Council for Secular Humanism

A supported organization of the Center for Inquiry

What Is Secular Humanism?

"Taxonomically, my family is Freethinker (including atheists, skeptics, agnostics); my genus is Humanist (including the religion-based), and my species is Secular."
— John Rafferty

Secular. “Pertaining to the world or things not spiritual or sacred.”
Humanism. “Any system of thought or action concerned with the interests or ideals of people … the intellectual and cultural movement … characterized by an emphasis on human interests rather than … religion.”
— Webster’s Dictionary

Secular humanism is a comprehensive, nonreligious lifestance incorporating:

• A naturalistic philosophy
• A cosmic outlook rooted in science
• A consequentialist ethical system

Let’s examine these items one by one:

A comprehensive, nonreligious lifestance

Secular humanism is comprehensive, touching every aspect of life including issues of values, meaning, and identity. Thus it is broader than atheism, which concerns only the nonexistence of god or the supernatural. Important as that may be, there’s a lot more to life … and secular humanism addresses it.
Secular humanism is nonreligious, espousing no belief in a realm or beings imagined to transcend ordinary experience.

Secular humanism is a lifestance, or what Council for Secular Humanism founder Paul Kurtz has termed a eupraxsophy: a body of principles suitable for orienting a complete human life. As a secular lifestance, secular humanism incorporates the Enlightenment principle of individualism, which celebrates emancipating the individual from traditional controls by family, church, and state, increasingly empowering each of us to set the terms of his or her own life.

A naturalistic philosophy

Secular humanism is philosophically naturalistic. It holds that nature (the world of everyday physical experience) is all there is, and that reliable knowledge is best obtained when we query nature using the scientific method. Naturalism asserts that supernatural entities like God do not exist, and warns us that knowledge gained without appeal to the natural world and without impartial review by multiple observers is unreliable.

 

A cosmic outlook rooted in science

Secular humanism provides a cosmic outlook—a world-view in the broadest sense, grounding our lives in the context of our universe and relying on methods demonstrated by science. Secular humanists see themselves as undesigned, unintended beings who arose through evolution, possessing unique attributes of self-awareness and moral agency.

A consequentialist ethical system

Secular humanists hold that ethics is consequential, to be judged by results. This is in contrast to so-called command ethics, in which right and wrong are defined in advance and attributed to divine authority. “No god will save us,” declared Humanist Manifesto II (1973), “we must save ourselves.” Secular humanists seek to develop and improve their ethical principles by examining the results they yield in the lives of real men and women.

Read the Latest Articles

Why I Am Not An Open Atheist

 

Online-only bonus: I support the goals of the various “out” campaigns in the atheist/freethinker sphere. However, despite my strong commitment to humanistic atheism, I cannot participate.

No God, Know Peace: Introduction

 

In the April/May 2013 issue, FREE INQUIRY invited readers to submit autobiographical essays describing the life-stance odysseys that had led them to their present positions of secular humanism or atheism.

Why I Am Not a Born-again Christian

 

I had a fairly normal childhood. Most weeks I attended Sunday school, sorting through crayon nubs to color pictures of farm animals, children, and disciples all clustered around Jesus with looks of adoration.

The American Humanist

American Humanist Association

GOOD WITHOUT A GOD

Advocating progressive values and equality for humanists, atheists, and freethinkers

What Is Humanism

By Fred Edwords


The sort of answer you get to the question "What is humanism?" depends on the sort of humanist you ask!

The word "humanism" has a number of meanings. And because authors and speakers often don't clarify which meaning they intend, those trying to explain humanism can easily become a source of confusion. Fortunately, each meaning of the word constitutes a different type of humanism—the different types being easily separated and defined by the use of appropriate adjectives. So it is relatively easy to summarize the varieties of humanism in this way.

Literary Humanism is a devotion to the humanities or literary culture.

Resaissance Humanism is the spirit of learning that developed at the end of the middle ages with the revival of classical letters and a renewed confidence in the ability of human beings to determine for themselves truth and falsehood.

Western Cultural Humanism is a good name for the rational and empirical tradition that originated largely in ancient Greece and Rome, evolved throughout European history, and now constitutes a basic part of the Western approach to science, political theory, ethics, and law.

Philosophical Humanism is any outlook or way of life centered on human need and interest. Sub-categories of this type include Christian Humanism and Modern Humanism.

Christian Humanism is defined by Webster's Third New International Dictionary as "a philosophy advocating the self-fulfillment of man within the framework of Christian principles." This more human-oriented faith is largely a product of the Renaissance and is a part of what made up Renaissance humanism.

Modern Humanism, also called Naturalistic Humanism, Scientific Humanism, Ethical Humanism, and Democratic Humanism, is defined by one of its leading proponents, Corliss Lamont, as "a naturalistic philosophy that rejects all supernaturalism and relies primarily upon reason and science, democracy and human compassion." Modern Humanism has a dual origin, both secular and religious, and these constitute its sub-categories.

Secular Humanism is an outgrowth of eighteenth century enlightenment rationalism and nineteenth century freethought. Many secular groups, such as the Council for Secular Humanism and the American Rationalist Federation, and many otherwise unaffiliated academic philosophers and scientists, advocate this philosophy.

Religious Humanism largely emerged out of Ethical Culture, Unitarianism, and Universalism. Today, many Unitarian Universalist congregations and all Ethical Culture societies describe themselves as humanist in the modern sense.
The most critical irony in dealing with Modern Humanism is the tendency for its advocates to disagree on whether or not this worldview is religious. Those who see it as philosophy are the Secular Humanists while those who see it as religion are Religious Humanists. This dispute has been going on since the beginning of the twentieth century when the secular and religious traditions converged and brought Modern Humanism into existence.

