Humanists International Declaration of Modern Humanism

Agreed at the General Assembly, Glasgow United Kingdom, 2022

"Humanist beliefs and values are as old as civilization and have a history in most societies around the world. Modern humanism is the culmination of these long traditions of reasoning about meaning and ethics, the source of inspiration for many of the world's great thinkers, artists, and humanitarians, and is interwoven with the rise of modern science. 

As a global humanist movement, we seek to make all people aware of these essentials of the humanist worldview: 

1. Humanists strive to be ethical 

    We accept that morality is inherent to the human condition, grounded in the ability of living things to suffer and flourish, motivated by the benefits of helping and not harming, enabled by reason and compassion, and needing no source outside of humanity. 

We affirm the worth and dignity of the individual and the right of every human to the greatest possible freedom and fullest possible development compatible with the rights of others. To these ends we support peace, democracy, the rule of law, and universal legal human rights. 

We reject all forms of racism and prejudice and the injustices that arise from them. We seek instead to promote the flourishing and fellowship of humanity in all its diversity and individuality. 

We hold that personal liberty must be combined with a responsibility to society. A free person has duties to others, and we feel a duty of care to all of humanity, including future generations, and beyond this to all sentient beings. 

We recognise that we are part of nature and accept our responsibility for the impact we have on the rest of the natural world. 

2. Humanists strive to be rational 

    We are convinced that the solutions to the world's problems lie in human reason, and action. We advocate the application of science and free inquiry to these problems, remembering that while science provides the means, human values must define the ends. We seek to use science and technology to enhance human well-being, and never callously or destructively. 

3. Humanists strive for fulfillment in their lives 

    We value all sources of individual joy and fulfillment that harm no other, and we believe that personal development through the cultivation of creative and ethical living is a lifelong undertaking. 

We therefore treasure artistic creativity and imagination and recognise the transforming power of literature, music, and the visual and performing arts. We cherish the beauty of the natural world and its potential to bring wonder, awe, and tranquility. We appreciate individual and communal exertion in physical activity, and the scope it offers for comradeship and achievement. We esteem the quest for knowledge, and the humility, wisdom, and insight it bestows. 

4. Humanism meets the widespread demand for a source of meaning and purpose to stand as an alternative to dogmatic religion, authoritarian nationalism, tribal sectarianism, and selfish nihilism 

Though we believe that a commitment to human well-being is ageless, our particular opinions are not based on revelations fixed for all time. Humanists recognise that no one is infallible or omniscient, and that knowledge of the world and of humankind can be won only through a continuing process of observation, learning, and rethinking. 

For these reasons, we seek neither to avoid scrutiny nor to impose our view on all humanity. On the contrary, we are committed to the unfettered expression and exchange of ideas, and seek to cooperate with people of different beliefs who share our values, all in the cause of building a better world. 

We are confident that humanity has the potential to solve the problems that confront us, through free inquiry, science, sympathy, and imagination in the furtherance of peace and human flourishing. We call upon all who share these convictions to join us in this inspiring endeavor."

— Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell - appendix

Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell, conclusion

"Posthumanism and transhumanism are opposites: one eliminates human consciousness, while the other suffuses it into everything. But they are the sort of opposites that meet at the extremes. Both agree that our current humanity is something transitional or wrong—something to be left behind. Instead of dealing with ourselves as we are, both imagine us altered in some dramatic way: either made more humble and virtuous in a new Eden, or retired from existence, or inflated to a level that sounds like that of gods. 

I am a humanist; I cannot happily contemplate any of these alternatives. As a science fiction enthusiast, I used to have a weakness for transhumanism, however. Years ago, my mind was blown by a classic science fiction novel: Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, published in 1953. 

The story begins, as many in the genre do, with aliens arriving on Earth. They promptly shower us with gifts, which include hours of entertainment. "Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels?" asks one character in the book, conveying 1953' s idea of a cornucopian abundance. But the bounty of the aliens comes with conditions: humans must stay on Earth and give up exploring space. 

A few people resist the gilded cage, declining to watch the entertainment and proclaiming defiant pride in human achievements. But as time goes on, this aging minority is forgotten and a new generation emerges. They have new mental gifts, including the first stirrings of an ability to access the "Overmind," a mysterious shared consciousness in the universe, which has outgrown "the tyranny of matter." 

That generation in turn gives way to the next, and these beings are hardly human at all. Needing no food, having no language, they simply dance for years, in forests and meadows. Finally they stop and stand motionless for a long time. Then they slowly dissolve upward, into the Overmind. The planet itself becomes translucent like glass and shimmers out of existence. Humanity and the Earth have gone, or rather, they have been transfigured and merged into a higher realm. 

