Ideas - Massey at 60: Payam Akhavan on his unwavering advocacy for human rights

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

Human rights lawyer Payam Akhavan gave the 2017 Massey Lectures, called In Search of a Better World. As part of the Massey at 60 series, marking six decades of the Massey Lectures, he explains how the themes explored in his lectures have taken on even more relevance in today's divided, conflict-ridden world.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

Payam Akhavan is one of Canada's and the world's most respected human rights lawyers. He's best known as a former UN prosecutor at The Hague and is currently a senior fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto. Paya Makavan also delivered the 2017 Massey Lectures, In Search of a Better World, A Human Rights Odyssey. Instead of embracing the reality of our oneness, the purveyors of political mirages have preyed on base instincts of fear, avarice, and hatred among the masses. They have demonized, dominated, and destroyed others to promote the supremacy of a particular class, nation, race, or creed.

The substitution of ideology for empathy. The deification of collective narcissism. The scapegoating of others for self-inflicted woes. The scapegoating of others for self-inflicted woes. Severing the limbs of the indivisible body to which we all belong. Where is the new world of peace and prosperity that these visionaries promised? How long will we persist in the absurd belief that our welfare is separate from the welfare of others. In his lectures, Payam Akhavan tells of some of his most formative experiences.

How his family fled their native Iran to escape being persecuted for their Baha'i faith following the 1979 revolution. Working for United Nations tribunals, prosecuting those responsible for ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the Rwandan genocide of 1994, investigating atrocities committed by the Islamic State in Iraq. He's borne witness to some of the most appalling episodes of human cruelty and suffering, And that's helped forge his commitment to pursuing justice for the victims of human rights abuses. He argues that our salvation as a species will come ultimately through realizing that we're all one people and must live that way. Our destinies have become inextricably intertwined in our hyper-connected global society.

Our narrow identities irresistibly converging into a greater all-embracing sense of belonging, witnessing the rise of an unprecedented consciousness that we all belong to a single emerging world civilization, that our survival depends on acceptance of a transcendent ethos of human dignity for all. The unification of all peoples into a world commonwealth is not only possible, it is inevitable. It is the next stage in the evolution of humankind. In 2023, Massey College celebrated its 60th anniversary

through a series of conversations and talks about notable past Massey lecturers. Paya Makavan visited the college last October to talk about his lectures and how the themes he covered in 2017 are, if anything, more pertinent today. Much like the search for a better world. Here's Payam Akhavan in conversation with Ideas producer Chris Watzkow. Only six years since those Massey lectures, and six years isn't exactly a long time, but a little bit has happened in the world since then. What are we doing in that search for a better world relative to where we were in 2017? How much time do you have, Chris?

In terms of where we can look back at the world now, it's a complicated situation. The world is moving into seemingly opposite directions. On the one hand, we see the destructive elements, clearly, wars, including in respect at least of Ukraine, a classical war of aggression of the sort that we thought we had put behind. And given that the Russian Federation is a permanent member of the Security Council, it's an especially serious challenge to the international order. In addition to what we see today in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the war in Tigray, which in two years has claimed up to 600,000 lives, more than all the

Arab-Israeli conflicts combined, but somehow that is completely absent from our consciousness. So there is still a lot in the world that leaves much to be desired. In addition, we have worsening desire. In addition, we have worsening social inequality and what I consider to be the game changer, climate change. So all of these forces, I think, are putting humankind and the current international order under unprecedented strain. And now for the good news. The good news is that we also are living in an era of unprecedented prosperity, unprecedented levels of health, nutrition, education, access to information, consciousness about historical injustices. And we are witnessing the irresistible contraction of the world into what once upon a time would have been the romantic idea of the global village, to quote Marshall McLuhan. And we now realize that the intensification of this inextricable interdependence in the world

