stock is supposed to be inspiring it’s
supposed to give you hope it’s supposed
to present an enticing picture of the
endless potential of our generation this
is not one of those talks if you read
the news at all you already know that
the world is a pretty terrible place
around us right now and if you think I’m
here to impart any form of optimism you
would be sadly mistaken in fact over the
course of the next 15 or so minutes I’m
going to take you through exactly how
bad things are around us today then I
will present you with something off with
me a little mind game and I’ll let you
engage with a small intellectual paradox
at the end of which I hope that you will
realize that things are much worse than
you had previously imagined because for
frankly for all the area Edition that
comes from peace and security
professionals like myself from students
from even statesmen and politicians we
have brought the world to a point of
abject failure our freedoms are under
attack everywhere today from tyranny
from political violence from civil war
from the violence of men against women
from our unjust social sexual political
economic relations around the world the
arc of the moral universe as Martin
Luther King jr. might have put it no
longer seems to bend towards justice
when I started working with the chemical
weapons treaty organization in The Hague
that was the time when we had first
started receiving images of children
having been killed by chemical weapons
in Syria now the reports told us that
sarin had been used if you know anything
about sarin it is one of the world’s
deadliest nerve agents a nerve agent
basically means it’s it’s it’s a kind of
chemical weapon that attacks your
nervous system and it can make the body
convulse or spasm so hard that often
people spines can snap into so you can
imagine if the reports turned out to be
true if a weapon of that form had been
used on children how terrible situation
must have been then I found myself
having the honor of working with the
United Nations peacekeeping mission in
South Sudan it is the world’s youngest
country I was there on the eve of
fifth Independence Day when we’d been in
town just a few hours earlier we had
returned to the base and we started
getting reports that shooting had
started in the center of the city where
we had just been those reports very
quickly turned into actual sounds of
gunfire adjacent to our base and then
over the course of the next few days we
worked from under our desks from inside
our house staying away from the windows
got in a crossfire of tank fire and
attack helicopters and rocket-propelled
grenades and gun battles it was a
terrible it was a terrible battle in the
in the capital city it killed many many
South Sudanese people it also took the
lives and claimed the lives of brave UN
peacekeepers who were standing between
civilians and war especially between the
displaced and those who were attacking
them but that was just one war around
the world today there are 40 active
conflicts we are States are spending
2000 billion u.s. dollars on military
expenditures every year this is at a
time when the United Nations estimates
that all we need for our aid
requirements over the course of 2018 is
22 billion dollars we are spending 2,000
billion dollars and defense systems as
States when we have the needs of 40
million refugees around the world today
and that’s that’s all all it would take
to help all of these people would be 22
billion climate change is happening very
much around us
it’s annihilating our future it’s
annihilating the potential of our future
generations but it’s also fueling the
Wars of today as we saw very clearly in
Darfur there are trust between
governments and people seems to be
breaking down sometimes as violently and
obviously as in a civil war situation
such as the one that I described but
sometimes also expressed in movements
for change such as the Arab Spring or
the women’s march on Washington DC but I
promised you at the very outset of this
talk that I was here to make things even
worse so here it is this is what really
blew my mind as a political scientist as
someone who is working in international
peace and security I started thinking
about political violence and crisis and
where it might have its origins and
– what substantial impact we could
possibly make as ordinary people working
in this field and I started to wonder
what crisis was inevitable and here’s
the paradox that I’m presenting to you
today the entire history of ethical
philosophy so far seems to be geared
towards one thing making us more free
free from what free from the constraints
of old social norms old conventions free
from the constraints of religion it has
told us that what we hold so dearly is
our moral and ethical ideas actually
don’t come from a divine force they
don’t come from the state of nature they
don’t come from anything natural they
certainly don’t come from any meaning in
the universe this is philosophy first in
the rena saw it resisted the authority
of the church and then later on the post
modernists resisted the authority of
society they told us that the universe
was without purpose that it was
meaningless and this universe that is
made up of Stardust and mater was
tendered more towards chaos and entropy
than anything else that my friends is
what you call a full-blown existential
crisis in fact the contextual ‘ti of our
norms the fact that our moral values
come from whatever city we live in at
that point whatever time of history we
are in became very clear to me so when I
was working on chemical disarmament I
learned that there was a time in history
when poisoned bullets were actually
considered more humane than ordinary
bullets because if you fired at someone
with a poisoned bullet it would kill
them instead of leaving them mortally
injured in the battlefield with an
injury or in pain or a long period of
torture things that we consider taboo
now had at some point the moral
validation of the authorities of the
time there were debates about whether
women were fully human whether they
should be burned at the stake as witches
live slavery at some point was legal
women did not have the right to vote so
what do you do and this is if all we are
in our lives are a cluster of atoms that
is perched on a wet rock hurtling
through empty orbits of endless dust
what how do we decide what is right and
wrong how do we choose careers for
ourselves
in an area which which necessarily
entails us to uphold certain ethical
values what do you do what do we mean in
a meaningless universe without morality
when we say as a generation as and as
young people that we are going to change
the world let me make it slightly worse
if you read history you will realize
that it has never moved in a single
trajectory towards any certain idea
whether it’s more freedom or more
prosperity or more equality all empires
rise and they ultimately fall all
greatness is ultimately decimated and
all victories are ultimately lost what
do you do what do I do
as someone who works in United Nations
offices where I have been mandated to
uphold the charter of our collective
security as States and as our rights as
people here’s what I do I fight anyway
and that’s for three reasons number one
we fight for our own survival granted
there are moral ideas and our values do
not come from a divine force or from the
state of nature or from the universe but
we need stable fair just liberal
governments and systems of ethics
because we have seen what happens when
the social contract breaks down we’ve
seen what happens in places like South
Sudan we see civil war happen sexual
violence happens the threat of nuclear
weapons looming large over our heads
secondly because we are responsible for
this mess now I I told you the very out
said this was not going to be a
moralizing talk I’m not here to tell you
that we should fight the good fight for
our common humanity or what John Lennon
would call the good will of our common
man none of those things we should be
responsible because we created this mess
whatever our jobs are whether we are
engineers or lawyers or or statesmen or
bureaucrats or teachers or scientists we
go about our daily lives we go back to
our jobs we create and recreate we do
nothing and we create and recreate a
world in which children die of weapons
of mass destruction and they die and
they die
Civil War in which they have no stick
let us be very clear that war is not a
moral problem the violations of our
human rights are not a moral problem
either they emerge from unjust political
and economic relations that we sustain
either through our active involvement or
through our silence and thirdly I fight
we fight as a generation because we can
never before in the history of our
planet as a generation been as connected
and as enthusiastic and as skilled as
this once never before has it had the
critical resources or the insights to
actually change the world for things
that matter to ourselves and never
before have we had more of a head start
on the struggle and this is where I have
tremendous school because yes we may be
sitting on a ridiculous arsenal of
16,000 nuclear weapons in our states
probably the more alarming number is 900
million small arms in circulation
everywhere but we have also for the
first time last year’s signed the treaty
on the prohibition of nuclear weapons
the world’s first legally binding
agreement to outlaw this most
destructive of weapons of mass
destruction I work in the United Nations
I would be the first person to tell you
that a charter or a mandate by itself is
just a piece of paper and it does
nothing to change the world but from
what I have seen in my experience with
chemical disarmament is sometimes an
agreement of this sort can be exactly
the rallying call that countries need to
put their weight behind an ideal that in
the case of chemical weapons can become
a tipping point and a red line for
situations like Syria yes
we live in a time of abject poverty but
the number of people living in extreme
poverty has declined by half from 2
billion people in 1990 to about 800
million now largely in part through a
collective effort under the UN’s
Millennium Development Goals yes we are
confronted with the specter of climate
change but for the first time ever we
have realized that we have more more
energy more power in our deserts and in
our winds and in the
waves of our oceans than we could
possibly dream of consuming in this
generation and in the next yes we are
fighting over 40 conflicts around the
world today as I said earlier but fewer
people have died from war in the first
decade of the 21st century than in any
decade of the 20th century states of the
world have put their way behind the UN’s
effort to help 40 million refugees
fleeing war and famine and persecution
around the world they have sent a
hundred and twenty thousand peacekeepers
drawn from 120 countries to 16
peacekeeping operations on four
different continents where other people
cannot and will not go yes we have the
shared pain of a movement like me too
and this collective sense that we have
all been victimized by the violent by
sexual violence at some point in our
lives but also the universally cathartic
relief that light has finally been shown
on the dark crevices and the dark rooms
of long repressed and long unpunished
injustice yes we have more images of
racism now but we have more solidarity
under movements like black lives matter
yes we have more complicated conflicts
but we are having louder conversations
let us not fool ourselves that our
generation is standing alone at the
brink of an apocalypse the tide of
injustice has ebbed and flowed through
all of history with an almost boring
routine
there are times before us when things
were much worse did the generation that
stood on the brink of World War two that
saw the Holocaust probably had a much
deeper sense of nihilist doom than we do
now they probably didn’t call it an
existential crisis but you can imagine
it was much worse than one that we are
having now we are not alone in this
fight we the struggle against it has
never been easy
it looks more difficult now because we
feel like all of our dearly held ideals
whether they were liberal world views or
whether they were equality or whether
they were ideas like racism that had
become taboo at a certain point of time
it’s more difficult to resist them now
because somewhere along the lines things
changed but the fight for this worldview
has always been difficult it is not
uniquely challenged now it
has always been contested people have
been jailed for human standing up for
human rights as long as jails have
existed and prosecuted throughout the
breadth of our world and through the
length of our history we currently have
more resources than we have ever had to
bring about a fundamental change for the
things that we believe in we need the
struggle for our own survival we need it
because frankly hiding behind nihilistic
complacency is actually an act of
cowardice and we need to stand up for
the freedom of other people so that we
ourselves can be free [Applause]
supposed to give you hope it’s supposed
to present an enticing picture of the
endless potential of our generation this
is not one of those talks if you read
the news at all you already know that
the world is a pretty terrible place
around us right now and if you think I’m
here to impart any form of optimism you
would be sadly mistaken in fact over the
course of the next 15 or so minutes I’m
going to take you through exactly how
bad things are around us today then I
will present you with something off with
me a little mind game and I’ll let you
engage with a small intellectual paradox
at the end of which I hope that you will
realize that things are much worse than
you had previously imagined because for
frankly for all the area Edition that
comes from peace and security
professionals like myself from students
from even statesmen and politicians we
have brought the world to a point of
abject failure our freedoms are under
attack everywhere today from tyranny
from political violence from civil war
from the violence of men against women
from our unjust social sexual political
economic relations around the world the
arc of the moral universe as Martin
Luther King jr. might have put it no
longer seems to bend towards justice
when I started working with the chemical
weapons treaty organization in The Hague
that was the time when we had first
started receiving images of children
having been killed by chemical weapons
in Syria now the reports told us that
sarin had been used if you know anything
about sarin it is one of the world’s
deadliest nerve agents a nerve agent
basically means it’s it’s it’s a kind of
chemical weapon that attacks your
nervous system and it can make the body
convulse or spasm so hard that often
people spines can snap into so you can
imagine if the reports turned out to be
true if a weapon of that form had been
used on children how terrible situation
must have been then I found myself
having the honor of working with the
United Nations peacekeeping mission in
South Sudan it is the world’s youngest
country I was there on the eve of
fifth Independence Day when we’d been in
town just a few hours earlier we had
returned to the base and we started
getting reports that shooting had
started in the center of the city where
we had just been those reports very
quickly turned into actual sounds of
gunfire adjacent to our base and then
over the course of the next few days we
worked from under our desks from inside
our house staying away from the windows
got in a crossfire of tank fire and
attack helicopters and rocket-propelled
grenades and gun battles it was a
terrible it was a terrible battle in the