Secular and Religious Humanists both share the same worldview and the same basic principles. This is made evident by the fact that both Secular and Religious Humanists were among the signers of Humanist Manifesto I in 1933, Humanist Manifesto II in 1973, and Humanist Manifesto III in 2003. From the standpoint of philosophy alone, there is no difference between the two. It is only in the definition of religion and in the practice of the philosophy that Religious and Secular Humanists effectively disagree.

The definition of religion used by Religious Humanists is often a functional one. Religion is that which serves the personal and social needs of a group of people sharing the same philosophical worldview.

To serve personal needs, Religious Humanism offers a basis for moral values, an inspiring set of ideals, methods for dealing with life's harsher realities, a rationale for living life joyously, and an overall sense of purpose.

To serve social needs humanist religious communities (such as Ethical Culture societies and many Unitarian Universalist churches) offer a sense of belonging, an institutional setting for the moral education of children, special holidays shared with like-minded people, a unique ceremonial life, the performance of ideologically consistent rites of passage (weddings, child welcomings, coming-of-age celebrations, memorials, and so forth), an opportunity for affirmation of one's philosophy of life, and a historical context for one's ideas.

Religious Humanists often maintain that most human beings have personal and social needs that can only be met by religion (taken in the functional sense just detailed). They do not feel that one should have to make a choice between meeting these needs in a traditional faith context versus not meeting them at all. Individuals who cannot feel at home in traditional religion should be able to find a home in non-traditional religion.

I was once asked by a reporter if this functional definition of religion didn't amount to taking away the substance and leaving only the superficial trappings. My answer was that the true substance of religion is the role it plays in the lives of individuals and the life of the community. Doctrines may differ from denomination to denomination, and new doctrines may replace old ones, but the purpose religion serves for people remains the same. If we define the substance of a thing as that which is most lasting and universal, then the function of religion is the core of it.

Religious Humanists, in realizing this, make sure that doctrine is never allowed to subvert the higher purpose of meeting human needs in the here and now. This is why humanist child welcoming ceremonies are geared to the community and humanist wedding services are tailored to the specialized needs of the wedding couple and their families. This is why humanist memorial services focus, not on saving the soul of the dear departed but on serving the survivors by giving them a memorable experience related to how the deceased was in life. This is why humanists don't proselytize people on their death beds. They find it better to allow them to die as they have lived, undisturbed by the agendas of others.
Finally, Religious Humanism is "faith in action." In his essay "The Faith of a Humanist," UU Minister Kenneth Phifer declares -

Humanism teaches us that it is immoral to wait for God to act for us. We must act to stop the wars and the crimes and the brutality of this and future ages. We have powers of a remarkable kind. We have a high degree of freedom in choosing what we will do. Humanism tells us that whatever our philosophy of the universe may be, ultimately the responsibility for the kind of world in which we live rests with us.

Now, while Secular Humanists may agree with much of what Religious Humanists do, they deny that this activity is properly called "religious." This isn't a mere semantic debate. Secular Humanists maintain that there is so much in religion deserving of criticism that the good name of humanism should not be tainted by connection with it.

Secular Humanists often refer to Unitarian Universalists as "humanists not yet out of the church habit." But Unitarian Universalists sometimes counter that a Secular Humanist is simply an "unchurched Unitarian."

Probably the most popular exemplar of the Secular Humanist world view in recent years was the controversial author Salman Rushdie. Here is what he said on ABC's Nightline on February 13, 1989, in regard to his novel The Satanic Verses.

[My book says] that there is an old, old conflict between the secular view of the world and the religious view of the world, and particularly between texts which claim to be divinely inspired and texts which are imaginatively inspired. . . . I distrust people who claim to know the whole truth and who seek to orchestrate the world in line with that one true truth. I think that's a very dangerous position in the world. It needs to be challenged. It needs to be challenged constantly in all sorts of ways, and that's what I tried to do.

In the March 2, 1989, edition of the New York Review, he explained that, in The Satanic Verses he -

tried to give a secular, humanist vision of the birth of a great world religion. For this, apparently, I should be tried. . . . "Battle lines are being drawn today," one of my characters remarks. "Secular versus religious, the light verses the dark. Better you choose which side you are on."

The Secular Humanist tradition is in part a tradition of defiance, a tradition that dates back to ancient Greece. One can see, even in Greek mythology, humanist themes that are rarely, if ever, manifested in the mythologies of other cultures. And they certainly have not been repeated by modern religions. The best example here is the character Prometheus.

Prometheus stands out because he was admired by ancient Greeks as the one who defied Zeus. He stole the fire of the gods and brought it down to earth. For this he was punished. And yet he continued his defiance amid his tortures. This is one source of the humanist challenge to authority.

The next time we see a truly heroic Promethean character in mythology it is Lucifer in John Milton's Paradise Lost. But now he is the Devil. He is evil. Whoever would defy God must be wickedness personified. That seems to be a given of traditional religion. But the ancient Greeks didn't agree. To them, Zeus, for all his power, could still be mistaken.

Imagine how shocked a friend of mine was when I told her my view of "God's moral standards." I said, "If there were such a god, and these were indeed his ideal moral principles, I would be tolerant. After all, God is entitled to his own opinions!"

Only a humanist is inclined to speak this way. Only a humanist can suggest that, even if there be a god, it is OK to disagree with him, her, or it. In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates shows that God is not necessarily the source of good, or even good himself. Socrates asks if something is good because God ordains it, or if God ordains it because it is already good. Yet, since the time of the ancient Greeks, no mainstream religion has permitted such questioning of God's will or made a hero out of a disobedient character. It is humanists who claim this tradition.

After all, much of human progress has been in defiance of religion or of the apparent natural order. When we deflect lightning or evacuate a town before a tornado strikes, we lessen the effects of so called "acts of God." When we land on the Moon we defy the Earth's gravitational pull. When we seek a solution to the AIDS crisis, we, as the late Reverend Jerry Falwell argued, thwart "God's punishment of homosexuals."