Such an ending for humanity is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, writes Clarke; it is just final. So is his novel, in a way. It pushes fiction to its limits. Earlier science fiction writers had also imagined a future in which humanity dies, notably Olaf Stapledon in his 1930 work, Last and First Men. But Clarke goes further, into a realm where there can be no more stories at all. Species have vanished; even matter has vanished, at least from Earth. He goes where Dante went in his Paradiso—and Dante complained in that work's first canto that this necessarily defeats the powers of any writer. To write about Heaven is "to go beyond the human"—transumanar—and, says Dante, this also means going beyond what language itself can accomplish. 

When I first read Childhood's End, I loved its finale. Now I feel the melancholy of such a vision far more. It leaves me in mourning for those flawed, recognizable individuals that we are and for the details of our planet and our many cultures, all lost to a universal blandness. Every particularity has gone: the atoms of Democritus, Terence's nosy neighbor, Petrarch's lack of patience and Boccaccio's bawdy stories, the Lake Nemi ships and the fishlike Genoese divers, Aldus Manutius and his exuberance (" Aldus is here!"), students floating down rivers, Platina's recipe for grilled eel à l'orange, Erasmus's polite farts, the Encyclopédie (all 71,818 articles of it), Hume's games of backgammon and whist, Dorothy L. Sayers's comfortable trousers, Frederick Douglass's magnificently photographed face and his eloquent words, the priestly and poetic Kawi language, sea squirts, bloomers, the Esperanto plaque by Petrarch's beloved stream, M. N. Roy's good soups, ridiculous heraldry, Rabindranath Tagore's classes under the trees, the windows of Chartres, microfilms, manifestos, meetings, Pugwash, busy New York streets, the yellow line of morning. They have all gone up in the ultimate bonfire of the vanities. To me, this no longer says sublimity; it says, "How disappointing." 

Where, in all this pure divinity and mysticism, is the richness of actual life? Also, where is our sense of responsibility for managing our occupancy of Earth? (Not that Clarke himself supported abdicating such responsibilities—quite the contrary.) And what about our relationships with fellow humans and other creatures—that great foundation for humanist ethics, identity, and meaning? 

These dreams of elevation perhaps emerge from memories of being a small child, lifted out of a cradle by big arms. But the Earth is not a cradle; we are not alone here, since we share it with so many other living beings; and we need not wait to be spirited away. Give me, instead of the Overmind, or the sublime visions of any religion, these words of a more human wisdom by James Baldwin: 

One is responsible to life. It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. 

A sense of sin is of no help on that journey; neither is a dream of transcendence. Dante was right: we really cannot transumanar, and if we have fun trying—well, that can produce beautiful literature. But it is still human literature. 

I prefer the humanist combination of freethinking, inquiry, and hope. And, as the late scholar of humanism and ethics Tzvetan Todorov once remarked in an interview: 

Humanism is a frail craft indeed to choose for setting sail around the world! A frail craft that can do no more than transport us to frail happiness. But, to me, the other solutions seem either conceived for a race of superheroes, which we are not . . . or heavily laden with illusions, with promises that will never be kept. I trust the humanist bark more. 

Finally, as always, I am brought back to the creed of Robert G. Ingersoll: 

    Happiness is the only good. 

    The time to be happy is now. 

    The place to be happy is here. 

    The way to be happy is to make others so.

    —

It sounds simple; it sounds easy. But it will take all the ingenuity we can muster."

— Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell

The Antidote to Melancholy: Robert Burton’s Centuries-Old Salve for Depression, Epochs Ahead of Science – The Marginalian

"'Seek out what magnifies your spirit'…

Precisely a quarter millennium before Thomas Bernhard observed that "there is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking," and two centuries before Nietzsche extolled the mental benefits of walking, Burton writes:

To walk amongst orchards, gardens, bowers, mounts, and arbours, artificial wildernesses, green thickets, arches, groves, lawns, rivulets, fountains… brooks, pools, fishponds, between wood and water, in a fair meadow, by a river side… in some pleasant plain, park, run up a steep hill sometimes, or sit in a shady seat… [is] a delectable recreation…

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/01/18/robert-burton-melancholy-body-mind/

Richard Powers on the Most Important Attitude You Can Take Toward Your Life and the World – The Marginalian

Sound advice from several sources…

We live in an open, evolving universe. We have choices to make, lives to live. All is not already set in plaster. Try to make it better.

