The century is approaching its conclusion in a climate of growing tension. Conflict springs up between individual rights and collective duties, between local roots and cosmopolitism. It is present in the tension between economic development and the safeguard of the environment, the aggression of global markets and the desire to protect fragile economies, the pressures of emigration from poor countries and unemployment in the more advanced nations. There is renewed bloodshed between ethnic, religious, cultural and economic groups, and between nations.
However, as the International Commission on Peace and Food reminds us, "the perspective the world seeks must be based on a greater understanding of the inextricable linkages between peace, democratization, development, equity and the environment. None of these great goals can be achieved, without corresponding progress towards the others. [...] What are the foundations of this new intellectual perspective and what sort of strategies, actions and results will it lead to? It requires a change in the way we look at and think of familiar things like war, developing countries, democracy, agriculture, industrialization. First, we have to awaken from the millennia-old nightmare that war is a natural and inevitable part of human existence, which can perhaps be mitigated or kept far from our shores, but never really mastered or eliminated. [...] Most of all, the new perspective the world seeks should be based on a recognition that humankind is the master of its own destiny, that the external limits are not binding on us if we tap the unlimited creative potential of our own inner human resourcefulness".
These recommendations are the starting point of the debate among the Nobel Laureates and international experts gathering in Milan, to discuss how to transform conflict into an occasion for dialogue, growth and innovation.
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The sessions
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Peace and justice as driving forces of development |
At the end of 1895 in San Remo, an Italian village, Alfred Nobel established in his will the prizes which now bear his name, writing that they were "to be distributed to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". Last but surely not least on his list was the prize for "the person who shall have done the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". Most of the time, science develops by building on earlier advances. Peace does not. We do not learn from previous mistakes: no Popperian "falsification" earns us permanent progress. But men and women search for peace with the same single-mindedness as scientists search for genes or particles. They work for disarmament, knowing how much it would benefit every nation of the world, especially the poorest, whose defence budgets are proportionally larger than those of the rich countries. They also want true peace, intended as freedom from hunger and oppression. In the centenary of Alfred Nobel's death, their struggle deserves more from us than the spectator's detached applause.
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Cultural diversity: from conflict to dialogue |
Networks, Information Society, Global Trends: we are constantly reminded that we are about to become citizens of a single world. At the same time, ethnic and religious conflicts refuse to dissolve into global harmony, and not only in faraway or underdeveloped countries: Northern Ireland or Corsica are uncomfortably close to home to allow for any feeling of safety.
But our differences in history and language do not willingly surrender to change, nor should they. There are alternatives: they can adapt, as living species do, and make space for otherness.
Literature has reached across borders to touch the hearts and minds of others, and so has world-music, another way of communicating "without frontiers". Art has been innovating from the day someone drew the first bison in a prehistoric cave, and ever since writers and poets have spoken to each other and to us, crossing boundaries between cultures to enrich both our language and our awareness.
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Human rules and natural laws |
Science will help us to live longer, and possibly healthier, than ever before. One promising development of genetic research is predictive medicine. Unlike preventive medicine, which also cares for healthy people but does so with mass tools such as vaccines, predictive medicine is tailored to individuals. It can help people by screening them early for genes that could lead to diseases and disabilities and by recommending suitable lifestyles. But the knowledge brought by genetic screening raises ethical problems and will have to be used responsibly: the desires of the individual and his or her relatives must be respected and test results kept strictly confidential, even when society as a whole might eventually benefit from such information.
We live longer, but we still only live once. This does not prevent us from speculating about human life as an ongoing process, the evolution of which was brought about by an astonishing mixture of contingency and inevitability, by all of nature's constraints that limit the play of chance. But now humans have become increasingly capable of interfering with evolution. It is an awesome power and, again, it must be used responsibly for the common good.
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Progress, development and their opponents |
According to François Jacob, scientific knowledge and technology are neutral: one can use a knife to peel potatoes or to kill one's neighbour. Who designed the knife does not come into it. Many scientists disagree. But the solutions suggested by their research to some of our ills are often highly controversial. This is especially so when they deal with the environment and population control, and therefore clash with religious beliefs, economic interests and freedom. For example, we have all heard about the risks of climate change or overpopulation, but are we ready to change our lifestyle or to approve public policies restricting our reproductive choices?
Basic science also sparks ideological conflicts, particularly when it tries to explain the originsof life on Earth or of the Universe. For over a century, the Darwinian theory of evolution has met with strong opposition, and in the last thirty years the Big Bang theory has faced similar hostility. Again, freedom - to pursue research and teach the knowledge it acquires - is the defining issue.
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Individual interests and collective choices |
We are reluctant to allow our collective and individual choices to be determined by the "invisible hand" of the market. We fear for our democracies, but is such alarmism justified? Most economists agree that the global market and its rules will provide valuable goods and services more efficiently than any form of political and social control. But citizens must not accept this system passively.
Reconciling morality with their personal interests, citizens are now called on to face new responsibilities and to answer new (and not so new) ethical questions. For instance: how much of the wealth that each of us produces through his or her work or earns from accumulated capital should remain in private hands, and how much can be appropriated by the community?
Will the global market draw politics toward more evolved forms of organization, developing its potential for spawning new ideas and forcing it to adopt solutions, such as federalism, consistent with the new reality of privatization, devolution and deregulation?
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