While attending the China-Europe Seminar on Human Rights in the Era of Digital Intelligence in Madrid, BRIX Sweden Chairman Stephen Brawer held a speech entitled “Human Rights in the Digital Age”.
Transcript:
I want to thank the China Society for Human Rights the Cátedra China Foundation and the Human Rights Institute of Southwest University of Political Science and Law for this kind invitation.
Excellencies, scholars, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.
As the very recent events of the US-Israeli attack on Iran demonstrate, the danger of an escalation into a new world war has never been more imminent.
Humanity stands at the precipice of a descent into what has been called the Law of the Jungle.
This is a Hobbsian world where the use of brute force determines the future of mankind.
In such a world, human rights will no longer exist, and the very existence of the future of mankind is questionable at best.
This is a world that cannot be tolerated or accepted in any form.
The great majority of nations are not prepared to follow that dangerous and destructive path, yet it now becomes urgently necessary to re-establish the respect for the common principles of the UN Charter for International Law and for National Sovereignity.
This return to sanity and international law is the opposite of the so-called rules-based order of hegemony, where the will of the most powerful is imposed by the use of military force or the threat of force and arrogance against nations which do not obey or submit to the will of overwhelming power.
So we are all at a crossroads where every nation on this planet has a responsibility to find the means both political and otherwise to successfully bury the Hobbsian thinking behind the Law of the Jungle forever.
This means an end to geopolitics or the balance of power doctrines such as Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a Clash of Civilizations.
These geopolitical balance-of-power doctrines reject the possibility of achieving the common aims of mankind through dialogue.
The much better alternative is a world order called A Dialogue of Civilizations.
The call for such a global dialogue was recently celebrated on June 10th this year for the first time by the United Nations jointly initiated by China and over 80 countries: Peace, development and friendship.
However, three days later, on June 13th, Israel, together with the support of the United States launch their massive assault on Iran.
Ladies and gentlemen, how do we bring the world back to a future in which justice and human rights will shape a community of sovereign nation states as a reality for all nations and all people?
The topic of my remarks; “The Nature of the Human Mind and its Relationship to Natural Law” is, I believe, a guiding light on how to protect human rights in an era of digital intelligence, as well as a world threatened by the Hobbsian “jungle”.
In the history of Western civilization there are two crucial philosophical thinkers that have defined the direction of especially European, but not exclusively European thought processes; they are Plato and Aristotle.
They are however vastly different in their fundamental thinking. Plato understood the human mind to be uniquely determined by the power of creative thought processes, or innate ideas which are not based on sensory experience.
Aristotle advocated the opposite, that is the idea that knowledge is solely dependent on sensory experience – information.
In this sense Aristotle did not distinguish between animals and human beings.
In fact, it is Aristotilian thinking which later takes its form in the Hobbsian Law of the Jungle, or the reduction of the nature of human beings to the beasts, that is is beastiality.
This difference between Plato and Aristotle is essential to understand how human beings can innovate and change the conditions for mankind’s continued survival.
The Platonic idea of the human mind unleashed at a later period was the foundation of the European Renaissance.
It is based on the divine spark in humanity; a spiritual nature that elevates us above the beasts.
The great renaissance thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz understood and developed these ideas in his thinking and was in direct opposition to Thomas Hobbes on the fundamental question of natural law.
Hobbes insisted that humans are beastly, basically wicked and egocentric and therefore must be controlled and dominated by the strongest to prevent chaos and maintain the rule of law.
Leibniz on the other hand understood the basic nature of human beings as creative by nature and therefore human civilization can be organized according to harmonic principles that define the nature of the universe itself.
This concept that Leibniz called a Pre-established Harmony is highly similar to the Chinese thinking of Konfucius and Mencius that is the basic goodness of human beings and their harmonic relationship to nature.
This should be the bridge to establish real and successful dialogue between East and West.
Ironically, it was Leibniz who developed the binary system which is the basis of all digital and AI technology today – all of it goes back to Leibniz.
Yet it was devised by Leibniz as a tool – never a replacement for the creative human thought processes.
If in these difficult and challenging times we are to protect human rights in this era of digital intelligence it will come as a result of re-establishing the essence of this renaissance concept of the spiritual, creative spark that separates human beings from the beasts.
This is especially important for the younger generation to rescue them from the growing danger of grave overdependence on pure information technology.
The future of human rights and justice in the world will depend very much upon humanity’s successful achievement of this global endeavor.
I wish this conference great success.
Thank you.