individualism. And it's not a new wisdom. Something was wrong, let's say, from the 16th century in Europe. But, for instance, just 50 years ago, when a Norwegian farmer - we have these very small farms - was dying, he knew that he should leave the farm in a more proper state, more developed, more cleaned than the farm he inherited. Now it was sad that the farmer was dying, but it would be even more sad for the farmer if the farm was burning. So the Norwegian farmer was thinking exactly the opposite of the father of the character Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen. The father of Peer Gynt was destroying the farm, before he left it to his son. We are today challenged by quite a new civilisation, I would say, talking about the global village.
Fifty years ago, answering the question "who are you?", people related to their local environment, to their local village. Today we talk about the global village, and I think that more and more people start to feel today that, well, my identity is not any more my local neighbourhood: it's actually the planet Earth. We do today see some, I would say, Copernican turning point concerning human self-understanding through, for instance, the Internet. I believe it's possible to fight for the Internet and the new global civilisation to increase a more global identity.
NORBERT GREINACHER
I would like to address some remarks to Mr Lederberg. I admire very much what he has shown us, what the results of medicine and medical research are. I myself, and probably many of you here in the room, took advantage when I went to see a doctor. But, and that I want to add in a critical way, many doctors were corrupt. They were corrupt like scientists and artists. I am saying that especially based on German history. According to my opinion, one of the great philosophers was Martin Heidegger. In 1933, he publicly said: "When the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler starts to speak, then the philosopher stops thinking." And I want to mention an example from culture: a question that is being discussed a lot in Germany is the corruption of the Bayreuth festival of Wagner by Adolf Hitler. But I want to come back to doctors and to medical research. Most of us will know how much medicine and medical research were corrupted during the time of National Socialism and that scientific research was carried out on dying people, children, and cripples. I am very, very much ashamed that these experiments were carried out by doctors who remained in their profession after the year 1945, and continued in their research even at my university in Tubingen. I would also like to say something about the biomedical convention of the Council of Europe. This convention was very much influenced by the medical associations and the pharmaceutical industry. I would like to give just one example of why I am protesting against this convention. I am doing this partly for egotistical reasons. According to that convention, it is allowed, in the case of people under a coma, for experiments to be carried out with such people without their consent. Can we imagine what it is going to be like in the future? I can imagine what it would be like if something like that happened to me in a couple of years' time and I know what kind of impact that would have on the ethical principles of medicine and the whole of society.
OSCAR ARIAS SANCHEZ
Thank you. I offer the floor now to Professor Claude Jasmin.
CLAUDE JASMIN
I want to come back to the very important point Jack Lang has brought up, which is children. We all know that infancy is a period which is very important, in which the personality and behaviour of the future adult is built. And we know even today that this process is starting during the time of pregnancy. So it's a very important stage of the life of a human being, and Jack Lang has insisted on the very important positive aspects I would say of the education of the youth. Young children are bearing creativity, renewal. They are the deposit of this second worldwide revolution in which someday maybe human rights will be respected all over the world.
But my point is that in fact we are always thinking in terms of a positive future, but it is very important also to think about how we can protect children, because in the world children are exposed to very important risks. In my field of cancer, I would take the example of tobacco. I don't know if the assembly here knows, but big American tobacco companies target children by putting advertisements at no higher than one metre from the ground in order that when the young children enter a shop, they will see the advertisement, and will be tempted. Also, they mix the cigarettes with candies in order that a young child will be somehow attracted to see this cigarette, this package of cigarettes, and they send people to control that everything is set in good order in these shops. Well, when we know the importance of tobacco in mortality of a human being, that's a very important thing.
Now, if we speak about violence, we know that children replicate what they lived through when they were young, when they were children. It is the beaten children who themselves beat other children. It is the raped children who in later times will be the rapers of other children, so at that stage we have to break that kind of vicious circle. We have to try to educate both the children and the parents. Even in the field of risks of infectious diseases Joshua Lederberg has spoken very well of this very important epidemic risk all over the world it is very important how we teach the children about the prevention of diseases. Maybe if we had known before, we could have restricted the epidemics of HIV just by rules, by very simple rules. We are not really investing in this field, and this is very important. I fully agree with Gareth Evans, for example, who stressed the notion of prevention in the political field, and I guess that health prevention may also be a very important field, which might have to learn from political prevention of war in which strategies have been devised previously. I also agree with the point that many people have stressed here, that is the importance of responsibility.
Well, to end, I would like to say that I am a little anxious for the future, because I fear that education will be in danger for the coming 21st century. When I see the prediction of the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, that the share of education in the national budget in economically developed countries will decrease very substantially, I ask: Why? Because our world will have to carry this wave of longevity. There will be a great part of the budget devoted just to pay the pensions of old people, and one of the budgets that will be sacrificed in the near future will be the budget of education. So I believe that we really have a duty to target education, to fight for education, put all our hopes, as Elie Wiesel has put it. In one interview, Elie Wiesel stressed this point and in Paris he had a great meeting with young people at the Sorbonne. I think the way Elie Wiesel has started to try to attract the young into this reflection is very important.