isn't just a romantic ideal. It's a reality. It's an inescapable reality. We have no choice but to live together on one planet as one emerging civilization. And in fact, I think that some of the negative or destructive forces, as painful and traumatic as they are, are also an opportunity for us to awaken to this new reality. I think we are headed to a period of unprecedented turbulence. And I would, instead of changing my position, dig down on some of what I said in 2017, that now is the time for visionary, princi principled leadership instead of despair and cynicism, which is quite effortless. It's very easy to look at the world to become anxious and

depressed and what have you. But now is the time for a new generation of visionary leaders to say what needs to be said beyond the short-sighted political calculations, which very often passes for leadership. And if we don't rise to the occasion, then we will be forced to make these seismic shifts after yet unimaginable suffering. And that's the choice that we have. Will we realize this new global order through an act of volition or after unimaginable suffering leaves us no choice? Okay, so you brought up climate change, which is one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because it seems to encapsulate so many of the themes that you talked about, the need

for visionary leadership, the need to act as a global community, a truly global community. I was wondering if you could just talk about the human rights dimension of climate change and doing our best to prevent the worst of it. There are all sorts of human rights, the right to a clean and healthy environment, respect of which the UN General Assembly has adopted resolutions. There is the question of forced displacement, climate migrants or climate refugees, as one would put it. In a country like Bangladesh, with which I'm working closely, there could be up to 40 million climate refugees because of rising sea levels, the salination of water. We have the most fundamental question of the right to life, the right to our existence as a species. And I think that people don't understand just how

far-reaching the consequences are of our persisting on this trajectory. And while we live in a world full of ideological polemics and division and posturing, we can just turn to irrefutable science to understand what is happening in the world. We know a really overwhelming scientific consensus that if we do not keep temperature rise to within 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels by the year 2100, we will have catastrophic consequences far, far worse than anything that we have experienced so far. We also know that based on the so-called nationally determined contributions of states under the Paris Agreement, which is a voluntary scheme, that we are now headed for 2.8 degrees, which is twice what is the threshold beyond which there is catastrophic climate change.

So these are scientific facts. It's not a matter of ideological debate. Are you on the political right or left? We live in nature. We exist as a species because of this almost impossible balance, which reflects the perfection of nature in an otherwise inhospitable universe. And if we reach three degrees or higher, we could potentially face the collapse of civilization and mass extinction. So that excites me. Let me tell you why. Because for the first time in history, we have no choice but to unite as a single world civilization for the sake of our own survival. It was famously said by Arnold Toynbee that civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide. Except that we live now in an era of unprecedented consciousness, unprecedented scientific advances. And I would place a lot of my hope in the next generation, because I think our generation has, there are a

number of words I would choose, but because we're on radio, I will not use it. We've messed up, maybe that's a polite way to put it. And we are addicted to this consumer capitalism, which is our definition of progress, pursuit of happiness, and we're literally driving over the cliff. Not because we don't have the knowledge, but because we are just addicted to this way of life and not willing to make the sacrifices that are necessary. But I do think that as the consequences of climate change become clearer with each passing summer, eventually there will be, I'm optimistic, the political will, including by ordinary people who begin to understand the real felt consequences of our poisoning of the environment. And this will require nothing short of a revolution, both in terms of global governance. This is a global problem. There is no way that individual nations can solve this problem. It is quintessentially a problem which reminds us that we inhabit a common planet and we all perish or survive together.

But I think that we are also being challenged in terms of the way that we define civilization and progress. A lot of very fundamental questions being asked about how throughout these decades, questions being asked about how throughout these decades in a materialistic and consumerist culture we've defined progress and the pursuit of happiness. So beyond the question of radical changes in global governance, I think we also have to undergo radical changes in our cultural sensibilities and self-definition. One of the things that I was really struck by when I was thinking about the state of human rights is the strange course of LGBTQ plus rights. You know, around the time of your Massey lecture, it seemed like that was something we kind of had reached broad agreement on. But there's been a backlash, particularly against trans rights in both liberal democracies like Canada and the United States and really draconian anti-gay laws in places like Uganda.