Politically, the defiance of religious and secular authority has led to democracy, human rights, and the protection of the environment. Humanists make no apologies for this. Humanists twist no biblical doctrine to justify such actions. They recognize the Promethean defiance of their response and take pride in it. For this is part of the tradition.

Another aspect of the Secular Humanist tradition is skepticism. Skepticism's historical exemplar is Socrates. Why Socrates? Because after all this time he still stands alone among all the famous saints and sages from antiquity to the present. Every religion has its sage. Judaism has Moses, Zoroastrianism has Zarathustra, Buddhism has the Buddha, Christianity has Jesus, Islam has Mohammad, Mormonism has Joseph Smith, and Bahai has Baha-u-lah. Every one of these individuals claimed to know the absolute truth. It is Socrates, alone among famous sages, who claimed to know nothing. Each devised a set of rules or laws, save Socrates. Instead, Socrates gave us a method—a method of questioning the rules of others, of cross-examination. And Socrates didn't die for truth, he died for rights and the rule of law. For these reasons Socrates is the quintessential skeptical humanist. He stands as a symbol, both of Greek rationalism and the humanist tradition that grew out of it. And no equally recognized saint or sage has joined his company since his death.

Because of the strong Secular Humanist identity with the images of Prometheus and Socrates, and equally strong rejection of traditional religion, the Secular Humanist actually agrees with Tertullian—who said: "What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?"

That is, Secular Humanists identify more closely with the rational heritage symbolized by ancient Athens than with the faith heritage epitomized by ancient Jerusalem.

But don't assume from this that Secular Humanism is only negative. The positive side is liberation, best expressed in these words of American agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll:

When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free-free to think, to express my thoughts-free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination's wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself . . . I was free! I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously faced all worlds.

Enough to make a Secular Humanist shout "hallelujah!"

The fact that humanism can at once be both religious and secular presents a paradox of course, but not the only such paradox. Another is that both Religious and Secular Humanism place reason above faith, usually to the point of eschewing faith altogether. The dichotomy between reason and faith is often given emphasis in humanism, with humanists taking their stand on the side of reason. Because of this, Religious Humanism should not be seen as an alternative faith, but rather as an alternative way of being religious.

These paradoxical features not only require a unique treatment of Religious Humanism in the study of world religions but also help explain the continuing disagreement, both inside and outside the humanist movement, over whether humanism is a religion at all.

The paradoxes don't end here. Religious Humanism is without a god, without a belief in the supernatural, without a belief in an afterlife, and without a belief in a "higher" source of moral values. Some adherents would even go so far as to suggest that it is a religion without "belief" of any kind—knowledge based on evidence being considered preferable. Furthermore, the common notion of "religious knowledge" as knowledge gathered through nonscientific means is not accepted in Religious Humanist epistemology.

Because both Religious and Secular Humanism are identified so closely with Cultural Humanism, they readily embrace modern science, democratic principles, human rights, and free inquiry. Humanism's rejection of the notions of sin and guilt, especially in relation to sexual ethics, puts it in harmony with contemporary sexology and sex education as well as aspects of humanistic psychology. And humanism's historic advocacy of the secular state makes it another voice in the defense of church-state separation.

All these features led to the old charge that people are teaching "the religion of secular humanism" in the public schools.

The most obvious point to clarify in this context is that some religions hold to doctrines that place their adherents at odds with certain features of the modern world. Other religions do not. For example, many Evangelical Christians, especially those filling the ranks of the "religious right," reject the theory of evolution. Therefore, they see the teaching of evolution in a science course as an affront to their religious sensibilities. In defending their beliefs from exposure to ideas inconsistent with them, such believers label evolution as "humanism" and maintain that exclusive teaching of it in the science classroom constitutes a breech in the Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state.

It is indeed true that Religious Humanists, in embracing modern science, embrace evolution in the bargain. But individuals within mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism also embrace modern science—and hence evolution. Evolution happens to be the state of the art in science today and is appropriately taught in science courses. That evolution has come to be identified with Religious Humanism but not with mainline Christianity or Judaism is a curious quirk of politics in North America. But this is a typical feature of the whole controversy over humanism in the schools.

Other courses of study have come to be identified with humanism as well, including sex education, values education, global education, and even creative writing. There are Christian fundamentalists who would have us believe that "situation ethics" was invented by 1974 Humanist of the Year Joseph Fletcher. But situational considerations have been an element of Western jurisprudence for at least 2,000 years! Again, Secular and Religious Humanists, being in harmony with current trends, are quite comfortable with all of this, as are adherents of most major religions. There is no justification for seeing these ideas as the exclusive legacy of humanism. Furthermore, there are independent secular reasons why schools offer the curriculum that they do. A bias in favor of "the religion of secular humanism" has never been a factor in their development and implementation.

The charge of humanist infiltration into the public schools seems to be the product of a confusion of Cultural Humanism and Religious Humanism. Though Religious Humanism embraces Cultural Humanism, this is no justification for separating out Cultural Humanism, labeling it as the exclusive legacy of a nontheistic and naturalistic religion called Religious Humanism, and declaring it alien. To do so would be to turn one's back on a significant part of one's culture and enthrone the standards of Christian fundamentalism as the arbiter of what is and is not religious. A deeper understanding of Western culture would go a long way in clarifying the issues surrounding the controversy over humanism in the public schools.

Once we leave the areas of confusion, it is possible to explain, in straightforward terms, exactly what the Modern Humanist philosophy is about. It is easy to summarize the basic ideas held in common by both Religious and Secular Humanists. These ideas are as follows:

1. Humanism is one of those philosophies for people who think for themselves. There is no area of thought that a Humanist is afraid to challenge and explore.
   