"Never forget what you were born knowing. That this fluke, single, huge, cross-indexed, thermodynamic experiment of a story that the world has been inventing to tell itself at bedtime is still in embryo. It's not even the outline of a synopsis of notes toward a rough draft yet. Buy the plot some time."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/09/12/richard-powers-advice/

John Cleese speaks for philosophy

 Short Spots for Radio Stations

One of the tasks of the APA Centennial Committee, chaired by John Lachs, was to create a broader public awareness for philosophy by calling attention to its personal value and social usefulness. The Committee enlisted the help of the actor, John Cleese, in bringing this about. Mr. Cleese has recorded a disk of short philosophical reflections that were written for use on radio stations throughout the country. The disc contains 22 spots ranging from 30 seconds to 1 minute in length.

We've converted the CD to MP3 files and shared them below. You can listen to each individually, or you can download the whole set as a zip file.

01 Survey
02 Scientific Life
03 In The Present
04 Information
05 The Meaning Of Life
06 Future Obligation
07 Somewhere Else
08 Tabloid
09 Starting Point
10 Worldly Good
11 Things That Matter
12 Fun
13 Quality Of Life
14 What To Fear
15 Dream
16 Kids Today
17 Decision
18 Silenced
19 Century
20 Neighbor Policy
21 To Die For
22 Reachable Stars

Download all as a zip file.

From Volume 80, No. 2 of the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association

https://www.apaonline.org/page/Cleese/John-Cleese-Talking-About-Life-and-Philosophy.htm

When the Sky Offers an Unexpected Gift of Time

…In "The Book of (More) Delights," the poet and essayist Ross Gay writes about the gift of time that opens up whenever he unexpectedly arrives at an appointment early, or when the person he plans to meet is running late. Such unplanned changes in agenda can feel, he writes, "like the universe just dropped a bouquet of time, and often a luminous bouquet of time, in your lap."

That's what a snow day feels like here. A snow day in the American South on an overheating planet is exactly like an extravagant bouquet of luminous time that comes out of nowhere and lasts as long as it cares to, on a schedule we cannot entirely predict, much less control. Last week the sky offered an unexpected gift of time. Thank God I had no choice but to take it.  —Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/opinion/snow-winter-climate-change.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Another Gun Fight Is Looming in Tennessee

"…this growing coalition of new gun-safety advocates continues to give me hope. They were back at the Capitol last week — parents, teenagers, children and just about every other group, from both sides of the political aisle. They are not giving up, and so far they have not fallen prey to the political divisions that so often splinter bipartisan advocacy efforts…" —Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/opinion/gun-safety-tennessee.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Fry reads Cave on ChatGPT

 I'd enjoy watching Stephen Fry read the phone book (you know what that is, right?) but this is a lot better.

Gen Z Sisyphus

https://www.instagram.com/p/C2NpLuvOnyB/?igsh=MXcxMjUyamZwYW9ybA==

A crucial reminder

From Snoopy
https://www.threads.net/@honorlaois/post/C2POE_-rj4S/

The antidote (more Cousin Mary)

Mary Oliver, who died 5 years ago today, on how books saved her life and what the greatest antidote to sorrow is

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/11/02/mary-oliver-upstream-staying-alive-reading/

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/C2OhCkUMq53/

The call

"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."

Mary Oliver, who left us 5 years ago today, on creativity

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/10/12/mary-oliver-upstream-creativity-power-time/
https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/C2NUjyROKEa/

Ken Burns & Margaret Renkl

In our latest UNUMChat, @KenlBurns sits down with @NYTopinion writer @Margaret.Renkl to discuss her new book, THE COMFORT OF CROWS: A BACKYARD YEAR (@spiegelandgrau). Watch as they explore how we are part nature and how to look - even close to home - at the natural world in a different way: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/unum/playlist/featured#unum-chat-ken-burns-and-margaret-renkl

https://www.threads.net/@kenburnspbs/post/C2PxDe_rKKj/

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Valentine

https://www.instagram.com/p/C2GS33ovnda/?igsh=cXZmNjhnNjB3NGRw

Earth rising

"Stunning timelapse of the Earth rising over the Moon as captured by Japanese lunar orbiter spacecraft Kaguya."

https://www.threads.net/@amaziingastronomy/post/C2C22yVos_H/

Kierkegaard: keep on walking

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right. ~Søren Kierkegaard

(Book: The Essential Kierkegaard [ad] https://amzn.to/3TOdRvM)

https://www.threads.net/@philo.thoughts/post/C2C9PbICdwr/

Will McAvoy (Newsroom) vs. Sorority Girl

https://youtu.be/wTjMqda19wk?si=wJSVRIBKUrfYkMS3

President Bartlett vs. Ignorant Tightass Literalists

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C15uf5lxV3J/?igsh=NnhobTdrZDEzcjls

Graham Nash

"My feet are always up"-csny's great harmonizer urges persistent pursuit of personal passions…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001v2w0?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile