Spreading The Humanism

In the second half of the twentieth century, the decades of the fifties, sixties, and also that of the seventies, were characterized by several important struggles that, in consequence, were going to change the world. What it happened? As long as the economic development created richness and new possibilities in the United States and other western societies, people started to demand new rights within its own borders and also to protest about the social situation in the others. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, the representative of the other bloc, had to cope with other sort of problems, like those of more liberty, more democracy or, even, more opened and tolerant societies. Then, the Third World experienced a little transformation in order to control somehow their natural resources to improve the economy. That’s what I can call the challenges of the three-world order.

The case of the United States is, maybe, the most important one in terms of human development. Here we have to explain a little bit how women initiated campaigns for equality and empowerment. The Worlds Together, Worlds Apart book, for instance, says: ‘Women now questioned a life built around taking care of home and family’ (p. 779). The main figure of that feminist movement was Betty Friedan, who described the ‘idealized 1950’s sub-urban home as a comfortable concentration camp’ (p. 779). Moreover, I must stressed the demands of African American people, who until those years had not the same rights than the whites and they fight to conquered them, but ‘legacies of racism and inequality were not easy to overcome. In spite of Supreme Court decisions, most schools remained racially homogeneous not only in the South but across the United States, as “white flight” to the suburbs left inner-city neighborhoods and schools to minorities’ (p. 779). Protests to end poverty, to spread education (both demands were included in the protests of Paris in May of 1968), to vote and to end the vietnam war, are other plaints of that era in the western.

Carlo Leidi, Prague, 1968

The Soviet Union, in the meantime, needed to control other kind of unrests. The main one was that of Prague, when workers and students supported Alexander Dubcêk in order to create a new model of socialism and also calling for more freedom of expression and even of debate. Later, soviet forces did a counterattack and quelled the revolt, although its spirit would remain in the air. The Prague Spring of 1968, as was baptized, inspired what other people would do later in Poland or even within Russia. I would like to emphasize the importance that had the edition of a book called 'The Gulag Archipelago’, in which the author, Alexander Sholzenitshyn, ‘repudiated the notion that Socialism could be reformed by a turn away from Stalin’s policies’ (p. 781). At the same time, the other major communist power, China, who had designed a 'Great Leap Forward' to transform the country into a big industrialized one, failed in its aims and had to deal with and severe famine which forced the rulers to think in other alternatives. Den Xiaoping would show us later another radical and different ones.

In the Third World, the more important thing could be the fact of trying to control resources like oil in order to enrich countries. Firstly, they were supposed to choose between alignment with the first world or with the second, but some radical policies took some nations to unify and empower themselves. The creation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was an example of that collaboration, which included the next countries: Algeria, Ecuador, Gabon, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. Although at the beginning they seized oil sales creating, above all, big problems to the western consumers, the result of that was that emerged more efficient ones, like Canada or Mexico, and, what was the most important issue, the strategy was backfired when they were aware that revenues flowed back to the first world banks. As a result: ‘Some of it was in turn re-loaned to the world’s poorest countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, at high interest rates, to pay for more expensive imports - including oil!’ (p. 782).

To sum up, I would like to say that this age represents the spread of humanism, understood as the need of the people to control their own lives and to create a better society in which the differences of sexe, age, race or origin don’t exclude anybody. That’s to say, a world where people have more rights, more liberties and more capacities to decide their own destiny. 

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