Building Global Unity through Tolerance and Universal Rights

December 10, 2020

By David Gallup

Today marks the 72^nd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Two related documents also celebrate significant anniversaries this year: the 25^th anniversary of the Declaration of the Principles on Tolerance and the 75^th anniversary of the United Nations Charter. Both Declarations and the Charter provide a framework for building unity in a diverse world.

The impetus for creating the Declaration on Tolerance was, as the Declaration’s Preamble states, “the current rise in acts of intolerance, violence, terrorism, xenophobia, aggressive nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, exclusion, marginalization and discrimination.” These acts dramatically impact the rights of vulnerable groups and threaten the development of peace and democracy in the world.

The Preamble to the United Nations Charter implores us “to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours.” 

On the anniversary of both Declarations and the Charter, we celebrate the strides we have made to practice tolerance; at the same time, we recognize that much work remains to be done to advance tolerance and respect for universal rights.

What does it mean to engage tolerance in society?

Tolerance involves active learning about and respecting the ways that our fellow humans live their lives. Tolerance means learning other languages, cultures, beliefs, identities, and practices as well as ecological principles. Article 1 of the Declaration on Tolerance provides a comprehensive definition of tolerance: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000151830

Tolerance doesn’t mean complete acceptance of others’ words, behaviors, or actions. As the Declaration on Tolerance states, tolerance doesn’t require “concession, condescension or indulgence . . . social injustice or the abandonment or weakening of one's convictions.” We need not sit idly by and tolerate others’ intolerance.

Tolerance involves ethical engagement in the world that we all share, affirming our responsibilities to everyone as fellow citizens and to the Earth as our home. Tolerance means having a holistic awareness of the mutual benefit to implementing our universal rights.

How do we achieve tolerance in society?

Education is vital to achieving tolerance. Article 26(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms the connection between education, tolerance, and human rights: “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups.”

Additionally, equal access to information, sustainable development, ethical governance, and just laws can advance both tolerance and universal rights.

What is the connection between tolerance and universal rights?

Universal rights and tolerance are interdependent: one cannot exist without the other.

To create awareness of the connection between tolerance and universal rights, we must speak up, speak out, and take action. We must pay attention to the needs of our fellow humans and to the needs of our planet. Working together, we can save the Earth from climate destruction and save humanity from inequality, injustice, and violence – which occur when tolerance and human rights are ignored.

If we want a just world, we must ensure that tolerance and universal rights prevail.

How does tolerance relate to a peaceful and governed world?

Like the Declaration on Tolerance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not binding treaty law that requires governments to respect the Declarations’ mandates. This lack of legal engagement internationally is why we must consider developing enforceable world law as the basis for a world community that respects and protects diversity. The creation of global, participatory institutions of law, such as a World Parliament and a World Court of Human and Environmental Rights, will help us to achieve tolerance and respect for universal rights.

As we deal with inequality and injustice, world health, structural violence, and climate destruction, tolerance is a mode of participation that all citizens of the world can embrace. Living a world-citizen way of life means not only respecting universal rights, but also considering how we will interact peacefully, ethically, and sustainably with our fellow humans, with all other life on Earth, and with the Earth itself.

For our continued existence on our home planet and for a potential interstellar existence, we must realize what it means to be world citizens who exercise tolerance in all aspects of our lives.

Pandemic of Racism

By David Gallup

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail

How many lives have been extinguished by the pandemic of racism?

Like a biological virus, racism is spread from person to person by what people teach and say to their family members and friends. It is spread by ignorance and nurtured by hatred and indifference.

Unlike a biological virus, racism immediately affects everyone who is targeted and leaves indelible lifelong wounds.

Racism does not only become lethal in the hands of those who inhabit the halls of power and privilege; racism resides throughout society. The world has been built on inequality, xenophobia, and oppression. Racism has been institutionalized and systematized. The system of exclusive nation-states has further exacerbated structural violence and cycles of discrimination. The foundations that humans have used to construct our world are unequal and unstable. The world that is our home is failing much of its inhabitants. The entire house will fall if we do not return to the drawing board to design and build an inclusive and just foundation.

What is the antidote to racism?

                                                             

If we want to have a world that works for everyone, we need to teach children from infancy not only the principles but also the practices of inclusion, empathy, listening, sharing, respect, equality, and justice. These lessons must not end when youth ends; adults must continually educate themselves and be cognizant of how their words and actions impact those around them.

Stopping racism requires a holistic approach. Racism must be recognized and eliminated from every aspect of society. Stopping racism requires us to question how we are running our world. Is our competitive economic and political system that pits human against human, group against group, ethical? How we govern ourselves, or neglect to govern our world, inordinately affects people due to their race and ethnicity.

The hyper-nationalistic and corporate control of human and natural resources embeds racism in the wheels of production, consumption, and day-to-day existence. We are taught to see our fellow humans as “others” against whom we must compete, and oftentimes fight, for supremacy. Rarely are we taught, let alone encouraged to practice, how to be allies of one another, rather than competitors.

A holistic approach to stopping racism takes into account the health of humanity and the earth. It will ensure that our rights and duties are universally respected. And it will seek equality and justice in all aspects of human-to-human interaction, as well as human-to-earth interaction.

