Why do people normally refrain from stealing from the local supermarket? Why do roommates try to respect each other’s boundaries? The answer to these questions seems obvious at first sight: we all live in societies where members have rights and duties. But where do these norms come from? The origin of human morality is hard to verify. However, a moral crisis—amid our inability to stop the violence in the Middle East, for example—compels us to revisit local tensions we are able to control. To achieve global peace, we need to first understand what made local peace possible.
Philosophical and religious foundations
The trade-off between rights and duties is understood as a social contract, a theory developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an eighteenth-century philosopher whose works inspired the French Revolution. Because the eighteenth century is referred to as the Age of Enlightenment, people thinking about rights tend to forget that theories on social contracts emerged from a reflection on human feelings, not reason. Rousseau despised the rationalism of his century and emphasized the heart over the mind. His social contract was a continuation of his earlier theory on “noble savages” who, according to him, were “perfectible” (improvable) and imbued with a natural capacity for sympathy that led them to embrace collaboration as an alternative to violence.
This myth about human nature led nineteenth-century French voices to call for the abolition of the death penalty. A growing consciousness among philosophers, artists, and scientists about the notion of humanity—and the special privileges accorded it—led them to believe that no state had the legal authority to kill a human being. The two most famous French authors in the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo and George Sand (the pen name of Amantine Dupin), believed capital punishment was never justifiable, following Rousseau in valuing that human beings are rational and social animals who can learn from their mistakes and are naturally capable of living in societies.
Today, 112 countries have abolished the death penalty. While activists have cited existing legal frameworks, such as specific articles from the United Nations, including the right to life and the right to live free from degrading or cruel punishment, it is important to regard the legal turn against capital punishment as the product of a much longer historical process in which both West and East—loosely understood—played an equal part.
Both philosophical and religious discourses have shaped the way people understand judgment, forgiveness, and humanity. Western philosophies and Eastern religions developed fixed principles to more rationally organize societies, believing that humanity was special enough not to have to live according to the “laws of the jungle” where the strong triumph over the weak. Even as some societies have become less attached to such philosophical or religious traditions, their perspectives on topics like capital punishment remain shaped by philosophical myths in which humankind is naturally good and religious myths in which human reason is fallible and needs merciful deities to judge it.
Rethinking global conflicts today
A global world with peace means extending the logic behind our disapproval of capital punishment beyond national borders. As a researcher in comparative literature, I analyze not only certain discourses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but also how they are repeated today. Since the Hamas attack on Israel last year and the subsequent Israeli wars against Gaza and Lebanon, I have been struck by the resurgence of a discourse on civilization that both borrows and modifies the way human nature was understood in past centuries.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the first to frame his war on Hamas as a struggle between the “enlightened world” and “savages.” Politicians and journalists around the world repeated his views. For example, when the International Criminal Court issued—and later received—a request for arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas representatives, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned “the sense of an equivalency between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the bloodthirsty terrorists that lead up Hamas.”
Both Netanyahu and Trudeau used a dichotomous way of thinking to comment on human nature. While they repeat philosophical views on savagery inherited from the eighteenth century, they no longer reckon with the rational arrogance that prompted Rousseau to imagine a noble savage who was not opposed to civilization but had been the one who first created it. Western journalists have also borrowed and distorted religious discourse on final judgments when, for example, a columnist for the Toronto Star used an apocalyptic tone in her op-ed about Gaza and concluded we should “condemn Hamas to hell.”
Ignoring the philosophical and religious principles that shaped their societies, Western supporters of Israel’s wars in the Middle East have demonstrated that the local laws and values they take for granted do not extend beyond national borders. Canadians and nationals of the UK and the EU logically violate their own national principles—which ban capital punishment—when they support Israel’s ongoing plan to bomb Hamas and Hezbollah into submission.
Bombs are only capable of destroying neighborhoods and dismembering human bodies. They do not bring anyone to justice, nor do they prompt us to think about long-term ways to deal with threats. That the United States and the UK do not negotiate with terrorists on principle contradicts a more long-standing biological and anthropological principle: our identity as homo sapiens, or wise apes. Humans inherited this label from the philosophers and prophets who celebrated the fact that, as a species, we are all—without exception—able to communicate to one another that peace is wiser than violence. No one is unreasonable, by definition.
Advocates of globalization—for example, transnational solidarity activists and the transnational corporations they are fighting—see the world as a “global village.” There have been signs of rolling back that project, including the rise of nationalism and Israel’s and the United States’ attacks on the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. However, the principles behind building a global village are the same principles that guarantee peace in local villages where the retributive justice of mafias is no longer welcome.
At a national level, in 112 countries, legislators have agreed that mass murderers cannot be met with state-sponsored violence, rejecting the eye-for-an-eye approach. This logic must be expanded to a global context in order to protect weaker states from stronger ones, avoid a cycle of violence, and make sure our global village does not recreate at a larger scale the jungles our ancestors left to build societies.
State-sponsored violence, even in self-defense, is an oxymoron and a refutation of state-building. If humans can kill each other, why live together? What underpins human civilization is sympathy, tolerance, and the bravery needed to convince others not to harm us because, in the long run, they are hurting themselves.
In the past year, many politicians, journalists, and heads of universities have forgotten about this unwritten social contract that created human civilization hundreds of thousands of years ago. They violated that principle ironically in the name of civilizations they forgot their ancestors already established. But the first and only civilization we have was never forced upon humanity: humans agreed to it, and humans—whoever they may be and whatever they have done—can still agree to it.