Sissela Bok, a philosopher and author of several books on ethics, will be offering her thoughts on ethics and society in this issue of Changemakers.net. Here she provides reflections on the possiblity that common values can connect nations that have divergent ideologies, cultures, and strategic interests (from the preface to her book Common Values, paperback edition, March 2002):

In the seven years since this book first appeared, disagreement about the possible role of common values has grown ever sharper. As societies attempt to meet threats increasingly seen as crossing all boundaries, leaving no community invulnerable, grim pronouncements about the impossibility of reconciling discordant value systems compete with sonorous proclamations of vast arrays of shared values.

The United Nations Millennium Declaration, signed in September 2000, for example, met with well-deserved skepticism as it listed an expansive set of common values, including freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature, and shared responsibility—in other words, ideals that have conspicuously never been held in common by all or even most societies at any time in history. Among the presidents, prime ministers, and other representatives of over 150 states who signed the statement were leaders of some of the most oppressive and aggressive regimes on earth; yet they, too, agreed to uphold the Declaration's panoply of values.

The Millennium Declaration never rang more hollow than after the September 11 attacks the following year. Reactions to the news of the attacks—not only of horror, anger and grief but also of jubilation and schadenfreude among some—concerned violations of fundamental moral prohibitions on the taking of innocent human life: violations denounced in all major religions, yet proclaimed by the perpetrators of the attacks and their leaders to have been divinely ordained. The scale and impact of the September attacks may have been unprecedented, but the violations were anything but novel in human history; and even as the planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, campaigns of terrorist killing were under way in conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia in the name of a variety of religions and belief systems.

Skepticism in the face of the rhetoric about common values is surely needed. Many values held forth as universal are demonstrably not shared; and the most fundamental values, such as rudimentary forms of nurturing and of curbs on violence, deceit and betrayal, are shared only in the sense that no society or even family could survive without them; but they are precisely not shared in another sense—that of being recognized by all as applying to outsiders, strangers, enemies. Still, the very fact that these values have had to arise everywhere offers a basis for dialogue about how to extend them, for rejecting practices such as slavery, terrorism, genocide and human sacrifice, and for critique of doctrines that endorse such practices.

As useful as healthy skepticism regarding the rhetoric of shared values may be, moreover, all-enveloping skepticism has dangers all its own. It can lead those disenchanted by inflated claims to swing over to imagining that societies in fact share no values whatsoever; and it can facilitate, in turn, passivity in the face of atrocities, on the ground that there can be no meaningful discourse about shared values or even understandings across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Such an attitude can facilitate, as well, blindness to the remarkable and innovative countervailing forces in support of basic values that have sprung up in the course of the past century. These countervailing forces bring to bear new institutions, movements, and resources of leadership, research and diplomacy, that are too often ignored by those who sum up the record of the twentieth century as one of unparalleled warfare, genocide, and totalitarianism.¹ For even as hatred and violence have flourished in the twentieth century, so movements have arisen in response to these threats. Just as technological advances in weaponry and industry have magnified the threats, so technology has come to the aid of nonviolent and restorative means of combating them. Non-governmental groups are using the Internet to mobilize efforts such as that to ban land mines or to combat the resurgence of child kidnapping and slavery. And research has accelerated on ways to resolve conflicts, foster restorative institutional change, and protect human rights.

In the past decade, moreover, new resources have come into being that could contribute greatly to a collective effort to deal with the forms of violence that now ravage communities the world over. We can now draw on the experience of the International Criminal Tribunals in Rwanda and Former Yugoslavia, of the Truth Commissions beginning in 1974, and especially on that of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.² We are learning to recognize the ways in which basic values can be thwarted and eroded, and how violence can take over human mind. New information comes to light each year from fields as different as neurology, genetics, primate studies, public health, psychiatry, and politics, about the effects of indoctrination into growing tolerance for violence, pitilessness toward victims, sometimes sheer pleasure in killing.³

Nothing assures that these countervailing forces will win out; yet to neglect them is to invite needless and debilitating fatalism with respect to what the future holds in store, and a standing aside, a choice to be merely a spectator, not a participant, in times of crisis. The assault on fundamental values by perpetrators of the September 11 attacks has contributed to a sobering rethinking of the most sweeping claims regarding the scope of shared values, but also to a recognition of their indispensable role as societies consider how best to marshal collective efforts in response to threats that confront them all. As Secretary General Kofi Annan stated in his Nobel Lecture, three months after the attacks:

We have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire. If today—after the horror of September 11—we see better and we see further, we will realize that humanity is indivisible. New threats make no distinction between races, nations, or regions. A new insecurity has entered every mind, regardless of wealth or status. A deeper awareness of the bonds that bind us all . . . has gripped young and old.⁴

Reports indicate that the September 11 attacks brought about a shift in priorities in personal as well as in collective life: a rethinking of what values matter most directly for purposes of survival and thriving. Such reactions went far beyond the instinctive first response of self-protection and of reaching out to immediate victims. People reassessed not only their travel plans but also their commitments to work, family, and community life. In the international debate, many argue that the new sense of urgency must govern not only immediate responses of self-protection against aggression but efforts to deal with life-threatening conditions of poverty, disease, and humanitarian emergencies world-wide. The question for the future will be one of how lasting and how far-reaching such reactions will be. As Joseph Stiglitz has put it,

September 11 has resulted in a global alliance against terrorism. What we now need is not just an alliance against evil, but an alliance for something positive—a global alliance for reducing poverty and for creating a better environment, an alliance for creating a global society with more social justice.⁵

1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), p. 13; and Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cap, 1999).
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2. Desmond Mpilo Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (Doubleday, 1999).
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3. See my Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment (Perseus Books, 1998).
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4. Kofi Annan, Nobel Lecture, Oslo, December 10, 2001.
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5. Joseph E. Stiglitz, "Globalism's Discontents," The American Prospect, Winter 2002, Special Supplement, p. A21.
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