A glance at history tells us that humankind can be both noble and cruel.
My wife was in Kraków in Poland last week and she visited Auschwitz while she was there. It is now a museum of cruelty, a monument to our ability as human beings to organise and inflict incredible brutality on each other simply because of who our parents are. And at the same time we read about incredible acts of bravery like in Schindler's List.
I may be getting old, but I am beginning to lose my
unfailing belief in the basic integrity of human nature. I have always believed
that most people come to work with a desire to do a good job, that the basic
human position is one of honesty and good intent. I am less sure of this as I look around the
world and in recent history see continued acts of aggression, cruelty and
selfish exploration of other people. In
Bosnia and Rwanda, in Somalia and Nigeria, in the towns and cities of Britain,
we have seen and heard stories of people inflicting cruelty on other people on
an organised and persistent scale. I am drawn to the conclusion that context is
everything and that we are influenced by those around us, by our parents, our
peers, our religion, our ancestry and our political context more than we might
like to think.
For us to break free of these influences requires courage
and persistence. But before that is possible we need to have seen a glimmer of
an alternative, a possible world of tolerance, respect and peacefulness. I
suspect for many young people in our society this glimmer is hardly visible.
The option to believe in a different approach, to question religious and
cultural context, to challenge the 'truths' our parents and older role models
fed us when we were young, is not always that accessible to young people. If that's true in highly controlled societies
such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and parts of the USA, it's almost certainly true in
parts of the UK, where religious and social conditioning are pervasive.
We need to enable our young people to make
up their own minds and where appropriate to choose a route which is not
necessarily that suggested by their context.
This requires less conditioning of our young
people and a more liberal and balanced approach to education. It needs less
polemic and more inquiry. We can start by insisting on a balanced education for
our young people, full of
exploration, discussion and the encouragement of independent thinking.
We need to focus more and more on the principles of what
we value in the UK such as respect for others, hard work, tolerance and freedom
of expression. As many parts of the world seem to be moving towards bigotry and intolerance of alternative views, we need to be making a stand for
the opposite. We can appeal to the
positive tendencies in our human nature, offering a route through life that is
characterised by harmony, truth and peace.