in the capital city it killed many many
South Sudanese people it also took the
lives and claimed the lives of brave UN
peacekeepers who were standing between
civilians and war especially between the
displaced and those who were attacking
them but that was just one war around
the world today there are 40 active
conflicts we are States are spending
2000 billion u.s. dollars on military
expenditures every year this is at a
time when the United Nations estimates
that all we need for our aid
requirements over the course of 2018 is
22 billion dollars we are spending 2,000
billion dollars and defense systems as
States when we have the needs of 40
million refugees around the world today
and that’s that’s all all it would take
to help all of these people would be 22
billion climate change is happening very
much around us
it’s annihilating our future it’s
annihilating the potential of our future
generations but it’s also fueling the
Wars of today as we saw very clearly in
Darfur there are trust between
governments and people seems to be
breaking down sometimes as violently and
obviously as in a civil war situation
such as the one that I described but
sometimes also expressed in movements
for change such as the Arab Spring or
the women’s march on Washington DC but I
promised you at the very outset of this
talk that I was here to make things even
worse so here it is this is what really
blew my mind as a political scientist as
someone who is working in international
peace and security I started thinking
about political violence and crisis and
where it might have its origins and
– what substantial impact we could
possibly make as ordinary people working
in this field and I started to wonder
what crisis was inevitable and here’s
the paradox that I’m presenting to you
today the entire history of ethical
philosophy so far seems to be geared
towards one thing making us more free
free from what free from the constraints
of old social norms old conventions free
from the constraints of religion it has
told us that what we hold so dearly is
our moral and ethical ideas actually
don’t come from a divine force they
don’t come from the state of nature they
don’t come from anything natural they
certainly don’t come from any meaning in
the universe this is philosophy first in
the rena saw it resisted the authority
of the church and then later on the post
modernists resisted the authority of
society they told us that the universe
was without purpose that it was
meaningless and this universe that is
made up of Stardust and mater was
tendered more towards chaos and entropy
than anything else that my friends is
what you call a full-blown existential
crisis in fact the contextual ‘ti of our
norms the fact that our moral values
come from whatever city we live in at
that point whatever time of history we
are in became very clear to me so when I
was working on chemical disarmament I
learned that there was a time in history
when poisoned bullets were actually
considered more humane than ordinary
bullets because if you fired at someone
with a poisoned bullet it would kill
them instead of leaving them mortally
injured in the battlefield with an
injury or in pain or a long period of
torture things that we consider taboo
now had at some point the moral
validation of the authorities of the
time there were debates about whether
women were fully human whether they
should be burned at the stake as witches
live slavery at some point was legal
women did not have the right to vote so
what do you do and this is if all we are
in our lives are a cluster of atoms that
is perched on a wet rock hurtling
through empty orbits of endless dust
what how do we decide what is right and
wrong how do we choose careers for
ourselves
in an area which which necessarily
entails us to uphold certain ethical
values what do you do what do we mean in
a meaningless universe without morality
when we say as a generation as and as
young people that we are going to change
the world let me make it slightly worse
if you read history you will realize
that it has never moved in a single
trajectory towards any certain idea
whether it’s more freedom or more
prosperity or more equality all empires
rise and they ultimately fall all
greatness is ultimately decimated and
all victories are ultimately lost what
do you do what do I do
as someone who works in United Nations
offices where I have been mandated to
uphold the charter of our collective
security as States and as our rights as
people here’s what I do I fight anyway
and that’s for three reasons number one
we fight for our own survival granted
there are moral ideas and our values do
not come from a divine force or from the
state of nature or from the universe but
we need stable fair just liberal
governments and systems of ethics
because we have seen what happens when
the social contract breaks down we’ve
seen what happens in places like South
Sudan we see civil war happen sexual
violence happens the threat of nuclear
weapons looming large over our heads
secondly because we are responsible for
this mess now I I told you the very out
said this was not going to be a
moralizing talk I’m not here to tell you
that we should fight the good fight for
our common humanity or what John Lennon