2. Humanism is a philosophy focused upon human means for comprehending reality. Humanists make no claims to possess or have access to supposed transcendent knowledge.
   
3. Humanism is a philosophy of reason and science in the pursuit of knowledge. Therefore, when it comes to the question of the most valid means for acquiring knowledge of the world, Humanists reject arbitrary faith, authority, revelation, and altered states of consciousness.
   
4. Humanism is a philosophy of imagination. Humanists recognize that intuitive feelings, hunches, speculation, flashes of inspiration, emotion, altered states of consciousness, and even religious experience, while not valid means to acquire knowledge, remain useful sources of ideas that can lead us to new ways of looking at the world. These ideas, after they have been assessed rationally for their usefulness, can then be put to work, often as alternative approaches for solving problems.
   
5. Humanism is a philosophy for the here and now. Humanists regard human values as making sense only in the context of human life rather than in the promise of a supposed life after death.
   
   
6. Humanism is a philosophy of compassion. Humanist ethics is solely concerned with meeting human needs and answering human problems-for both the individual and society-and devotes no attention to the satisfaction of the desires of supposed theological entities.
   
7. Humanism is a realistic philosophy. Humanists recognize the existence of moral dilemmas and the need for careful consideration of immediate and future consequences in moral decision making.
   
8. Humanism is in tune with the science of today. Humanists therefore recognize that we live in a natural universe of great size and age, that we evolved on this planet over a long period of time, that there is no compelling evidence for a separable "soul," and that human beings have certain built-in needs that effectively form the basis for any human-oriented value system.
   
9. Humanism is in tune with today's enlightened social thought. Humanists are committed to civil liberties, human rights, church-state separation, the extension of participatory democracy not only in government but in the workplace and education, an expansion of global consciousness and exchange of products and ideas internationally, and an open-ended approach to solving social problems, an approach that allows for the testing of new alternatives.
   
10. Humanism is in tune with new technological developments. Humanists are willing to take part in emerging scientific and technological discoveries in order to exercise their moral influence on these revolutions as they come about, especially in the interest of protecting the environment.
    
11. Humanism is, in sum, a philosophy for those in love with life. Humanists take responsibility for their own lives and relish the adventure of being part of new discoveries, seeking new knowledge, exploring new options. Instead of finding solace in prefabricated answers to the great questions of life, humanists enjoy the open-endedness of a quest and the freedom of discovery that this entails.

Though there are some who would suggest that this philosophy has always had a limited and eccentric following, the facts of history show otherwise. Among the modern adherents of humanism have been Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and 1957 Humanist of the Year of the American Humanist Association; humanistic psychology pioneers Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, also Humanists of the Year; Albert Einstein, who identified with humanism in the 1930's; Bertrand Russell, who joined the American Humanist Association in the 1960s; civil rights pioneer A. Philip Randoph, who was the 1970 Humanist of the Year; and futurist R. Buckminister Fuller, Humanist of the Year in 1969.

The United Nations is a specific example of humanism at work. The first Director General of UNESCO, the UN organization promoting education, science, and culture, was the 1962 Humanist of the Year Julian Huxley, who practically drafted UNESCO'S charter by himself. The first Director-General of the World Health Organization was the 1959 Humanist of the Year Brock Chisholm. One of this organization's greatest accomplishments has been the wiping of smallpox from the face of the earth. And the first Director-General of the Food and Agricultural Organization was British Humanist John Boyd Orr.
Meanwhile, humanists like 1980 Humanist of the Year Andrei Sakharov stood up for human rights wherever such rights were suppressed. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem fought for women's rights, Mathilde Krim battled the AIDS epidemic, and Margaret Atwood remains one of the world's most outspoken advocates of literary freedom—humanists all.

The list of scientists is legion: Stephen Jay Gould, Donald Johanson, Richard Leakey, E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk, Steven Weinberg, Carolyn Porco, and many others—all members of the American Humanist Association, whose president in the 1980s was the late scientist and author Isaac Asimov.

The membership lists of humanist organizations, both religious and secular, read like Who's Who. Through these people, and many more of less reknown, the humanist philosophy has an impact on our world far out of proportion to the number of its adherents. That tells us something about the power of ideas that work.
It may have been what led philosopher George Santayana to declare humanism to be "an accomplishment, not a doctrine."

So, with modern humanism one finds a lifestance or worldview that is in tune with modern knowledge; is inspiring, socially conscious, and personally meaningful. It is not only the thinking person's outlook but that of the feeling person as well, for it has inspired the arts as much as it has the sciences; philanthropy as much as critique. And even in critique it is tolerant, defending the rights of all people to choose other ways, to speak and to write freely, to live their lives according to their own lights.

So the choice is yours. Are you a humanist?

You needn't answer "yes" or "no." For it isn't an either-or proposition. Humanism is yours—to adopt or to simply draw from. You may take a little or a lot, sip from the cup or drink it to the dregs.

It's up to you.

---

This is the text of a talk that has been presented to various audiences over the years.

© Copyright 1989 and 2008 by Fred Edwords

Ethical Humanism: Ethical Society Without Walls

Ethical Society Without Walls

connecting to live more ethical lives

What is Ethical Culture?

 

What philosophy of life inspires the Ethical Societies?

Ethical Culture (also sometimes called Ethical Humanism) is the name of an evolving body of ideas that inspires Ethical Societies. Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity (Humanist Manifesto III). For Ethical Humanists, the ultimate religious questions are not about the existence of gods or an afterlife, but rather, "How can we create meaningfulness in this life?" and "How should we treat each other?"

Ethical Humanism is clear about the essential role that ethical principles play in human relationships. Despite how uncertain we might feel about our personal standards--or how best to apply them--for an Ethical Humanist, there are unquestionably acts that are good and evil, right and wrong. In order for human beings to have good lives, love must prevail, truth must be respected, honesty esteemed, justice secured, and freedom protected. Learning how to realize these ideals in personal and political relationships is the purpose of Ethical Societies.

