The Human Interest

Years ago, in a commencement address at American University, President John F. Kennedy stated, “While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests.”  A noble sentiment indeed, but one that seems forgotten in this 21^st century fashion of unenlightened self interest.  It deserves notice that JFK did not raise the interests of humanity while ignoring national interest, but assumed instead that they can share common values and goals.  We especially seem to have forgotten that.  Time after time, we discount human goals and values obvious to the rest of the world as,”not in the national interest.”  There is a new principle of international law, embedded in the Law of the Sea Treaty (which of course the U.S. has as yet refused to accept) called "the common heritage of mankind" principle, which holds that all nations are bound to honor and hold in trust for future generations places such as sea beds, great historical sites, etc., that are the common property of humanity.  It, too, is a noble sentiment, well worth honoring.  But it has become fashionable among some conservatives to discount any values “not invented here” as suspicious attempts to Europeanize America, as though only those values not found in other nations can be truly American.  As I walked through flower-filled public spaces in Canada this summer remembering the colorless and joyless public streets common in the U.S. (“flowers – what a waste of money!”), I thought what a tragedy for the human spirit that attitude can become.

It is an old problem, written large in this new age of mass slaughters, globalized finance, an international struggle against terrorism and planetary climate change.  It’s said that we drive on the right side of the road and use the fork in the right hand in America because, following the Revolution, we didn’t want to be like the British.  De Tocqueville noted the problem in the 1840’s.  David McCullough, in The Greater Journey, an account of Americans in Paris in the 19^th century, quotes a conversation between two Chicagoans at the Paris International Exposition of 1900 (site of the first presentation of the internal combustion engine, electric turbines, and now-priceless works of art, the fair was regarded by most as the grandest world fair ever held until that time):  First Chicagoan, “Well, it’s not as good as the Chicago Fair of 1876”; Second Chicagoan, “I knew that before I came.”  Some of us just haven’t changed.  But the world has.

Written large, the problem transforms from comedy into tragedy. My country’s skies are bluer than the oceans.  But other lands have skies as blue as mine.  So states one of the great hymns, based on the melody of Sibelius’s Finlandia.  We all share one planet, and a common humanity.  Yet we devote the equivalent of the entire corn crop of Iowa each year to corn syrup for soft drinks, while humanity around the world starves for lack of ability to pay the inflated food prices that result.  We cheerfully count arms sales to other countries that enable the mass slaughters as part of our world’s largest GNP.   We proclaim the world superiority of our educational and medical systems while we slide further and further down the international scales of effectiveness.  And in terms of climate change, we fiddle while the rest of the world (including us) burns.

Eugene Robinson, in the Washington Post, notes that the science of climate change is now confirmed to the point that previously skeptical scientists have reversed their positions, scientists previously cautious in describing the evidence are announcing that they had been significantly underestimating its effects, and a strong world consensus has emerged regarding the seriousness of the problem.  Other countries “get it.”  Yet in this country, Gallup polls show that public recognition of climate change and its consequences has actually declined, from 60 percent in 2007 down to 44 percent in 2011.  In the face of the hottest July in the hottest year on record, severe drought in Australia and emerging drought in our own Midwest, torrential rains in Russia, and floods covering one-third of Manila, many of us grit our teeth, square our jaws and hang on to full scale denial.  Robinson terms it the “You can’t pin it on our SUVs” view.

It’s time for the interests of humanity to come forward again as part of our legitimate public policy agenda.  Robinson suggests that global climate change should be part of the discussion in this current election, and I would agree with him.  I would also add subjects like the effect of our domestic policies on world poverty, and our national contribution to world violence.  We as a nation known for its impact on world affairs cannot disregard the effects of our actions on the common interests of all the world.  We cannot claim greatness without practicing it.