MICHAEL NOVAK
Thank you. Three brief comments, please. When looking ahead into the 21st century, I sometimes find myself much more pessimistic than we are being, particularly because at the end of the 18th and 19th centuries so many people were so optimistic. But also because I see, and have frequently the experience, of how separate the worlds are: worlds of mind, of culture, among believers and among non-believers. It sometimes splits along the lines of elites and population; it sometimes splits along the lines of science and religion. If we are going to help the free society to survive in the 21st century, and there is no guarantee that it will, we are going to need everybody. One small warning. The term "fundamentalist" is often being used as though it were a religious term. This is a great offence to many Islamic groups I have spoken with in the last three years, for whom the turn toward violence is an abomination, and who argue that most of those called "fundamentalists" are moved by politics, not by religion. I want to pick up on the second point, a point raised by John Silber this morning, citing De Tocqueville about the importance of the dimension of eternity in democracy. De Tocqueville said that religion is the first political institution of democracy. And he argued further that this is so because it is in religion that humans get their sense of human dignity, and of truth and the role of truth: that no matter how rich or how powerful you are, you will be subject to the bar of truth, subject to the bar of judgment. This was extremely important in the American revolution. I don't have time to develop this, but I need to mention that, 1776, and thereafter.
The third point I want to come to is the prediction that in the 21st century and in the next millennium we are likely to see a rearrangement of the way in which science and religion regard one another. Over the past three or four centuries there has been a sense that science arose out of rebellion against religion, and that the two are on opposite sides. If I understand what is going on in modern physics at all, there is a rebirth of natural theology, a rebirth of speculation about origins, meaning, purpose, God, who we are, of the most fascinating kind. It's one of the periods of greatest fruition in natural theology for some centuries. And I see that this is occurring in other dimensions of science too. I think that John Polanyi himself performed a very valuable service in showing - the connections between science and politics on the one hand, democracy on the one hand, and values and morals on the other. I think we will see more such attempts to link the various fields among us - politics, science, and religion - and to draw out of them around the core of human dignity as Professor Geremek suggested yesterday: reflections, mutual reflections from different points of view on what it is that gives us our dignity, our value, our hope, and what it is in us that is our danger to ourselves. Thank you very much.
HELMUT SCHMIDT
Thank you, Chairman. I want to come back to the several interventions we have heard on the subject of democracy and politicians. Politicians have to feel responsibility. Also, are they to be held responsible for what they say or do not say, for what they do or what they do not do, for the effects of their speech and their actions, not just for their good intentions? Also for the unforeseen side-effects of their speech and actions, and for the aftereffects as well? Democracy is a category of governance in which one can hold rulers responsible. As a devoted democrat, I of course understand that there do exist several types of democracy. But in none of these democracies is it the people who govern. Instead, it is a few rulers who govern. This is unavoidable. Unavoidably any type of democracy does need responsible leadership by politicians. But then state and society may also be misled by insufficient politicians or even by corrupted leaders. Having this in mind, it seems to me that the one great advantage of all types of democracy over all other forms of governance is this: that a majority of the ruled can do away with the government of their rulers without bloodshed and without violence. This is maybe the only great advantage of democracy over other forms of governance. One should therefore not concentrate too great expectations on democracy.
So far, culturally advanced parts of mankind have existed for over 5,000 years. Five thousand years of creative culture, but without much democracy in all these 5,000 years. Even in the democratically governed ancient Athens, at the time of Pericles, they did practise slavery, and even Thomas Jefferson had his slaves. What I am trying to say is this: Do not put too much emphasis on institutions. Instead spread education about the conscience of responsibility of leaders, whether leaders in governments and parliaments, or leaders in schools and in universities, or whether leaders in financial or commercial corporations. And teach them that responsibility does necessitate the ability and the will to put oneself into the shoes of the other guy - the neighbour, the opponent - or as a Westerner to put oneself into the viewpoints of the Chinese and the Indians, and the black Africans, and the Muslims.
I would like to close by quoting two sentences from Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi listed seven so-called social sins and in this catalogue of seven social sins, number one was politics without principles. Number two was commerce without morality. And I would like to add to Gandhi's list, at least to these first two social sins, politics and commerce without responsibility. I am convinced that no democracy and no open society, neither in Britain nor in Texas, nor later on in Shanghai, can afford to do without the principles of duties and the principles of responsibility. An open society cannot do without these principles if it is to secure its own survival. So whether we will have a better shaped United Nations, or even have the so far utopian World Government, of which we heard somebody talk yesterday, I think we have to strive to educate ourselves in all the five continents towards a consensus on a minimum code of ethics which would have to include not only rights but also each individual's responsibility. Thank you very much.
OSCAR ARIAS SANCHEZ
Thank you, Chancellor. Now I offer the floor to Dr Silber.