So what do you make of this? Is this a kind of retrenchment or a retreat of human rights? Or is this part of the normal sort of non-linear progress that we see in these things? Well, non-linear progress is one way of putting it. In a time of tremendous turbulence and change, there will be the backlashes, there will be the resistance to new conceptions and new understandings. And I would say that this is perhaps where international human rights law and its objectivity becomes that much more important because we live in a pluralistic world and we may have had a certain consensus in Canada, and there is a backlash even in Canada

against those understandings, which have to be mediated, which have to be discussed and not simply shut down in this sort of culture of intolerance and posturing. There are real discussions to be had in order to allow us to move forward in a constructive way. But we have to bear in mind that the Canadian values are not shared by many other cultures and civilizations in the world. And it's not just authoritarian states that don't respect human rights. There are cultural sensibilities as well, which are at odds with some of the sentiments and values that we have, which is why international human rights law becomes that much more important, because human rights are non-negotiable. That's the whole point,

isn't it? These are legally binding obligations. It's not about whether you have a particular preference in your culture for one sensibility or another, but persecuting people on the grounds of their sexual orientation or identity is, for the most part, prohibited. And those are the international treaties to which you have committed. And that allows for a different kind of space for addressing some of these issues. But I should say, however, that international human rights law may not go as far as we may want it to go in the Canadian context. So on the one hand, laws which criminalize or otherwise prohibit certain conduct based on sexual orientation have, for the most part, been found to violate international standards. But when it comes to same-sex marriage, for example, that is not necessarily part of international human rights

law, even though it is part of Canadian law. So that is part of the dissonance between our jurisprudence under the Charter of Rights in Canada and this wider body of international human rights law, in which case one can say that Canada is ahead of the curve and it remains to be seen where other countries are going to go in the coming years. It is very important to create a space for critical conversation. That is the way to assimilate human rights principles into culture. And it's especially important to speak with those with which we may have very opposing views. That, I think, is part of the cultural transformation, which is even more important to me than the legal principles. In Canada, we do think of ourselves as, you know,

some of the exemplars of human rights and standing up for human rights. But of course, we have been not exactly angels as a country, the horrors of residential schools, for example. How do you feel about how we have, as a country, come to terms with those kinds of human rights abuses, which some people have used genocide as a word or cultural genocide, certainly, to describe it, our own culpability in these things. How do you think we're doing? Well, you know, I came to Canada as an exile. So I've always seen Canada through a certain prism, through a certain experience of a place where I could live in freedom, facing persecution in my country of origin. the intimate reality of suffering and the intergenerational harms and trauma which continues to plague our Indigenous fellow Canadians. I think that even for me as an

immigrant to Canada, it has been really an eye-opening and in some respects transformative experience. But I must say at the same time that as much as one can level criticism in many ways about how the situation could have been handled better or earlier, it is extraordinary that we have society in which we can confront our past so openly. I think we take it for granted in Canada that this is how it would work everywhere else in the world. It does not work that way in the world. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I thought, was of phenomenal importance, not just in providing a catharsis and an opportunity for healing for the some 6,000 witnesses who testified. And this goes back to the power of

narratives, the power of stories. You realize that behind every victim, there is a name, there is a mother and father, a brother, a sister. And that's what I think has really gripped the Canadian public. Residential schools are no longer an abstraction or a mere historical fact. So I think that that process had, in many respects, a transformative effect in raising consciousness. And of course, now comes the hard part. We have the truth part, now we have the reconciliation part. And when it comes to the management of resources, when it comes to ancestral territories. Those are the very difficult aspects of renegotiating a new, if you like, nation to nation relationship. So we have a long way to go, but I think we have made significant progress and it is cause for

hope, cause for hope. And I think there's a lot that other countries can learn from the Canadian experience, that it is possible, instead of sweeping unpleasant facts under the carpet, to confront them and still to be very proud to be part of this country. I always say this because I've spent a big part of my life in other countries, which is why I think Canadians don't value enough the country that they live in, because they haven't lived abroad enough to see what goes on elsewhere, including in respect of historical injustices. You're listening to human rights lawyer Payam Akhavan in conversation with Ideas producer Chris Wadzkow.