• Education must be just.
• Societal opportunities and outcomes must be just.
• Economics must be just.
• Politics must be just.
• Governmental representation must be just.
• Laws, their enforcement, and their adjudication must be just.

The laws that we create help determine how we will interact with one another. Racism and discrimination are outlawed in many national and international codes of conduct. For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Persons (UNDRIP) affirm the principles of equality and justice.

The Preamble and Articles 1, 2 and 26 of the UDHR affirm everyone’s equality and right to be free from racism. Article 2 specifically states, “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”

The Preamble and Articles 8 and 46 of the UNDRIP reiterate the antidiscrimination principles of the UDHR. The Preamble states “that all doctrines, policies and practices based on or advocating superiority of peoples or individuals on the basis of national origin or racial, religious, ethnic or cultural differences are racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust.” Article 8(2)(e) specifically states, “States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for: Any form of propaganda designed to promote or incite racial or ethnic discrimination.”

The problem is not the lack of laws against racism, it is how and whether those laws are implemented. When the institutions of society and government do not fairly represent everyone in the community, then the laws will not be implemented fairly, or at all. Laws, in the end, will never be enough to stop racism. We need to protest for change, listen and be allies for change, learn and educate for change, vote for change, and run for office for change.

We need to run on a platform of building an ethical and inclusive social and governmental system for the whole world. This means creating a just system and an equitable justice system, one that does not treat some people as lesser, and others as better, or above the law.

To have a peaceful, free and sustainable world, it must be a just world. As citizens of the world, we are all directly responsible for rooting out injustice anywhere and for seeking justice for everyone, everywhere.

Black lives matter.

Scarcity or Abundance?

Scarcity or Abundance?

By David Gallup

The COVID-19 virus is not the first pandemic to seriously impact humanity, nor will it be the last. This global crisis and existential threat provides an opportunity for humans as a species to determine how we will interact with one another and the earth from now on. We can choose a coordinated, interdependent, and holistic approach, or we can continue haltingly and in vain to deal with global issues selfishly in an ungoverned world.

Beyond a Nationalistic Strategy

A virus that impacts everyone necessitates a world citizen-focused response.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is the UN agency attempting to coordinate efforts of national governments in their response to the pandemic. While structures like the WHO encourage local governments to heed their policy recommendations, they have no power to enforce their suggested courses of action. National governments may arbitrarily refuse to follow those guidelines within their self-imposed borders. National governments do what is in their self-interest or that of their leaders’ economic and political priorities. Human-made borders, we have realized, do very little to contain a virus in a free world.

In its proposed 2020-2021 budget, the WHO will receive almost five billion dollars from UN Member-States. This is a miniscule amount of money compared to the two trillion dollars that national governments spend preparing for and waging wars every year.  Not only is the WHO underfunded, but also national health institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health are severely underfunded in comparison to the life-saving work that they are doing.

It’s not a question of whether the world has the resources and funds to support the health and well-being of all humans and the earth; it is a question of priorities.

National leaders frequently appeal to the security concerns of citizens in expanding military budgets, while ignoring the impact that poor health and environmental degradation has on these same citizens. They argue about scarcity -- limited funds and resources should be directed at national military defense, rather than health care, sustainable development, and ecological conservation.

To the detriment of all, national self-defense supersedes defense of people and planet.

Scare City

In times of crisis, individuals begin to act in panic mode. They become self-absorbed, thinking only about self-preservation. This is understandable because fear and protection of oneself and one’s family are strong motivators of behavior.

Perceived scarcities have created real Scare Cities – people living in states of fear. The individual behaves like a mini nation-state setting up borders, raising their self-interest above all other concerns, and fending off those they perceive as a threat. This selfish mentality has presented itself in the hoarding of toilet paper, sanitizers, and, most importantly medical supplies that first responders, health care workers, and hospitals desperately need.

To help everyone through this crisis, local governments should establish a voucher system to assist those who have no salary or income. And there should be total loan forgiveness on necessities like groceries, medical supplies, housing, and education. Governments could easily provide digital or physical vouchers to everyone each month to pay for necessities. It just means that we need to change priorities from using money to wage wars and build walls, to using money to pay for livingry – tools that support and enhance all life.

Abundance

Resources are abundant in the world. We can feed, clothe, house, educate, and provide for every human being on the planet, but only if we choose to use and share resources sustainably to help people and protect the earth.

Instead of building weapons like war planes and nuclear bombs, funds and resources must be redirected to advancing both earth and human health as well as environmental and human rights. Currently, less than half of the world’s population has universal health coverage. Global institutions devoted to the rule of law, such as a World Court of Human and Environmental Rights and a World Peace Force, should replace the wastefulness of vast national armies. Think how much humanity could do to ensure healthcare and safe infrastructures for everyone on the planet with the two trillion dollars that national governments spend annually on waging wars.

Our failure to implement global approaches to global crises will inevitably lead to higher death tolls from wars, pandemics, and climate change. How many deaths will occur if we fail to implement a coordinated global system?

Moreover, the human response to this crisis must not be about saving any one economy; it must be about saving individual lives, humanity and the earth as a whole. Human and earth survival are interconnected. We must develop a human and earth consciousness, as well as a governing system that matches this holistic awareness, in order to prevent humanity’s extinction.

What we do now will determine our fate. How seriously will we take our responsibility as world citizens toward each other and the earth? This is a test of our humanity.