How is an Ethical Society religious?

Ethical Societies serve as religious congregations in which members can build a community of friends, find inspiration and purpose, provide moral education for their children, celebrate the seasons and life events, and clarify their world views. Professional Ethical Culture Leaders fill the roles of religious clergy, including meeting the pastoral needs of members, performing ceremonies, and serving as spokespeople for the congregation

ESWoW is a new and growing congregation, with members in various locations. We are still learning and trying to find ways that we can do things together, especially celebrating life events, and providing moral education for children of members. We are open to your ideas.

Do Ethical Societies have a creed?

No. Members are not bound by any community creed or dogma. Rather, Ethical Societies emphasize the importance of developing a clear personal philosophy that makes your life understandable and meaningful. Learning to benefit from a diversity of viewpoints is one of the challenges of membership. Members encourage each other to think freely and to disagree without being disagreeable. A saying often used in Ethical Culture is "Deed before creed" sometimes expressed as "Diversity in the creed, unanimity in the deed."

What are some beliefs taught by Ethical Societies?

 

• Freedom of Belief: When we stimulate our thinking with new insights, information, and inspirations, our understanding of the world evolves, and we realize the full capacity of our human spirit.
• Eliciting the Best: It is by acting in a way that encourages the finest characteristics in others that we bring out the best in ourselves.
• Respect for Human Worth: We treat all people as having an inherent capacity for fairness, kindness, and living ethically.
• Ethical Living: When we put into practice ethical principles such as love, justice, honesty, and forgiveness, we experience harmony within ourselves and in our relationships.
• Reverence for Life: We cultivate the spiritual dimension in life by experiencing our interdependent connections to humanity, nature, and our inner values.

 

What does ethics mean?

Ethics defines the elements essential to human well-being and proposes guiding principles to generate an ethical culture. Ethics also refers to the specific values, standards, rules, and agreements that people adopt for conducting their lives. Ethics, most broadly, is the study of human behavior and its consequences in the light of what is ideally possible. For example, ethicists might study a society's mores or morals to determine what effect they would have on humankind if they were used as universal standards. Ethics are not merely social conventions, like table manners. Rather, ethics define the social conditions necessary for human beings to thrive.

What are some of the ethical principles of the Ethical Society?

The Eight Commitments of Ethical Culture were written in collaboration with Leaders and members of the American Ethical Union, coordinated by Lois Kathleen Kellerman, Leader Emeritus of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture.

1. Ethics is Central: The most central human issue in our lives is creating a more humane environment.
2. Ethics Begins with Choice: Creating a more humane environment begins by affirming the need to make significant choices in our lives.
3. We Choose to Treat Each Other as Ends, not Means: To enable us to be whole in a fragmented world, we choose to treat each other as unique individuals having intrinsic worth.
4. We Seek to Act with Integrity: Treating one another as ends requires that we learn to act with integrity. This includes keeping commitments, and being honest, open, caring and responsive.
5. We are Committed to Educate Ourselves: Personal progress is possible, both in wisdom and social life. Learning how to build ethical relationships and cultivate a humane community is a life-long endeavor.
6. Self Reflection and Our Social Nature Require Us to Shape a More Humane World: Growth of the human spirit is rooted in self-reflection, but can only come to full flower in community. This is because people are social, needing both primary relationships and larger supportive groups to become fully human. Our social nature requires that we reach beyond ourselves to decrease suffering and increase creativity in the world.
7. Democratic Process is Essential to Our Task: The democratic process is essential to a humane social order because respect for the worth of persons requires democratic process, which elicits and allows a greater expression of human capacities.
8. Life Itself Inspires a Natural "Religious" Response: Although awareness of impending death intensifies the human quest, the mystery of life itself, and the need to belong, are the primary factors motivating human religious response.

 

What is the latest statement by Ethical Culture Leaders about Ethical Culture/Ethical Humanism?

In 2008, the National Leaders Conference developed a statement on where Ethical Culture/Ethical Humanism stands at the beginning of the 21st century. Its intent is to clarify our shared beliefs in language that resonates with the familiar and unfamiliar alike. Open to the possibilities of the future, it is part of a living canon—an expression of those Ethical Culture Leaders who endorse it and are devoted to furthering Ethical Humanism within its context.

SundayReview

 

Editorial

What the Stimulus Accomplished

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD 

FEB. 22, 2014

Of all the myths and falsehoods that Republicans have spread about President Obama, the most pernicious and long-lasting is that the $832 billion stimulus package did not work. Since 2009, Republican lawmakers have inextricably linked the words “failed” and “stimulus,” and last week, five years after passage of the Recovery Act, they dusted off their old playbook again.

“The ‘stimulus’ has turned out to be a classic case of big promises and big spending with little results,” wrote Speaker John Boehner. “Five years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, millions of families are still asking, ‘where are the jobs?’ ”

The stimulus could have done more good had it been bigger and more carefully constructed. But put simply, it prevented a second recession that could have turned into a depression. It created or saved an average of 1.6 million jobs a year for four years. (There are the jobs, Mr. Boehner.) It raised the nation’s economic output by 2 to 3 percent from 2009 to 2011. It prevented a significant increase in poverty — without it, 5.3 million additional people would have become poor in 2010. 

And yet Republicans were successful in discrediting the very idea that federal spending can boost the economy and raise employment. They made the argument that the stimulus was a failure not just to ensure that Mr. Obama would get no credit for the recovery that did occur, but to justify their obstruction of all further attempts at stimulus. 

So the American Jobs Act was killed, and so was the infrastructure bank and any number of other spending proposals that might have helped the country. The president’s plan to spend another $56 billion on job training, education and energy efficiency, to be unveiled in his budget next month, will almost certainly suffer a similar fate.