They spoke last October about his 2017 Massey Lectures in search of a better world, a human rights odyssey. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, podcast and a broadcast heard on cbc radio one in canada on u.s public radio across north america on sirius xm in australia on abc radio national and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas find us on the cbc listen app and wherever you get your podcasts i'm n Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes,

I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Paya Makavan was a young boy when he started a new life in Canada with his family. They were Baha'i, a religious minority despised by the new regime after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in their native Iran, a faith that cost the lives of many of their friends and extended family. He didn't know it then, but that persecution planted the seeds of what would become his life's work, fighting for human rights, dignity, and justice.

His career took him to the UN tribunal at The Hague, prosecuting the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. In his 2017 Massey lectures, Payam Akhavan reflected upon both the promise and limitations of international law to achieve justice for victims of atrocities and other human rights abuses. Is it ever possible to achieve justice after genocide? And if someone should be held accountable, is it only the big fish like Karadzic and Ladic, who issue the orders to kill, or also the small fish, like Erdemovic, who become the executioners? We have the privilege of asking such questions today because global justice, however weak and selective in practice, is no longer a utopian fantasy. a utopian fantasy. The emergence of this new conception of international legitimacy stands in sharp contrast to the casual acceptance of atrocities throughout much of history. For too long, the extermination and enslavement of vanquished nations was deemed the natural right

of the victor. But in today's world, atrocities are no longer acceptable. The transformation of ritual barbarity into an international crime cannot be taken for granted. It was and remains an epic story of defending humanity in the darkness of despair. Here's Paya Makavan in conversation with Ideas producer Chris Wadzkow as part of the Massey at 60 series last October. Despite the success of the war crimes tribunals, you were also feeling disillusioned about the will of the international community

to pursue justice against perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Is there any reason to think that leaders guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity, abuses of human rights, are more likely to be held accountable and punished these days? And if they're not punished, is justice possible? It's a case of two steps forward, one step back, hopefully not one step forward, two steps back, because of my formative professional experience was in the 1990s when after almost a half a century of total impunity, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was established by the UN, followed by a tribunal for Rwanda. So the 90s was a period of tremendous progress, and it was consummated with the adoption of the Rome Statute for an international criminal court. So we have come very far in the

sense that we now have finally, more than half a century after Nuremberg, an international criminal jurisdiction. It is weak. It does not have sufficient resources. It does not have sufficient political support. But the institution exists, and we at least have some successful precedents, such as the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals. But we have, once again, a long way to go. And these are historical struggles. to go. And these are historical struggles. So we have to accept that there are periods in which we will make a lot of progress and periods in which we will confront obstacles. I think that the Russian invasion of Ukraine presents a unique challenge to the international criminal justice system. Because while one can say that other powerful

states have also committed war crimes and violations of international law, when a permanent member of the Security Council engages in a kind of war of naked aggression, then that is a very serious danger to the entire edifice of the international legal order. The arrest warrant issued against President Putin by the International Criminal Court is quite remarkable. And while one can dismiss it as symbolic justice in the sense that, well, who's going to execute the arrest warrant? It does matter. President Putin did not go to South Africa for the BRICS summit, because South Africa is a member of the International Criminal Court.

And they realize from their previous episode where President Bashir of Sudan, yet another sitting head of state who had been indicted for genocide in the Darfur, who came to South Africa, and that created a political storm and even legal proceedings in the South African courts. In fact, President Bashir had to leave South Africa in a hurry before the government would receive an order from the South African judiciary to effect his arrest. So it is better than nothing, but it is far from satisfactory when one sees what has happened in Mariupol and Bucha and all these other sites of terrible atrocities. The dehumanization of others is always a precondition for their destruction. We cannot harm those for whom we have empathy. The killer, the torturer, must first convince himself that his cruelty is in the name of a greater good,

