Health & Fitness
Compassion Speaks: Common Good
by M. Doretta Cornell, RDC
As promised in my last entry, here is a little reflection from my experience with the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) community at the United Nations.
At two recent discussions with members of religious communities that are also NGOs, a couple of themes kept recurring: the need to emphasize the common good, and the need for us as faith-based organizations to keep the moral and spiritual dimensions of the issues and situations in the forefront of deliberations.
These two themes are interwoven: moral and spiritual concerns lead us to the Common Good. Believing in God as creator of all people calls us to be aware of them, of reaching out in compassion to all as members of one family of human beings, with a moral obligation to seek their highest good, especially for those least able to provide for themselves.
The “Common Good,” is a foundational principle of the United Nations. Two selections from the preamble to the United Nations Charter spell out the reasons for its formation: “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small,” and “to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”
As each nation brings its own needs and strengths to the United Nations forum, we must all consider solutions that will also include the needs of all people, which demands we consider also the needs – and of Earth itself.
Besides responding to current crises around the world, from the violence in Syria, the cease-fire in the Congo, and humanitarian aid needed for earthquakes and other natural disasters, work toward international solutions to the underlying problems of 21st Century Earth goes on. You may remember my describing, in my June 2 entry here, the initial proposal for a follow-up to the Millennium Development Goals has a working title of “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies Through Sustainable Development.”
Various “Working Groups” are collecting ideas and guidelines for drafts of the major positions, and I am privileged to be on the Integrity of Earth Working Group, a subset of a large group.
We are preparing a statement to encourage the inclusion of moral principles of the Common Good in the efforts to increase participation in poorer nations and their people in better living conditions and a more peaceful world, while restoring and /or maintaining the environment on which we all depend.
In looking at any aspect of Earth’s resources, the call for seeking the common good is very clear. We have only one Earth, with one air supply, one unified water supply, one ecosystem of the whole Earth. In order to have any future, let alone to create “the world we want,” we must preserve and restore this “biosphere,” the slim layer of life-sustaining elements that is our planet’s surface and the atmosphere around it.
As we work to improve the lives of the poorest people, we must be more mindful of how any change will affect all of us, as well as Earth. China and India offer cautions: both are developing by depending heavily on the same polluting fossil fuels that earlier-industrializing countries, like ours, used. As a result, the current destruction of air, water, and soil continues and is exacerbated by the additional pollution of the billions of people emulating our destructive energy patterns.
The Common Good demands that we reach out to the billions of people living in dire poverty, but – first of all – we must reduce our own production of pollution, and then assist them to grow out of in ways that will foster the future of all life on Earth, not threaten it.
The climate change we have been accelerating demands even greater awareness of the interdependence of our actions and the future, not just of ourselves, but of the planet itself.
More and more nations around the world are coming to recognize this interdependence, and so the “core” of the next series of Goals for post-2015 is “sustainable development” – that is, development that will enhance the lives of all peoples in a way that ensures that future generations will have the resources they need.
Compassion can guide us here to see the very real needs of both people and planet, and recognize their needs as equally important to our needs, and as having a greater right to the basic requirements for a decent life than we have to our luxuries. We as Americans have an essential part to play in this future: unless we recognize the ways we overuse the world’s resources – from food to water, and especially energy – we will be a block to our own future and that of all human and non-human beings.