JOHN SILBER
I'd like to refer back to the issue raised by Mr Castoriadis, and Mr Capra, concerning science and its goals and in particular in relation to what President Havel had to say. I think it's important that we do not emphasise every single detail of what President Havel had to say, because his general idea has great validity and force even if some of the formulations he offered of it seem less convincing. Just take for example his statement: "Could not the crisis of responsibility and accountability for the world as a whole and for its future, be but the logical consequence of the modern conception of the world as a complex phenomenon controlled by certain scientifically identified laws, formulated for God knows what purpose."
That is a conception that does not question the meaning of existence, and renounces any kind of metaphysics or any kind of metaphysical roots of its own. He went on to say: "The crisis of the so necessary global responsibility is in principle due to the fact that we have lost the certainty of all and every humility towards what reaches beyond us and surrounds us. This loss is accompanied by the loss of a feeling that whatever we do must be subjected to the regard for a higher order of which we are a part, and to respect the authority of that in whose field of vision every one of us is permanently present." Now, what he is talking about is a sense of transcendence in which we work. Now what happens when you undertake a scientific enterprise forgetting the dependence of science on ethical principles and on metaphysical principles.
Scientists offer no scientific proof for the principle of induction on which much of their work depends. They offer no scientific proof for the principles of scientific method on which the validity and integrity of their work depends. They function as human beings, with purposes, and they devote their lives to these purposes often with great courage, sometimes even with great sacrifice. This does not demonstrate the indifference of science to purpose, but the parasitic dependence of the scientist on purpose. And we have to recognise that. I don't believe that the validity of what President Havel had to say depends upon our knowing those mysteries of this transcendent domain of which we are aware, but the importance of our awareness of it cannot be denied. When the scientist forgets this sense of mystery, loses this sense of mystery, and loses the profound sense of his limited perspective - the limited perspective offered by scientific research - he runs the risk of either absolutism, absolutising something that is clearly finite, something that was pointed out by John Polanyi, or he also runs the risk of being exposed as a very shallow naive person.
Consider what Sagan and many other cosmologists have done with regard to extrapolations concerning the Big Bang, treating it as a scientific explanation of creation, advanced far beyond the limitations of the poor religionists who talked thus: "In the beginning God said let there be light, and there was light". He went on at great length and many of the cosmologists have gone on to suggest that the Big Bang explains something. What bangs, where did it come from? Did God suddenly create stuff, so that it could bang, or was there a prior collapse of a previous universe into a black hole, which then compacted the energy that allowed for the Bang. I asked Sagan once. I said: "You know, as a cosmologist perhaps you read the work of Immanuel Kant who along with Laplace developed the nebular hypothesis."
I said that one thing that Kant pointed out was that every first cause can be reduced to an infinite regress and consequently, "why do you think you offered an explanation of the creation when you came up with the Big Bang?" This is, I think, the important point that Havel was making: unless we have some humility even in the scientific undertaking to recognise this transcendent dimension of mystery of which we know nothing, and to which we are subject, and which has the final judgment over the adequacy or inadequacy of our work, even though we will never know the answer. I think that was his point, and the one that we have to take seriously.
I want also to compliment Mr Polanyi for stressing the nature of scientific method. In doing so he reminded me of the work of his splendid father, Michael Polanyi, who in my opinion has done the best work on the philosophy of science, when he seized on the notion of concertare, the exercise of artistic judgment in the fulfilment of one's work as a scientist. He has demonstrated, as his father did before him, the community of the artist and the scientist. The artist is not a species, and the artist is not the only one who sacrificed his life in the pursuit of truth. There have been theologians, Jan Hus for example, and many scientists who made the same sacrifice. We are all in the same boat and we all share this responsibility for creativity and creative work and creative thought, and for concertare.
KHOTSO MAKHULU
Mr Chairman, what I wanted to say is that, first of all, I think we all come from different worlds. And when some of you get carried away with your postulations and your presuppositions, understand that we have a different experience of life from the one that you have come from. I want to make the following points. One, I was enthralled by Mr Gareth Evans' s description of various types of security which were very impressive but, having to deal with human nature, we have overlooked one thing that governments often do, and what some people come to recognise as state security, for their own self-preservation, but which has nothing to do with the good of the whole community. This is just a warning that we must not get too carried away, even in our desire to see a better tomorrow. I spoke about the conventions that have been passed including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
If there is one complaint that has to be made, it is that many heads of states go to summit after summit and accept these conventions, but the adoption and accession to these conventions probably takes ages and ages and ages before they are adopted for action. It is only recently in my own country that the action plan on the convention on the child has been adopted. And finally, the anticipation of the cuts in education in the 21st century, or in the next millennium, is a little late. Those cuts are already taking place under the structural adjustment programmes when heavily indebted countries are being forced to make choices, choices about what to provide in terms of social services, and have to choose between servicing debt and paying for social services. Thank you.