a glorious act of cleansing and purification. The demonization of others is less about the reality of the victim and more about the needs of the perpetrator. But translating hatred into real violence, motivating the executioners of genocide, brings with it the problem of visceral identification with human suffering. Extreme violence is impossible without hate propaganda. We may feel deep-seated resentment towards others, but the transformation of such impulses into an instrument of systemic violence, far from being a spontaneous crime of passion, requires careful premeditation and planning. Collective demonization requires considerable skill and effort, a toxic, sophisticated blend of suggestions, innuendo, distortions,

half-truths, and outright lies, poisoning the public discourse. It needs to be inspired, poisoning the public discourse. It needs to be inspired, learned, expressed, and perfected like a perverse art form. This is as true of mass atrocities in distant lands as it is in the ominous rise of populist hatred and terrorism in our own midst. There is nothing random or spontaneous about radical evil. It is a conspiracy of prodigious proportions. Rarely does it creep up on us without warning. The real question is not whether we're capable of stopping atrocities. It is whether we have the will to intervene. If it takes a lot of work to get people to the point where they're willing to commit it, that means these things are predictable and preventable. But, you know,

we've seen so many examples, Rwanda being a classic example, where the will to do something about it hasn't been there. Where have you seen the international community squandering an opportunity to make a difference? I always like to say that in the human rights world, the measure of success is what does not happen. What we never hear about, what never makes headline news, what never becomes an item on the agenda of the Security Council. Because once you have large-scale collective violence, it is already too late. And it becomes increasingly difficult in the midst of violence, let alone genocidal violence, to intervene. And it is true at the same time that mass atrocities, certainly in today's world, are not inevitable, are not

inevitable. If one looks at the anatomy of ethnic cleansing and this sort of violence, one invariably sees the instrumentalization of identity as a means of exercising power. Incitement to hatred and violence requires tremendous planning and effort, which is why we can think in terms of early warning, or perhaps even more widely in terms of creating societies shaped by a human rights culture, which goes back to the importance of public education and engagement. Because at the end of the day, the demagogical leaders will always be there. The question is, will they have followers? Under which circumstances will the masses allow these leaders to drive them down the road to hell,

which is exactly what we've seen in so many of these conflicts. And I think we have to reach the general public, especially the educated elites, who I think are far too often out of touch with why it is that the demagogical leaders so successfully can use populist hatred as an instrument of power, while a lot of the liberal elites are engaged in ideological posturing, but not really reaching the masses. And this actually goes back to my experience with the Massey Lectures, which itself was an experiment of coming out of the academic bubble and realizing how receptive the masses

were in Canada to storytelling, to an empathic discourse. And I like to call it empathic populism. We need to transform our culture from one of inflammatory ideological debates and posturing to one of a genuine engagement to creating a shared humanity. Ultimately, that is what divides a healthy society from one that becomes a tinderbox where a spark can create this sort of explosion. You have the unipolar Pax Americana and the idea, instead of reimagining global governance, creating a strong United Nations to confront the challenges that we're now stuck with 30 years later, there was this triumphalism, this idea of the new world order as basically domination by one superpower, the exporting of the market economy, the idea that through economic self-interest, we could transform the world and achieve progress. So I think all of those misconceptions are now literally blowing up in our face. So I think that the United States and

the Western world had a unique opportunity in an ascendant position in 1991 to strengthen the institutions of global governance. And 30 years later, we see what the consequences are of the semi-anarchic nature of a world, which is beset by global problems that require global institutions, but which don't have either the institutions or the political will to engage with them. Today, we demand justice for the oppressed. We no longer accept atrocities as the inescapable fate of the defenseless. We desire and we expect a better future. But when confronted with the enormity of injustice and what it demands of us, we retreat into

the familiar ritual of intellectualization and moral posturing, recycling lofty liberal sentiments from a safe distance. We avoid the intimate knowledge of suffering without which we will never understand the imperative of human rights. I left home a long time ago, against my will. I didn't want the journey until I realized that I had no choice. I wandered, wounded and confused, on a wondrous path that would take me to extraordinary places and spaces, from the lofty summits of selfless love to the dark abyss of searing sorrow. If there is any advice I would humbly dispense, it is that the fountain of all knowledge is felt experience.

