10 PRINCIPLES OF HUMANISATION
Joseph H
1: Life is inherently good. It is generally positive and purposeful
and routinely engaged in the essential life-activities of survival and
nurturing. The opposite of good – so-called evil – does not play a
part in most lives on the planet. It is very easy to forget this fact.
2: Life is inherently intelligent. Across the globe billions of
creatures practice successfully the often very complicated
life-activities referred to above. It is also easy to forget this.
3: Life is inherently risky. The immense complexity of the
life-organism itself, allied to the perils of colonisation and of
habitation and the vagaries of nature, ensures the continuation of
this fact.
4: Humankind, being the most intelligent form of life, should expect
the optimum resolution of life's challenges.. To this optimum we may
give the name Humanisation: that era when human beings have most
cultivated the positive aspects of life and most mitigated the
negative aspects. Humanisation is not a right – but it should be a
demand. Humanisation is our destiny – but it is not inevitable. It
will only happen because we make it happen. Indeed, to achieve
Humanisation we will first have to imagine Humanisation.
5: The human colonisation of the planet (meaning, to be precise, that
process whereby human beings starting from a single location, or a
very small number of locations, spread out to inhabit the entire
planet) differed from all other colonisations in several major
respects:
(a) Our considerable intelligence brought rapid change that disrupted
all settled patterns.
(b) Our curiosity – i.e. "our demand for knowledge" – added impetus to
that change; it also, given our initial deficit of knowledge,
introduced error that often proved costly.
(c) That same need for knowledge, allied to that same deficit, saw us
and still sees us daily - create endless erroneous assumptions about
the nature of existence.
(d) Our capacity for belief and our desperate need to endow value to
our existence saw us confer upon these assumptions a status that did
not brook opposition.
(e) Our capacity for conceptualisation saw us confer upon the
countless usurpations of right and power witnessed in history a status
that distorted our own view of ourselves and bestowed upon these
usurpers a permanence that proved very difficult to terminate.
(f) Our enduring loyalty to the regional expressions we call culture
or nationalism saw us resist bitterly most attempts to rationalize or
homogenise our societies.
(g) Our ability to effect vast change on the planet we inhabit
frequently saw us destroy our local habitations – and today sees us
threaten the continued existence of life itself.
(h) Our capacity to depict our condition, to mimic it and celebrate it
through the arts and the media brings great consolation but often led,
and still leads, to mass confusion.
(i) Our unequal – and unequalled - capacity for acquisition saw, and
still sees, some of our numbers amass unthinkable sums of wealth
while, others, the vastly greater majority, struggle daily to provide
the basic necessities of life.
(j) Finally, our varying capacity and opportunity for economic
exploitation also saw, and still sees, some of our nations thrive
while others fester in a desperate poverty.
6: These traits and their associated difficulties are part and parcel
of the human colonisation of the planet. They are inseparable from
human existence. Humanisation, when it is achieved, will not
eradicate the difficulties – but it will ameliorate them. Change will
still occur – but it will be less disruptive. Error will still occur –
but it will be less pervasive. Illusion will still be prevalent – but
it will be less powerful. Usurpation, the unauthorized appropriation
of power over others, will still be a temptation – but it will be less
tolerated. Sectionalism will still be cherished – but it will be
accommodated and even embraced. Destruction of our environment cannot,
however, find a place in any future intelligent society we create.
Vastly unequal societies must likewise be abhorred. A globe vastly
polarized between rich and poor nations will be totally unacceptable.
The struggle for true value - indeed, the struggle for truth itself -
must be ongoing in the face of the ceaseless creativity of the sirens
of the media and the popular arts and the ceaseless errors of many
others.
7: It might well be thought that life throughout the so-called
Developed World already approximates to Humanisation. It does. Across
a broad swathe of the earth hundreds of millions of human beings live
a life of comfort and of knowledge that would be the wonder of the
millions who toiled and died before them and that currently is the
envy of the billions who toil and die as we speak. But this life,
magnificent achievement though it is, is not Humanisation. Within
these societies of the West much deprivation still resides; value has
been sequestered by the self, leading to a petulant insistence on
rights and privileges; health-care and a decent education more and
more becomes a preserve of the wealthy; capitalism, our current form
of economic aggrandizement, is in many areas effectively beyond the
control of the state. Also, the capacity of these nations to respond
to the wider questions raised above – environmental depletion and
economic deprivation – must seriously be questioned. Democracy,
vaunted institution that it is, has proved resistant to anything
beyond the immediate. Political parties have learned to play on the
immediate hopes and fears of the voters, pushing serious issues into
the background. Equally, political parties have avoided decisions that
would incur unpopularity, more and more passing such matters into the
domain of international bodies (such as the UN, the EU and the World
Court) while still jealously guarding local prerogatives. Thus, in
many areas of political, social and economic life we are at a
crossroads, poised between increasing international supervision and
resistant local control. We may even say – horror though it may be to
some – that European democracy is a phase, a rude ruling device that
was fairly quickly made redundant by a momentum of history, a
momentum, of course, given added impetus by the arrival of democracy
itself. This is not to say that democracy will disappear. It will not
– locally. But it has shown itself to be to be too fraught and
contentious a process to make the decisions necessary for our safe
future. Until this phase is completed - until the safety of the human
race and the safety of the earth itself is in competent hands - we
cannot say that the countries of the West have reached Humanisation.
