Building A Moral Renaissance in 2023 | Opinion

The future is always something of a foreign country; ours, at the end of 2022, looks especially uncertain. Between the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, inflation, economic volatility and extreme weather, many around the world are casting worried eyes on 2023. This year's United Nations Human Development Report describes an emerging "uncertainty complex," in which forces like climate change and polarization not only drive uncertainty on their own, but interact with each other in new ways that further amplify our sense of insecurity. This new complex has caused negative views of the world to surge across societies.

Luckily, human beings are built to wrest order out of chaos, hope out of despair. Stability is an achievement, but one that we have reached many times before. For example, the postwar stability of Europe—stability that Vladimir Putin is trying mightily to shatter—was an achievement of robust institutions like the European Union and NATO. Future stability will likewise be a hard-won achievement. We should take a careful look at what authentic renewal would really require.

Many people, from the UN secretary general on down, have called for urgent action and new institutions capable of responding to global challenges. However, these calls have fallen short of their aspirations because they lack the moral vigor that directed the construction of the first generation of postwar institutions.

The UN, EU, and NATO were founded upon moral principles. Their creation was not simply an exercise in the efficient application of scientific or technical know-how, but a moral achievement, rooted in the universal principles of human rights, dignity, equality, and self-determination. Retooling these institutions to tackle today's uncertainties will require more than a download of the latest technocratic software updates. It will require a wholesale reinvigoration of the moral principles upon which they were founded.

As Alan Jacobs has shown in his book The Year of Our Lord 1943, we have an example in the work of Western writers following the catastrophe of the Second World War. Their names are still familiar: Auden, Eliot, Weil, Maritain, and others. Even before the war ended they focused on vital questions about the type of education that would make young people and future generations "worthy of that victory." They aimed to clarify the moral and spiritual basis upon which to build a humane postwar order that would make another world war unthinkable.

They were not just armchair theoreticians. Jacques Maritain, for example, along with figures like Charles Malik and Eleanor Roosevelt, was instrumental in the development of the United Nations and the formulation of the human rights principles upon which the UN is based. Figures like Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gasperi played a similar role in the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, a forerunner of today's European Union.

Our task is tantamount to a sort of renaissance: to build a better future, drawing inspiration from the past. This includes building on the traditions of humanistic education, recovering that which is good but has been lost, evaluating what no longer fits our current circumstances, and updating based on new knowledge and the development of societies' moral consciousness.

We are not nostalgists. Today's problems and uncertainties are different from those of 1945, 1960, or even 2008. If history often rhymes, it rarely repeats itself; even perennial principles need to be applied in new and creative ways.

A present-day renaissance would require at least three things.

First, it requires humane, public-spirited figures rooted in general—not hyper-specialized—knowledge, and thus capable of a far-sighted perspective. These individuals must be closely engaged with our institutions while maintaining a sufficient distance from the tumult of politics and the media culture that surrounds it, to constructively critique our present situation. Our universities, where the humanities have fallen out of favor and specialization is the name of the game, are no longer producing enough of these types of people.

Second, it requires leaders who possess moral and spiritual insight in roles of public responsibility. The principles upon which our governing institutions are built are moral and spiritual ones. We sense that many of the people who populate leadership roles in our major institutions are not driven by those principles. They are frequently technocrats, committed instead to pragmatism and efficiency. They do not share the vision—or are not familiar enough with its sources—to renovate underlying principles to meet present-day challenges. For example, many global leaders are undoubtedly committed to advancing human dignity in their work, but lack the necessary moral and spiritual insight to articulate a vision of human dignity that responds to contemporary challenges like artificial intelligence or climate change.

Third, it requires confidence in humanity's capacity for progress. Today's atmosphere of instability overshadows our capacity to make new things. Progress and productivity have slowed and most Americans believe their children are inheriting a world of threats rather than opportunities. Perhaps the greatest indicator of a lack of confidence in humanity's future is our collapsing birth rate; there is no stronger vote against the human future than a reticence to create new humans.

Progress toward solving society's greatest challenges is possible. We've done it before and we can do it again. Intentionally making bigger, bolder investments to accelerate progress in biotech, clean energy, space travel, and more will not only give us the benefits of those particular innovations, but restore a sense of possibility and confidence in our future that we sorely lack.

There is no getting around our need for spiritual renaissance. A culture of daring, future-facing innovation is best fostered by dedicated groups that willingly pool risk and reward, but this kind of pooling—also known as solidarity—generally springs up where there is a deep, shared vision of what is good and beautiful and worth pursuing. Americans have grown timid in the communal work of spiritual vision-setting, and so we have grown apprehensive about the future, which deep down, we fear we each face alone. The time has come to take that work up again.

Ian Corbin is a Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita, where Joe Waters serves as CEO.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.