Without embracing pain, without breaking open, we will never start our journey to a better world. The crux of the book is that political will and how you actually put these things into action is a matter of a deep knowledge of suffering and injustice. How intimate do we need to personally be with suffering and injustice? Like how close to it do we need to be? Is it an act of imagination or is it an act of feeling it personally? It's a difficult question for me to answer because I probably have had a surfeit of empathy, which can also have deleterious consequences. And

one can become exhausted and what is it called? Compassion fatigue. And at some point, you're not of much use to anyone if you yourself have collapsed. And so it's important to take care of your own psychological health and to keep enough of a distance from suffering so that you do not become consumed by it. But at the same time, we live in what I'm sorry to say is a very narcissistic and superficial culture where virtue signaling passes as meaningful engagement. And it's not meaningful engagement. Meaningful engagement means you go out into the arena. And if you really care about this or that cause, then go and serve those who suffer with your own hands. That, to me, is the foundation of the sort of transformation that one needs to create a just society. We have an incredible talent for hypocrisy. And all of us want to feel virtuous. We all want to pay lip service to worthy causes.

But as soon as we're forced to pay a price for it, we look the other way. Whether it's the World Economic Forum in Davos or within the United Nations itself or within the academy, everybody's virtuous. But do we really engage with the reality of suffering in the world? Do we really ask ourselves, is what I'm doing helping or hurting people? I think that yes, ultimately, we need to realize that that profound empathy is the engine which allows for meaningful social transformation. It's not some radically new theory or policy or whatever. All of those are important as well. But at the end of the day, it's the human instinct of saying that I am responsible for the suffering of my fellow human being. I cannot sit in comfort, in apathy while others are suffering.

And you can imagine if that was a kind of societal discourse, how radically different we would structure our economy and our cultural sensibilities and what have you. We should not underestimate our own potential. When I was on the Massey tour, I met a lot of ordinary people who very often would feel disempowered about distant events. What can I do about the conflict in the Middle East or whatever the case may be? And that's why I had this wonderful story of Chief Fontaine in Winnipeg, who on the day that Prime Minister Harper made the apology to the residential school survivors, he had a knock on his door and his next door neighbor, an elderly immigrant couple, didn't really speak English that well, had a plate of muffins, which they shared with him because simply of what his people had gone through.

So sometimes these very simple acts of kindness can have a profound effect. And we're very often a bit too cynical, perhaps, to understand the power of those simple connections. On the surface, Mona Mahmoud Nejad was no different than any of my friends from Sunday school back in Iran. We were of the same age, in the same community, in the same country. But there was a consequential difference between us. One of us moved to Canada, the other remained in Iran. One of us would live, the other would die. All those who knew Mona were enchanted by her beautiful presence. She was intensely thoughtful and immensely kind. She was an idealistic high school student. She volunteered her time at the local orphanage. After the expulsion of Bahá'í

children from elementary schools, she took it upon herself to teach them at home. But there was also a fiery side to this otherwise gentle soul. Mona was an outspoken defender of human rights. This in a country where speaking the truth carried grave consequences. On one occasion, her religious studies teacher had assigned a class essay. The topic was, the fruit of Islam is freedom of conscience and liberty. Like the other students, she was expected to deferentially repeat revolutionary polemics, glorifying Iran's rulers as just and wise. Instead, she had written a provocative essay on their hypocrisy. Freedom, Mona wrote, is the most brilliant word. So why don't you let me be free to say who I am and what I want?

Why don't you give me freedom of speech so that I may write about my ideas? Yes, liberty is a divine gift, and this gift is also for us, but you don't let us have it. Why don't you push aside the thick veil from your eyes? In a Canadian high school, such words from a 16-year-old would have won the praise of her teachers. In Iran, it would cost Mona her life. The revolutionary guards raided Mona's home. They grabbed her and her father and took them to prison.