This may be the singular tragedy of the Obama administration. Five years later, it is clear to all fair-minded economists that the stimulus did work, and that it did enormous good for the economy and for tens of millions of people. But because it fell short of its goals, and was roundly ridiculed by Republicans and inadequately defended by Democrats, who should have trumpeted its success, the president’s stimulus plan is now widely considered a stumble.

This enabled Republicans to champion an austerity policy that produced deep reductions in discretionary spending, undoing many of the gains begun in 2009. The result has been a post-stimulus recovery that remains weak and struggling, undermining an economic legacy that should be seen as a remarkable accomplishment.

The legacy of that policy, detailed by the White House last week in its final report on the effects of the stimulus, affects virtually every American who drives, uses mass transit, or drinks water. It improved 42,000 miles of road, fixed or replaced 2,700 bridges, and bought more than 12,000 transit vehicles. It cleaned up water supplies, created the school reforms of the Race to the Top program, and greatly expanded the use of renewable energy and broadband Internet service.

It’s probably too late for the White House to persuade skeptics about its program, but its assessment echoes the views of many independent economists and the independent Congressional Budget Office. “The Recovery Act was not a failed program,” the C.B.O.’s director, Douglas Elmendorf, told annoyed Republican lawmakers in 2012. “Our position is that it created higher output and employment than would have occurred without it.”

Government spending worked, helping millions of people who never realized it. And it can work again, whenever lawmakers agree that putting people to work is more important than winning ideological fights.

Meet The New York Times’s Editorial Board »

A version of this editorial appears in print on February 23, 2014, on page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline: What the Stimulus Accomplished. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

Musician Peter Buffett, Son of Famed Investor, Confronts Gross Injustices of American Capitalism

  Economy  

AlterNet / By Peter Buffett, Gar Alperovitz

Musician Peter Buffett, Son of Famed Investor, Confronts Gross Injustices of American Capitalism

Economist Gar Alperovitz talks to Buffett about how to create a new system from the ground up.

February 10, 2014  |  

Peter Buffett and his wife, Jennifer, head up the NoVo Foundation, whose $1 billion endowment was made possible by Peter's father, famed investor Warren Buffett.Last year, Peter wrote a scathing opinion piece in the New York Times that called out traditional philanthropy for treating symptoms while ignoring the underlying systemic issues. Now that the dust has settled, Peter Buffett sat down with Gar Alperovitz, longtime advocate for a transition to a more just, equitable, and sustainable economic system, for a conversation about hope, change, personal commitment, and community roots.

GA: I want to make it a dialogue. I’m not a reporter, but I do want to start with the obvious questions, with the piece you did in the New York Times on the "charitable industrial complex” and the reaction that you received.

PB: Well, it’s been fantastic. I was utterly surprised that it mattered that much, what I had to say. And that it mattered that much that I said it. I got a lot of responses like, “Thank god somebody said this, and thank god you said it!”
So then I wrote the op-ed thinking, oh, it’ll just be a blog, and when I finished I thought, well, maybe somebody might be interested in this. So when the NYT said yes, I was certainly flattered and excited, but still I had no idea how far it would go. It’s like writing a hit song—you’re just writing a song; you don’t know that it’s going to resonate the way it does. In fact, I say to my musician friends, here I’ve been spending my whole life trying to write a hit song, and it ended up being an op-ed in the NYT!

GA: I know you also got a lot of criticism.

PB: This is the interesting part. Within the first three to four days, maybe even longer, I received an absolute tsunami, beyond a flood, of support and positive responses—crashed the NoVo website for a couple of days, came in through my info@PeterBuffet.com address, hundreds of hundreds of responses, all positive, 100 percent.

And then the people who actually had their own megaphone, inside the system that I was talking about, started responding, and that’s when the negativity began. It came from, essentially, the institutionalized way of thinking. Immediately what I saw was that the people who got the feeling of it, the systemic nature or the overarching sense of what I was trying to put out there as an observation, totally got it. The people who wanted to reduce it—this sentence is wrong, that sentence is shows how nuts he is—were the ones who criticized it. Well, isn’t that the problem? I thought it was interesting seeing the issue once again show itself in who supported and who criticized the piece.

GA: That’s really interesting because I thought you were going to answer—but I’m glad you didn’t—that you were mostly attacked. That’s the part I saw.
PB: The positive responses are what people didn’t see, because it was email after email personally.

GA: Even more important, is the recognition in other’s eyes that one has a voice. A lot of people don’t know that they have a voice.

PB: We really feel like that at the foundation as one of the key components for us is to either give people the agency to have a voice, or if they don’t feel like their voice is valid for some reason, to have other voices speak for them to show them that it is. One way or another, we want to create this awareness around your own agency that your voice matters.

GA: I’ll tell you my story: I wrote a Ph.D. thesis which turned out to be on the decision to use the atomic bomb. I hadn’t started there. I started with the development of American economic imperialism in 1944-'45, and the planning for the post-war era. And I ran into the fact that people, when the atomic bomb became available, saw it as way to keep the Russians in the corner and enforce their position. This was at Cambridge, and Simon and Schuster decided to publish it.

I was 26—I thought, oh, isn’t that nice? And then all of a sudden, I had the same experience you had. It was front page on the New York Times and the Washington Post, but attacked, of course.

PB: Of course. Wow.

GA: I was like, whoa that’s a different world out there! What’s really interesting about the inside of the system is that even Harry Truman who made this decision actually believed that he was doing good. If you see him as an evil person conspiring, you miss the whole.

PB: I don’t particularly subscribe to the idea that there are people out there with their fingers on the triggers, pulleys, levers and buttons, sort of a conspiracy side of things, as much as a system that is running…

GA: It’s much deeper than a conspiracy.

PB: Right! The thing I love is that nobody’s that smart, nobody’s that together. No politician has it all figured out. That’s not to say that there weren’t bad actors when the engines were starting, for instance during the Industrial revolution.  People have gotten the car going off in that direction, but at that point, it’s going. That’s the hardest part about this. We’re inside this system and people absolutely not only believe it’s real, they need to believe it’s real.
GA: One of the things I’ve discovered—I’ve been speaking around the country, mainly because of my new book—most people understand that there is a systemic problem. It’s not politics and who you elect; the long-term trends are perfectly clear. It’s not a secret.

PB: You’re saying that most people get that it’s systemic.

GA: Yes, they get it. Media continues to be all about the Tea Party, and whether Barack Obama made the right move yesterday, and all that stuff. But what’s actually being said across the country is that there is a systemic problem. They voice it in different ways—some people talk about the big corporations, some about the government. But to say that there is a systemic problem is to speak to something people basically know. Lots of people.

PB: Yes, you’re right. Exactly. That was what was interesting about the response to the op-ed. These were not just philanthropic people in the NGOs cheering me on. These were people that just got that I was talking about a systemic deal.
GA: That’s the challenge. You put that issue in the center.  “If you don’t like capitalism, and you don’t want socialism, then what do you want and how do we get there?” It is that level of question.

PB: It’s funny, I was talking to someone at KPFK in Los Angeles, on Pacifica radio. He wanted me to go toward revolution and communism, essentially. And I said, look, all those words are charged for various people for various reasons, so I’ll just use the word “awaken.” How about that? How can I get to a word that isn’t charged? That’s a problem with “socialism” in particular.

GA: Although, you’ve seen the poll data. People under 30, who will be the creators of the new era, are slightly positive on "socialism," probably because Fox news is against it.

PB: Yes, exactly, Fox is probably doing themselves in, and they don’t realize it!
GA: But all of this is not manifest; we need to crystallize it somehow. The thing I discovered just going around the country, and particularly this last round, is that there is also a huge amount going on on the ground. But people don’t know that! People do not have the information. So they see the bleak and the dark, and the talking heads. And when you begin to give them information on what's developing locally all over the place, the most common reaction I get is “Oh! There’s some hope!” In the media, people don't get that, what they get is stalemate and deadlocked power.

PB: Yes, they’re getting what’s fed to them. Maybe the most important thing to us at the foundation is giving people the knowledge that other people are there too. Again, that alone gives them hope.

GA: Knowledge, information and also some perspective on how to move forward.

PB: It’s about trailblazers. What's critical is finding like-minded people that maybe have taken one step further than you have, and then you feel safe to taking that step yourself.

GA: Yes, it makes it seem possible, that it might be possible. There may be a way forward. But language is important. Half of our time at the Democracy Collaborative is spent on the ground, working on how to democratize ownership of wealth through community building strategies, and the other part is focused on the systemic question: if you don’t like capitalism and you don’t like socialism, then what do you want?

My language on this, I’m from Racine, Wisconsin, and my first test, is to think about my very good friend who I go back to see occasionally, who I started kindergarten with. And he’s extremely conservative, very religious and really smart. And last time I saw him, and I talked to him about this. If you don’t have a way to speak to people who are ordinary Americans like the guys I grew up with, you’re not in the game.

Let me ask you one more question about this, because I can't resist. How much of this—as a kid from Racine asking a kid from Omaha—how much of the spirit of this comes from the local Midwestern experience?

PB: In some sense, all of it. There’s some fundamental geographical DNA that plays a role in the literal DNA, I think I’m the sixth or seventh generation in Omaha, my great-great-whatever came in in the 1860s and started a grocery store in 1869, that was there for 100 years. That was the family business. My great-great-grandfather, I joke about this, his name was Earnest and his brother’s name was Frank. And their sister’s name was Grace! But talk about a work ethic!

My mother lived two blocks from where she grew up and where I was born. So in other words, I would go see my grandparents all the time—they were two blocks away. And I had the same English teacher my mother had in high school, and it just goes on and on. It was a community. This essentially could happen anywhere, but it feels very Midwestern.

GA: It’s a small enough city that you could have that feeling of community. Where I'm from the size of the town is smaller, about 80,000. I’ll probably romanticize this, but looking back, let me tell you how it was. The truth of it was, the zoo didn’t have an elephant and they wanted an elephant. (It's a whole other question whether that's a good thing.) So they put up a paper-mâché elephant with a slot in it, people would drop their pennies in, and ultimately, step by step, they got an elephant. They could actually count on the community.

I have this image, and I remember reading this story, where they’re training young firemen, and they have to learn to go into the fire and then come out the other end. They are one thing at the outset, and frightened. And they come out the other end as a fireman once they’ve actually faced it and done it. What I hear you doing is embracing Warren Buffett’s son, and coming out the other end, using it.

PB: Yes, absolutely. That’s exactly right.

GA: Wonderful. Did you have any hesitation about doing this?

PB: No, and I’ll tell you why. I got it from my parents, and my nature, too. It takes both. We grew up not having any idea what my dad did.
GA: You really didn’t know?

PB: We really didn’t know. When my sister was in grade school and she had to list our father’s occupation, she put security analyst. Everybody thought he checked alarm systems. He’d read the paper every night in the same place, going through S&P 500s, Moody’s, huge bulletins, but we had no idea. Honestly, we rented the same house in Laguna Beach for the summer for 10 years, over 10 years, and then they finally bought a house. So we had a second home when I was 13 or 14, and that was a big deal. And that was a $125,000 house on the beach, it wasn’t a $4 million house or whatever.