Equally, until such time as the citizenry of the West moves from their
petulant insistence on self and rights and begin to embrace a more
inclusive conception of the human achievement – such as Humanisation
claims to be – then we may also safely say that Humanisation has not
been achieved.
8: Africa poses a different problem. Here, given a continuation of
current conditions, Humanisation seems all but unattainable. Poverty,
corruption, civil and other war, disease, famine, climatic change…all
threaten the ongoing existence of the continent as a viable economic
and political entity. The perceived solution to these difficulties -
freedom, democracy, a panoply of rights, economic regeneration – seems
quite impotent in the face of such calamity. It will need to be
accepted soon that this package of measures can never be more than an
institutionalised recognition of ongoing – or developing – social
relations. They can never CREATE these social relations. These
measures emerged from the crucible of Europe and America and were
never far in advance of (and indeed were often far behind) the current
social and economic relations in their country of origin. It should be
observed further that many, or even most, of the great European
nation-states were more than 1000 years in gestation. To import – or
export - the measures referred to above into an African country where
no such preparation existed and where no equivalent economic or social
relations were in place was to court peril in the extreme, was, in
fact, to allow the current fashion for the so-called inviolability and
inalienability of human rights to take precedence over clear
observation of the nature of human existence – indeed ALLexistence.
Africa, we may hope, will transcend Europe's democratic phase. There
are countless precedents everywhere where a particular cherished
expedient in one locale is deemed to be unnecessary, or irrelevant, to
a subsequent locale. Africa, we may hope, will bypass democracy, in
the European sense. Under the leadership of a very small number of men
and women of vision – WHO RECOGNISE THAT EUROPEAN-STYLE DEMOCRACY
SIMPLY WILL NOT PROISPER IN AFRICAN SOIL - a new pan-African
institution WITH POWER may emerge. These men and women will require
the massive assistance of the global bodies referred to earlier –
since they certainly will receive little or no help from individual
European (or other) nations and no help at all from the greedy
mammoths of Capitalism. These men or women, I suggest (but then I
would, wouldn't I?), will also need, or may also need, the
intellectual support of the Theory of Humanisation.
9: America, ironically, poses the biggest problem of all. To be the
most powerful nation on earth must induce a singular cast of mind that
baulks at the notion of submitting to an Ideology of All. This would
be a difficulty anyway. But to be so completely in the grip of a very
small number of powerful lobbies adds further complication. America is
the most vibrant democracy in the world – but the voice of its people
hardly registers outside the domain of popular culture and consumer
demand. Its people do not constitute a voice for the improved
existence of the human race or the improved maintenance of the planet
we inhabit. The voice of the American people has effectively been
sidetracked, has been neutered politically. The lobby dictates all –
and not even the lobby, but the acolytes of the lobby, these
sharp-suited men and women, the greyhounds of the globe, whose
existence is measured only by the bottom-line. What do these people
care about the world? They may – at home with their children. But once
they don those suits they perpetrate an oppression and a despoliation
that is more pervasive and more comprehensive than that of Genghis
Khan. To soften this frozen cast of mind is the great task of our age.
Everything else pales in comparison. When the most powerful country in
the world refuses to sanction the existence – or any increase in the
power - of the supranational bodies referred to earlier then these
bodies will have correspondingly less effect on the policies of that
powerful nation. How to solve this problem? My only – proposed –
solution is an inexorable increase of knowledge, an inexorable
insistence on the deference due to this knowledge, an inexorable
amassing of a new lobby, a lobby dedicated to an intelligent ordering
of our place on the planet. All of this The Advent of Humanisation
seeks to provide and promote.
10: Value is an essential part of the human system. Only when we
create value relevant to our life today will we regain some of our
recent losses of purpose. But, of course, we are already POUNDED by
value. The strident voices of the new media leave our quiet teachers
for dead. How can a man or woman with chalk compete with the vast
assault on our senses represented by these new media sources? But we
should see this as a phase, a process, too. We will need to learn to
deal with this process, to supersede it. If we do not supersede it we
are doomed to eternal trivialisation. But of course we will supersede
it. The human emergence on the planet and the human colonisation of
the planet and the human conquest of ignorance and illusion is as
colourful and epic a saga as any we witness our screens today.
Equally, the human destiny of control of the planet, of stewardship of
all life on the planet, is as inspiring as any putative destiny we
glimpse elsewhere. Finally, the notion that we are the mind of matter,
THAT WE ARE THE ONLY KNOWN CREATURE MADE OF MATTER WITH THE CAPACITY
TO UNDERSTAND THE NATURE AND COMPOSITION OF MATTER, must – when
mediated and molded by the creative minds of this and future ages -
be a source of inspiration as profound as any of the great beliefs of
the past.