Her mother begged them to stop. She's just a child, she said. Please don't take her. They produced Mona's essay and retorted, the person who wrote this is not a child. For the next eight months, Mona was confined to a filthy prison cell. She endured repeated interrogations and brutal torture. The religious judge who interrogated the prisoners had given the Baha'is a stark choice, Islam or execution. Having endured so much torture and the execution of her father, Mona was no longer afraid of death. The head of Adelabad prison in Shiraz called out the name of Mona and nine other Bahá'í women. They were driven in a minibus to the same polo field where her father had been executed. The ten women were hanged one by one.

Mona was the last one to be brought onto the scaffold. She had been forced to watch the agonizing deaths of all her friends. And now, in her last moments, the merciless men that were about to snuff out her precious life were subjecting her to vicious insults. As Mona stood on the gallows in a final act of defiance, she smiled at her executioner. I wanted to ask you about the person who's sort of the lodestar of your book, your friend Mona. ask you about the person who's sort of the lodestar of your book, your friend Mona. That was so formative of your own journey. And when you look at the Iran of today, it's a year since

the killing of Massa Amini. We've had protest movements that have roiled Iran and seem to put the regime on the ropes. But when you see how much people have put up with in Iran and how hard they've struggled and the fact that they always seem to be tamped down, how much can people take? How infinite are those reserves of resilience to eventually just grind the bastards down? This summer, we commemorated the 40th anniversary of the execution of Mona Mahmoud Nejad. And it is remarkable to see how her presence and her sacrifice still inspires so many people.

And especially when you consider this unprecedented feminist revolution in Iran, where the rallying cry was, woman, life, liberty, which is a radically different image than most people would have of people in the Middle East. And remember that many of the people on the streets crying, woman, life, liberty, were also men standing in front of bullets and batons and giving up their lives for their ideals. And this was an emotional roller coaster for many of us in the Iranian diaspora, because we were so near yet so far from achieving the change, the democratic society that we have struggled for so long. This goes back to understanding two things. One is that bringing

about meaningful change is often a historical process. It is not achieved overnight. And in a culture of instant gratification, it's very difficult to understand that it may take generations of sacrifice to achieve what you wish. You can think about the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. That did not happen overnight. Many people had to sacrifice. And it also makes us realize, getting back to the theme of, you know, virtue signaling and what they call what slacktivism, you know, thinking that, you know, the Facebook like is going to somehow achieve anything. I think some of those young people in Iran have a lot to teach us, a lot to teach us. Their courage is incredible.

Many of the young people I've been speaking to, the government has been using shotguns to blind them as a way of punishing them. So many young people have lost their sight, they've lost their loved ones, but they go back. They go back because of this resilience. They go back because they have nothing to lose. They go back because for them, it has become an existential struggle. It's about your dignity. So I'm afraid that this struggle is not going to end anytime soon. There will be further bloodshed and sometimes that is the price that people pay for their freedom. Something for us to remember as we sit here in our Canadian bubble. Well it's always a cold hard dose of reality but also inspiring to talk to you. So thank you for this. Thank you, Chris.

Human rights lawyer and 2017 Massey lecturer Payam Akhavan, in conversation with Ideas producer Chris Watzkow. Akhavan then took questions from the audience, including one about the shortcomings of international law, the UN, and other international institutions, and how to make them more effective. So I think that the reform of the United Nations, and that is not a simple matter, it would require a truly global effort, significant amounts of political will, which is more difficult now than it was in 1991,

when the Western countries were really ascendants. Now we have a very, very different reality. But ultimately, I think the nations of the world will come to the conclusion that it is in everyone's interest to have stronger institutions. And I think here it goes back to the question of we have law and politics on the one hand, and then we have society and culture on the other. And there's a very complex interplay between the two. Although I think institutional reform is also necessary, for example, the Paris Agreement is grossly inadequate for addressing the urgency of the radical curbs in greenhouse gas emissions that must be achieved. One needs a robust regime where states are not simply subject to volunteerism, but they're subject to legally binding obligations. They're subject to enforcement mechanisms. This is what kind of institution

