People often ask “What is Unite for Rights.” One of my favorite answers is “It’s humanity’s agreement to live together.”
The main reason I like this answer is that it shifts the conversation from the local, or national, to the international – or even to humanity as a whole.
It may seem impossible: humanity is so vast and varied, how could humans reach an agreement to live together? The answer: we can read and write. No other species on Earth can do this. Today we can combine this skill with technology to ask people, nonprofits, businesses and governments what rights they would want embodied in an International Bill of Rights, which is a written agreement to live together.
But what guide do we use to design this agreement? Beauty.
Many in the arts (and I broadly include actors, musicians, painters, authors, sculptors, and others), are our trendsetters. They are leaders ahead of our political representatives, and often our body politic too. They can ignite social movements, and they can be a catalyst for humanity to reach an agreement to live together.
There is a great scene in the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, by Steve Martin, that captures how beauty guides Unite as art.
The play takes place in a Paris bistro at the turn of the twentieth century. Picasso and Einstein are sitting in the bistro and a patron asks them what inspired them to achieve their breakthrough ideas in the fields of art and physics.
Einstein and Picasso pause and quietly mull over the question. Then Einstein blurts out that theories must be “beautiful” and a theory that the sun revolving around the Earth “is not beautiful enough.” Then they have this conversation about beautiful ideas:
PICASSO: So you’re saying you bring a beautiful idea into being?
EINSTEIN: Yes. We create a system and see if the facts can fit it.
PICASSO: So you’re not just describing the world as it is?
EINSTEIN: No! We are creating a new way of looking at the world!
PICASSO: So you’re saying you dream the impossible and put it into effect?
EINSTEIN: Exactly!
PICASSO: Brother!
EINSTEIN: Brother!
(Picasso and Einstein hug)
And so it is with our international social order — “it’s not beautiful enough.” Of course, there is some beauty in our social order, just as there was beauty in art and formulas prior to Picasso and Einstein. But often, as is evident from wars, destruction of Earth’s biosphere through climate change – even the minute-by-minute tragedies of children dying needlessly from lack of clean water, food, or decent health care — it is ugly.
As Picasso and Einstein did, it is time in our new millennium for us to “dream the impossible and put it into effect.” It is time for a new social order that is more beautiful: An International Bill of Rights enforceable in the courts of all countries would be more beautiful than the social order we have now.
So why don’t we act to create something more beautiful than what we already have? What do we need to step up in these times where even basic concepts such as judicial review are being undermined?
LEADERSHIP!
Humanity is failing to reach an agreement to live together because of a lack of leadership.
Usually when people think of a lack of leadership, they think of those at the top, elected or not, who are directing their lives. This is not the lack of leadership of which I’m thinking: I’m thinking of those in the middle and bottom of our social order who fail to act, even though they can. Those who read this and do nothing.
When Einstein said: “The problems of the world do not exist, because of the evil people, but because of the good people who do nothing about them”, he was identifying the core of the problem. Authoritarianism is not on the rise because it is inevitable, it is because we are not doing enough to prevent it.
True, among humans there will always be brutes who rise to power with physical force. But in the early days, as homo sapiens were evolving, when a brute would rise to power and attempt to control others, the others would kill him. I am not condoning killing brutes who rise to power – non-violence is a core tenet of the Unite movement – civil disobedience, yes, violence no.
The powerful act is the pursuit if beauty, to dare to think of the most beautiful system possible that would constrain brutes. It’s time to think courageously and assertively. Most people, even those pursuing human rights and environmental protection, are self constrained by their limited view of what might be. They are using their perception of practicality, not beauty, to be their guide. We can do better with beauty.
Again, as Picasso and Einstein exchange, beauty is the guide.
PICASSO: So you’re saying you bring a beautiful idea into being?
EINSTEIN: Yes. We create a system and see if the facts can fit it.
PICASSO: So you’re not just describing the world as it is?
EINSTEIN: No! We are creating a new way of looking at the world!
PICASSO: So you’re saying you dream the impossible and put it into effect?
EINSTEIN: Exactly!
Thinking about what might be most beautiful is the answer to getting ourselves beyond what we are. It’s how humanity can reach an agreement to live together.
Thank you for being a leader, and getting on the globe.
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