On her book A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace
Cover Interview of February 06, 2019
Lastly
As the adage goes, if UNESCO did not exist, we would have to
invent it. Without its contributions in the fields of education, science, and
culture it is all too easy to imagine a world in ruins.
Yet despite their initial good intentions, many
international organizations like UNESCO are struggling or have failed to
implement their vision to improve the lot of great swathes of the world.
Whether in the fields of environment and climate change, economic development,
global health, or human rights, the impediments to international organizations
are most often their member states. Perhaps it should not be surprising then
that World Heritage has become so contentious. Culture and heritage are
supposed to constitute a benign forum for soft power negotiations, but in fact
they are intimately sutured to identity, sovereignty, territory, and history-making,
with ever more fraught and fatal consequences. As UNESCO’s highly visible
flagship program, the stamp of World Heritage may prove to be both the source
and the solution to that dilemma.
UNESCO’s appeals to one-worldism and universality were
ambitious and legible in the aftermath of a world war. For better or worse, the
commitment that UNESCO embodies has been accompanied by an unshakeable
confidence in the possibility of human improvement and an optimistic adherence
to its mission.
Perhaps the real and unstated problem is that we imagine
international organizations to be more powerful than they really are and expect
them to deliver on impossible promises. Collectively we expect that they can be
better than we can as individuals. The utopian dream of UNESCO, while not
fatally flawed, was nonetheless tainted by the same human history and politics
that it sought to overcome. Emerging from dystopia, the organization would
advance its mission over the next seventy years in the best of times and the
worst of times.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
As the adage goes, if UNESCO did not exist, we would have to invent it. Without its contributions in the fields of education, science, and culture it is all too easy to imagine a world in ruins.
Yet despite their initial good intentions, many international organizations like UNESCO are struggling or have failed to implement their vision to improve the lot of great swathes of the world. Whether in the fields of environment and climate change, economic development, global health, or human rights, the impediments to international organizations are most often their member states. Perhaps it should not be surprising then that World Heritage has become so contentious. Culture and heritage are supposed to constitute a benign forum for soft power negotiations, but in fact they are intimately sutured to identity, sovereignty, territory, and history-making, with ever more fraught and fatal consequences. As UNESCO’s highly visible flagship program, the stamp of World Heritage may prove to be both the source and the solution to that dilemma.
UNESCO’s appeals to one-worldism and universality were ambitious and legible in the aftermath of a world war. For better or worse, the commitment that UNESCO embodies has been accompanied by an unshakeable confidence in the possibility of human improvement and an optimistic adherence to its mission.
Perhaps the real and unstated problem is that we imagine international organizations to be more powerful than they really are and expect them to deliver on impossible promises. Collectively we expect that they can be better than we can as individuals. The utopian dream of UNESCO, while not fatally flawed, was nonetheless tainted by the same human history and politics that it sought to overcome. Emerging from dystopia, the organization would advance its mission over the next seventy years in the best of times and the worst of times.