“It’s not just about resigning and renouncing violence, but about seeking a social contract for harmony”
Ernesto Kahan, honorary academician of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), insists on the need and urgency to educate in peace and tolerance to avoid the wars that plague Humanity without progress or lessons from the past have served to put an end to new conflicts. “The Preamble to the Unesco Charter states that wars are born in the minds of men, so it’s in the minds of men that the bastions of peace must be built, a new culture of education for the peace towards love, harmony and tolerance is the great challenge for intellectuals”, says the thinker in the article “Paz, su significado en la actualidad” (Peace, its meaning in the present), of recent appearance.
Ernesto Kahan
Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as international vice president of the Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Kahan believes that, in the end, the conclusion is simple: “We have to sign up for a crusade for peace. It’is not easy, but it’s not a utopia: the rulers, intellectuals, artists, journalists, educators and the general public should demand that policy and attitude”. “Never in all of history has man been as powerful as he has today to dominate nature and he was never so close to destroying himself and nature. Man has never made so many technological and scientific advances that in today’s world, but there is a lot of inequality of opportunities and terrible misery. In the world, every day, 24,000 people die of hunger”, continues the academician with his argument.
Kahan calls for awareness to understand that tolerance, active or passive, for difference implies a high degree of displeasure or annoyance that is necessary to assume at all levels and that should be the basis of teaching respect. “Obviously, tolerant acceptance must be the rational response to some kind of benefit or the requirements of a social contract, which in turn is also the result of a beneficial agreement for the parties that must tolerate each other -he says-. Active tolerance requires not only resignation and renunciation of the use of violence against the contrary, but an insistent search for the achievement of a social contract for harmony”.
