Building A Moral Renaissance in 2023

by Ian Marcus Corbin and Joe Waters

Newsweek

December 28, 2022

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.