By Margo Picken

Justice Michael Kirby said in an interview in 2003:

If you ask what the essence of human rights is, I think it’s love, that you can love another person, even a person who’s done very wrong things, because you realise you share with them the phenomenon of the common existence of our species. It’s, I suppose, the golden rule – love one another. And I think that is the foundation of universal human rights.

Norberto Bobbio:  I do not know whether people are aware of just how much the Universal Declaration of Human Rights represents an unprecedented historical event, given that for the first time in history a system of fundamental principles for human behaviour has been freely and expressly adopted by the majority of people living on this planet through their governments.

Could Agape as a political philosophy and practice help to further human rights at a time of crisis when the politics of hatred and fear are dominant?

Universal human rights, as codified in the Universal Declaration and conceived as one coherent whole, have been both embraced and contested from the outset.  The more legitimacy they have gained, the more fiercely they have been contested and malevolently misconstrued:

• civil and political rights falsely pitted against economic, social and cultural rights;
• the rights of the individual falsely pitted against the right of the collective;
• the false association by the West of human rights with free market economies in the aftermath of the Cold War;
• the universality of human rights increasingly rejected as representing Western values and serving neo-colonial and neo-imperial interests.

ZeidRaad Al Hussein, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in a talk on Hope in 2021, voiced concern that the UN’s vocabulary of some 20,000 words trapped us in a narrow lexicon of language and thought. He called for fresh language and thinking.  He also lamented that initiatives start, declarations are adopted, treaties are ratified, but that the hard work of putting them into practice is rarely done.

And it is hard work. The Universal Declaration would not have gained life save for the persistent, insistent, and collaborative campaigning by non-governmental organisations over many years at all levels and across political divides: the churches, the trade unions, jurists, organisations like Amnesty International, most with dedicated members working from within their communities.

The right has been single-minded in its pursuit of hard power through hatred, fear, and divisiveness, backed by money and media.  Its strategy has been based on rigorous research through surveys and focus groups into what most arouses the fears and hatreds of voters, and then distilling the findings into simple slogans and through the invention of enemies – immigrants, enemy elites etc., Can we be as single-minded?

Could love as a political philosophy and practice serve to re-build trust and overcome the politics of hate and fear? Could it inject the fresh thinking and language that is needed, and galvanise people’s imagination, sympathy, and goodwill? Could it serve as a unifying force to overcome divisions, and bring together the thousands of determined but fragmented and uncoordinated protest and activist movements around shared values of love, kindness, compassion, equality, solidarity, fraternity, integrity? 

Marie Curie: Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.  Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less.

Is this Triglav’s role: to contribute to “understanding more” so that we may fear less, and in the context of the upcoming 2025 World Social Summit by distilling and handing on its accumulated knowledge and experience?