Joseph H
9-9-2004
www.humanisation.org
merv bitikofer
of less fortunate peoples in any public discussion. I share in that
concern, so please don't take the following questions as a serious
attempt to detract from those noble motivations. Take these, rather,
as me playing "devils advocate" with some of what you propose in your
manifesto of humanization.
How is it reasonable to expect society to adopt values that are freely
admitted to be of our own individualistic manufacture when that same
segment of society largely rejects values that were considered to
exist independently in a reality residing outside ourselves? Are the
same witheringly skeptical tools that have deposed the gods in the
minds of so many, suddenly supposed to disappear at the advent of a
"new" system of manufactured values?
Also…
By what measure do you despise the suffering in the world … Surely,
if you have abandoned traditional religion, you don't still believe in
good and evil? Evolution and nature are indifferent to suffering,
indeed letting it be a part of life. Our current life's situations
complete with greed, competition, survival of the fittest… would not
appear any different than all of history ever has been, according to
the naturalist. So how is your current predisposition toward
compassion any more objectively justifiable than, say, Mueller's
eugenic program of sterilizing the poor – or putting them out of their
misery? The world has seen environmental calamities that make
anything we have done to the world so far look like an innocent picnic
in the park. And evolution simply responded and adapted each time,
right?
--merv bitikofer
Joseph H
> Joseph H., it is good to see some awareness and concern for the plight
> of less fortunate peoples in any public discussion. I share in that
> concern, so please don't take the following questions as a serious
> attempt to detract from those noble motivations. Take these, rather,
> as me playing "devils advocate" with some of what you propose in your
> manifesto of humanization.
your questions justice.
>
> How is it reasonable to expect society to adopt values that are freely
> admitted to be of our own individualistic manufacture when that same
> segment of society largely rejects values that were considered to
> exist independently in a reality residing outside ourselves? Are the
> same witheringly skeptical tools that have deposed the gods in the
> minds of so many, suddenly supposed to disappear at the advent of a
> "new" system of manufactured values?
one of millions of gods about the place - is not, I suggest, a
withingly sceptical act. It is just a fairly intelligent - and a
fairly belated - recognition of reality. And if that same scepticism
is brought to bear on any ideas that I - or anybody else - might have,
well then we'll just have a world less in thrall to fantasy. Anybody
seeking to implant a new view of the world today has to expect that
people will be somewhat sceptical. It adds a difficulty - but it is a
cleansing difficulty. But, having said all that, I take your point.
Sketicism can be all-embracing - except for quackery! Maybe i should
be an astrologist!
>
> Also?
>
> By what measure do you despise the suffering in the world ? Surely,
> if you have abandoned traditional religion, you don't still believe in
> good and evil?
Have to say I hate linguistic arguments. But that last sentence is
full of charged words. "Believe in"...as in "value" or accept the
existence of? I certainly accept the existence of "good" - but that is
also so charged a word. I believe (!) that the existence of the
universe, of earth, of life itself can be deemed to be "good". I value
all the above. I prefer that they exist than that they not exist. I
relish the beauty and the vigour and the excitement of life etc. I
want to be part of it as long as possible. I think all but the most
unhappy people feel likewise. I know this is "goodness" in a sentient
or cerebral sense - as opposed to the moral or philosophical or
theological sense you may (?) have in mind.
Evil? People do evil things, unforgiveable things. But - again - I
don't "believe" in the existence of evil as some kind of extra-
ordinary force.
Evolution and nature are indifferent to suffering,
> indeed letting it be a part of life. Our current life's situations
> complete with greed, competition, survival of the fittest? would not
> appear any different than all of history ever has been, according to
> the naturalist.
I think today we - most of us -are more aware of the "other" as
people, of their feelings etc. Any perusal of past regimes in
education, military life, work etc etc shows utter insensitivity to
children, employees, slaves etc. It is a small hope.
So how is your current predisposition toward
> compassion any more objectively justifiable than, say, Mueller's
> eugenic program of sterilizing the poor ? or putting them out of their
> misery?
Tough question. Objectively justified? No, can't be. No outside force
to justify it. It's a choice. It's a decision based on a valuation of
life - as above - and of our role in life and our potential as a
species. I say in the web-site that we are "the mind of matter". I
think this confers a huge obligation. But even if this were not true I
think the foregoing decision about how we should live would still be
my wish. I also think it would be the wish of the vast majority of the
human race. This is not a statement that will stand any philosopical
scrutiny. It is akin to the observation above that life etc is good. I
feel...I hope...I think... that I - we - can base a comprehensive view
of life on these banal facts. They have none of the majesty of past
fabrications. They are a quiet valuation of life generally and us
particularly.
The world has seen environmental calamities that make
> anything we have done to the world so far look like an innocent picnic
> in the park. And evolution simply responded and adapted each time,
> right?
Absolutely right. So do we just submit to this reality? Or do we
recognise our very special ability, first, to see this, and second,to
impose some order of our choosing on it. I suggest the latter. It will
happen anyway. www.humanisation.org is an attempt to impart some
direction to this process. Spread the word, baby!
Joseph H
>
> --merv bitikofer