we need. But beyond that, I think it's a question of political willingness. And how can we get political leaders to rise above short-sighted myopic decision-making to the kind of visionary or planetary politics that we're seeing now from small island states. My client Tuvalu, population 10,000, is going under the sea. This country will disappear in the near future. And you have the indigenous prime minister of a country with 10,000 people saying what needs to be said. And one wonders how it is possible for this political culture to transform itself. And this brings me back to ordinary people. People need to wake up. People need to hold their leaders accountable. They need to come out on the streets and demand

the sort of radical changes that is necessary for our common survival. I'm still fairly optimistic that humankind is resilient enough when pushed to the edge to do what's necessary to survive. The question is, what will the cost be to us in the coming years? You mentioned push to the edge, and that made me think about that we're just reacting to the consequences to the pandemic. We are always on the back foot. We're reactionary as a society. For our generation, who has to deal with some of these effects of climate change and all a lot more than the previous generation, and there's so much misinformation going on, right? You mentioned the

ordinary people need to hold their government responsible, but if we don't see that as a problem, because we have this campaign telling us that there is no problem, how do you overcome that? How do you become more proactive as opposed to reactive? A very good question. Well, it helps when people can't breathe the air because of forest fires. It helps when people can't insure their home anymore because of flooding. And it's sad that I have to say that, but that goes back to when people feel the pain, they realize that these divisive political debates and denialism is besides the point because science tells us what's going to happen. So it goes back

not just to education, but education brings in also that emotional dimension, which goes back to the discussion of empathy. The idea that we have about the generation of knowledge now in the academy is very much rooted in the tradition of occidental rationalism, intellectualization, which is a very important part of learning. But I would say the most important part of learning is emotional connection, which is what motivates us to act on the knowledge that we have. Which brings me to what I said earlier about we are a society that is addicted to consumerism. We have a profoundly materialistic ideology definition of progress, pursuit of happiness is all based on material things. And yes, I come from a different

tradition where spirituality, transcendence is very important. Empathy is a nice, safe, secular way to talk about it without being accused of a fanatic of some sort but ultimately it is transcendence which allows people to act in i want to say heroic ways but not in this sort of marvel action figure sense but in the sense of rising above our own selfish instincts and allowing our conscience to govern us rather than our selfishness. And I think the environment and climate change presents an unprecedented challenge because we have to wean ourselves off of this culture of endless consumption. But what's ironic is that that culture has brought us tremendous misery, nevermind climate change. When I travel to countries in the global South, which I do not want to romanticize, there's a lot that is profoundly problematic with poverty,

oppression, and all sorts of other troubles. But when I come to North America and I see this sense of anxiety and depression and stress, what I call the psychic pandemic, before the pandemic, I was writing about the psychic pandemic, the age of rage, the sense of bitterness and divisiveness, it really bewilders me that in our society where, yes, we have problems, our problems are nothing, nothing compared to what the rest of the world suffers. Why have we sunk into this sense of collective despair? It doesn't make any sense. Part of me thinks that it is this culture of materialism and narcissism. Everything is about me.

The whole world revolves around me, my identity, my needs, my wants. That is not a recipe for happiness. The recipe for happiness actually is compassion, love, empathy, giving of yourself to others, sacrifice. So this goes back to empathy. And one of the sentences, which I would dig down on now even more where I say that, you know, when you're helping others, you're not anybody's savior except your own. The best thing you can do for yourself is to live a life with purpose and meaning. And the worst thing is to live a life that is just emptiness and egotism and all the nonsense that we're told is what it means to be successful. So there's a big lie in our culture that we need to confront.

And I think ultimately education is the most important thing, but an education that brings in that spiritual and moral dimension and not merely intellectualization. moral dimension and not merely intellectualization. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.