2025: Will we see a humanistic world?

As the world celebrates Christmas, the festival of joy, harmony and bonding which brings humanity together, there are innumerable people in every continent, caught in the vortex of distress and pain and undergoing untold suffering. Ukraine has been at war with Russia for almost three years and countless lives have been lost with no solution foreseen in the near future. In earlier decades, when conflicts broke out, peace-loving nations would get together, maybe under the aegis of the United Nations or some other world body, to make impassioned calls for restoring order.

Peace-keeping forces have been sent to various parts of the globe to make sure warring factions pull back and do not engage in any further spilling of blood. Nothing of that kind seems to be happening in present day conflicts whether it be Ukraine or Gaza in the Middle-East. So much so that a pained Pope Francis, speaking from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on X-mas day to thousands of people standing below, was forced to say, “May the sound of arms be silenced in war-torn Ukraine!” He also called for “gestures of dialogue and encounter, in order to achieve a just and lasting peace”.

Nor are the guns showing any signs of becoming silent on another war-front - in Gaza where more than 45,000 lives have been lost in the past two years with innocent women and kids bearing the brunt. Umpteen visits by senior UN and US officials including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken have been unsuccessful as Israeli jets continue their murderous assaults on Gaza and even on civilian populations slaughtering the innocent. World powers have been flexing their muscles hurling ugly diatribes against each other, making an end to the war look more distant.

Civilians in the war zones, as always, have been caught in the incessant firepower with no respite in sight. There is a conflict of a different kind too raging across the globe - while the super rich continue to wallow in wealth, the poor are engaged in a daily battle for survival against the pangs of hunger and deprivation. The income of the top ten percent rich lot continues to rise in many countries. Right-wing regimes are increasingly hitching their economic policies to the interests of the rich and powerful making the common man wonder if he enjoys political or economic power of any kind at all despite all that talk about democracy and universal suffrage. There are also regimes bent on building on the prevailing animosity among communities of different denominations for their jingoistic political ends, with tolerance no longer part of their vocabulary.

As the world moves inexorably into 2025, voices of reason are calling for a return to the humanistic principles which helped mankind weather many a cruel storm through the centuries. Kindness, compassion, understanding and empathy are more needed than ever in a world racing towards an age of unbridled nationalistic fervour and economic self-interest and even trade wars. A return to our essential humaneness and a world order based on equality, fairness and the ‘live and let live’ principle are urgently needed before we descend into the abyss of destruction and anarchy.

A fervent plea for peace and understanding should be the clarion call, global leaders should be giving out to a world torn apart by hate, self-interest and a callous disregard for human life as evidenced by the mass killings in Gaza. And it’s also time the global leadership started seriously thinking about ways and means to enforce humanistic principle in a world order where they are under serious threat. If it can’t happen under the purview of the UN, which has been helplessly watching two wars rage from the side-lines, why not start thinking of alternate forums to push the agenda for peace?