“The great challenge of our time is to build open and cosmopolitan societies in a dialogue where shared values build a universal citizenship”
Dr. Santiago José Castellà Surribas
Santiago Castellà, full academician of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), appeals to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948 in Paris, as a foundation of a new morality that allows a respectful and free coexistence in a world as plural as globalized. This was stated during the 2nd World Summit on Integration for Peace (Cumipaz), held in Panama from October 16 to 21. Castellà presented the conference “La mirada al Holocausto: hacia una pedagogía activa de los Derechos Humanos” (The look to the Holocaust: towards an active pedagogy of Human Rights) in the session “Educación para la paz integral” (Education for integral peace). Cumipaz hosts more than a hundred personalities of current social and political relevance to advance proposals for peace before international organizations.
For Castellà, “the great challenge of our time is to build open and cosmopolitan societies that, in the face of populism, allow us to live in diversity, from the free and autonomous construction of our identities, in a dialogue where shared values build a universal citizenship. In order to achieve this, a progressive pedagogy of human rights is required: it’s the key to open and peaceful coexistence, based on the enlightened values of freedom, equality and fraternity and on the principle of the dignity of the human person as the founder of a new global, universal and cosmopolitan international order”.
The academician reviewed the great failures of a modernity that stood for reason, from the Holocaust to Hiroshima and the gulag. Although he expressed his confidence that precisely this “chastened reason” would be able to establish the minimum universal precepts for peaceful coexistence in times of new religious-based totalitarianism, populism and nihilism. “The possibility of closed, self-referenced, supportive spaces of excluding worldviews is today more than ever a reality of a fracture of universalism, which calls for the formulation of a new citizen ethic built on an ethics of individual and collective responsibility capable of overcoming conflict between private interests”, argued Castellà.
Globalization and social networks, far from bringing cultures, societies and individuals together, can atomize them more, according to the academician. “The process of contemporary globalization, based on the immediacy and deterritorialization in network or cloud of social relations has led to extreme individualism and an identity neonomadismo in which traditional forms of containment, such as family, work, culture or class”, he concluded.
