Listening to the Voice of Humanity

Straight from the Heart

Feature-world crisis

Listening to the Voice of Humanity

Steven Kull

Last Part

Having a very large Citizen Advisory Panel also make it possible to hear from subgroups within the citizenry. This can include subgroups based on race, ethnicity, gender and partisan affiliation. Obviously, finding common groud among these different groups is more challenging than finding majority agreement among the general citizenry. But when one is dealing with people who are randomly selected, rather than people who are affiliated with organized interest groups, it is often easier than one expects. People have multiple identities and, as long as they are not committed to being identified with just one of them, they are more to find common ground.

Giving voice to the people is not an all-or-nothing proposition. If we think of humanity as a kind of large mural or tapestry, even the most basic poll begins to give us some information about the kind of thinking that is occurring in different corners of the world. With methods that go into greater depth, we gain greater detail and nuance. With coverage of more nation, we gain greater breadth so that we can increasingly get a sense of humanity as a whole.

As many have noted, the most compelling challenges of the future are ones of a global nature, requiring a global response. Nation states are not entirely adequate to these challenges and have prevented international institutions from fully consolidating their capacity for collective action. Like actors in a Greek drama, thay seem headed for an impasse with the potential for tragedy. It may be time to shift our attention from the actors to the chorus in the background. Already we can begin to hear a voice of humanity-a voice that is less constrained by established patterns and that offers a more flexible and holistic approach to the challenges we as a species facts.

Steven Kull, PhD is a political psychologist who studies world public opinion on international issues he is the Director of WorldPublic.org, the Program on International Policy Attitudes and the Center on Policy Attitudes and regularly provides analysis of public opinion in the US and international media. He has briefed the US Congress, the State Department, NATO, the United Nations and the European Commission. His most recent book, co-authored with I.M. Destler, is Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism. He is a member of the Council on Foreign relations and the World Association of Public Opinion Research and teaches at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.

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