would call the good will of our common
man none of those things we should be
responsible because we created this mess
whatever our jobs are whether we are
engineers or lawyers or or statesmen or
bureaucrats or teachers or scientists we
go about our daily lives we go back to
our jobs we create and recreate we do
nothing and we create and recreate a
world in which children die of weapons
of mass destruction and they die and
they die
Civil War in which they have no stick
let us be very clear that war is not a
moral problem the violations of our
human rights are not a moral problem
either they emerge from unjust political
and economic relations that we sustain
either through our active involvement or
through our silence and thirdly I fight
we fight as a generation because we can
never before in the history of our
planet as a generation been as connected
and as enthusiastic and as skilled as
this once never before has it had the
critical resources or the insights to
actually change the world for things
that matter to ourselves and never
before have we had more of a head start
on the struggle and this is where I have
tremendous school because yes we may be
sitting on a ridiculous arsenal of
16,000 nuclear weapons in our states
probably the more alarming number is 900
million small arms in circulation
everywhere but we have also for the
first time last year’s signed the treaty
on the prohibition of nuclear weapons
the world’s first legally binding
agreement to outlaw this most
destructive of weapons of mass
destruction I work in the United Nations
I would be the first person to tell you
that a charter or a mandate by itself is
just a piece of paper and it does
nothing to change the world but from
what I have seen in my experience with
chemical disarmament is sometimes an
agreement of this sort can be exactly
the rallying call that countries need to
put their weight behind an ideal that in
the case of chemical weapons can become
a tipping point and a red line for
situations like Syria yes
we live in a time of abject poverty but
the number of people living in extreme
poverty has declined by half from 2
billion people in 1990 to about 800
million now largely in part through a
collective effort under the UN’s
Millennium Development Goals yes we are
confronted with the specter of climate
change but for the first time ever we
have realized that we have more more
energy more power in our deserts and in
our winds and in the
waves of our oceans than we could
possibly dream of consuming in this
generation and in the next yes we are
fighting over 40 conflicts around the
world today as I said earlier but fewer
people have died from war in the first
decade of the 21st century than in any
decade of the 20th century states of the
world have put their way behind the UN’s
effort to help 40 million refugees
fleeing war and famine and persecution
around the world they have sent a
hundred and twenty thousand peacekeepers
drawn from 120 countries to 16
peacekeeping operations on four
different continents where other people
cannot and will not go yes we have the
shared pain of a movement like me too
and this collective sense that we have
all been victimized by the violent by
sexual violence at some point in our
lives but also the universally cathartic
relief that light has finally been shown
on the dark crevices and the dark rooms
of long repressed and long unpunished
injustice yes we have more images of
racism now but we have more solidarity
under movements like black lives matter
yes we have more complicated conflicts
but we are having louder conversations
let us not fool ourselves that our
generation is standing alone at the
brink of an apocalypse the tide of
injustice has ebbed and flowed through
all of history with an almost boring
routine
there are times before us when things
were much worse did the generation that
stood on the brink of World War two that
saw the Holocaust probably had a much
deeper sense of nihilist doom than we do
now they probably didn’t call it an
existential crisis but you can imagine
it was much worse than one that we are
having now we are not alone in this
fight we the struggle against it has
never been easy
it looks more difficult now because we
feel like all of our dearly held ideals
whether they were liberal world views or
whether they were equality or whether
they were ideas like racism that had
become taboo at a certain point of time
it’s more difficult to resist them now
because somewhere along the lines things
changed but the fight for this worldview
has always been difficult it is not
uniquely challenged now it
has always been contested people have
been jailed for human standing up for
human rights as long as jails have
existed and prosecuted throughout the
breadth of our world and through the
length of our history we currently have
more resources than we have ever had to
bring about a fundamental change for the
things that we believe in we need the
struggle for our own survival we need it
because frankly hiding behind nihilistic
complacency is actually an act of
cowardice and we need to stand up for
the freedom of other people so that we
ourselves can be free [Applause]
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