This is the English version of a post loosely based on an entry from my bi-weekly column “The Way of the Pianist” to be published on Dec. 17th by Nikkan San.
“Treat others the way you want to be treated,” didn’t our teachers tell us? The first mention of the Golden Rule we know of today apparently is in hieroglyphics from around 2,000BC from ancient Egypt. We have records of the same idea uttered by philosophers and moralists and spiritual leaders from all over the world across time, space and cultures.
Making someone happy feels good. Stanford has a center that studies the relationship between kindness and well-being. Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) draws from disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, and economics to study the effects of compassion on brain and behavior and promote it as essential to our humanity. We are wired to empathize, to cooperate and cohabitate. Our humanity depends on this trait for us to see ourselves in others around us. I think music is one of the ways that helps us cultivate and thrive on this human nature.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
Stated in the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10th, 1948. It happened the day after the ratification of the Genocide Convention, after an estimated 80,000,000 casualties in WWII, more than half of whom were civilians.
The UDHR led to equal rights movements. It dismantled apartheid in South Africa, and helped encourage more equal access to education and healthcare, globally. It spurred international negotiations on treaties like the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and other treaties, laws and instruments and mechanisms to develop and advance the rights agenda. However, human sufferings and atrocities brought on by fellow humans continue, even on the 75th anniversary of the UDHR, even in the age of the IT revolution and machine learning.
When we gather around a table of feast and bite into a tasty treat, we are happy together. When we join our voices singing the same song, even if our lyrics were sang in different languages, our heartbeats, breathing and brainwaves synchronize, creating a sense of bod. What we share is greater than our differences. So, let us unite with music.