So there were little things that were a little different, but nothing that was wildly different than anybody in the neighborhood. We didn’t have any sense of that. When I was in my 20s, in the '80s, he showed up on some richest person list, it might’ve been when Forbes started doing it. And my mom and I were on the phone laughing saying, wow, now everybody is going to start looking at us differently, even though we’re still the same. But being in Milwaukee and being a musician, it was actually not a thing because my friends were painters, house painters, and musicians. We never got a ton of feedback one way or the other.
But when Jennifer and I moved here to New York City in 2005, I called my dad and said, this is weird. This is the first time I felt like the name is doing things to people. My wife calls it the funhouse mirror. And he hadn’t thought of it, my dad was like, oh, yeah, this is kind of like you’re a Rockefeller or something in NY. I mean, none of us think that way, and he hadn’t either.  In the past decade or so, he’s been really way more public. And so now, of course, he walks down the street and people recognize him and are excited to see him—and he deserves it. He’s worked his tail off for years and years and years.

But when I was growing up, it was never a factor; when it started to become one, I was already fully formed, essentially, or certainly formed enough, because I’ll never be fully formed. I was formed enough to be able to recognize that it could be a tool. How am I going to use this thing? It’s worth using, and it’s stupid to run away from it. Why live in anything other than a positive relationship to it? How do I work with this? It’s been spectacular, trying to figure this out, especially after this op-ed because that opened up so many things, and I want to be careful.

GA: That’s a whole different public life. It’s not only music.

PB: Exactly right, and the foundation is of course a big part of this because it has enough assets to potentially shift things.  What do we do with that? How do we behave? We knew from the minute we got the money that our behavior is as important as the money. Luckily Jennifer and I have been together for 22 years, and we have worked through our personal relationship stuff.  However you want to say it, we are learning so much about being in a relationship to each other that that can only begin to reflected out into the larger world.

We’re rooted individually and together, and what I’ve learned, ultimately, is the whole "be the change" thing is way more complicated than people think. People think it’s do the change you want to see in the world. Being is so much harder, but you get so much back for doing it. I don’t want to use the word ‘work’ because it’s not work, it’s this wonderful place of discovery. It literally grounds you. And I am literally barefoot all of the time. That’s no joke. I’m convinced that being in nature, eating from the land you live on, drinking water from the land you live on, all these things are things that we’ve experienced for millennia, and have only been separated from at most 150 years, Are essential. Whatever the next thing is, it has to have that as a component. A deep local commitment.

GA: I was just thinking this about it the other day talking with my wife (we’re in our 41st year). I went to William Horlick High in Racine, WI, and my friends, going to public school, were blue-collar and farm kids—I could walk from our house easily in five minutes to a farm to get fresh food. That’s gone now from Racine, it’s changed. But we had that possibility, to connect to the land, to meet people of different backgrounds….

PB: Public education is a huge part of that. My education was public from all the way through kindergarten through high school, and you’re right, you meet everybody there.

GA: But it wasn’t a question. It’s just the way it was.

PB: It’s community. Our grandparents didn’t call it organic food, right?

GA: What about the larger ecological piece—climate change? Where does that come in for you?

PB: Well, to me, it gets into the stopping the bleeding part when there’s a systemic nature of the wound. Climate change falls into the category of critical. It’s another piece of the systemic problem. I don’t put it in a different category than violence against women, economic inequality, or all the things that create the other layers of injustice, except that it’s an injustice against the planet, which is probably the deepest. In NoVo, we aren’t specifically addressing climate issues, but that doesn’t mean we don’t think it’s important.

GA: To say that it is a systemic problem, rather than a technological problem, changes the debate.

PB: I have friends who are so passionate about doing all this stuff around climate change, but it’s like the Affordable Care Act. These things are big deals, but let's remember the Einstein quote, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” All this carbon sequestering, people talking about burying CO2 under the ocean: you have to be kidding me. Which generation is going to pay for that?

GA: It’s really interesting, to focus it that way: it’s not the way the movements are currently engaged. They are trying for piecemeal legislation and they come up against the fact that it is really the system that needs changing. We better get an alternative, and that shifts the conversation.

PB: I think some of the problem gets back to the question of hope. I think it's beautiful to see some of the people who are so passionate about this cause, but then you say, actually that’s not going to work, you need to change the system.
GA: And they say, well how do I change that?

PB: Exactly, then they say, well, that’ll never happen, so what do I do?

We’re talking about people who have a lot of influence and you would think the kind of the imagination to admit, you know what, you’re right, let’s go! I’m struck by the way ego stops this from happening. You know, someone has a cause, it’s their cause, they’re going to fight for it: to say to them, you know what, actually, it doesn’t matter unless you tackle the big picture. Nobody wants to hear that.

GA: But they know. And if it’s a system problem, we better figure what’s the alternative, at least  have some ideas about it. We better have some starting points. I use the term evolutionary reconstruction. Which means you need to reconstruct institutions, and reform doesn’t get you there.

PB: That’s the thing. I’m so with you on that. Reform is giving energy to the existing problem, ultimately.

GA: And revolution, typically, doesn’t get you there either. Either you’re going to find a way, over time, to change the institutional structure and the patterns in culture that reinforce it, or you are stuck. This might be possible, it might not be, but what’s interesting is that once people understand it they begin to have a path.

PB: They have to. They absolutely do. And that’s the hard part; I think of it as a lilypad—people need something to jump to, otherwise they’re not going to jump. I found that in my own career as a musician, I was doing commercials commercials commercials, and I felt comfortable, safe, and it took seeing something I could jump to, that was built strong enough, to make the leap.

We feel that it’s our responsibility to start building the scaffolding—creating the conditions so that something can be built. We don’t need to be saying that this is exactly what it should be. But we obviously have to have enough of an inkling about what we think it could be, but not be attached to the exact outcome.
I joke about it, that we’re trying to use money as if money doesn’t matter. But that’s the trick, you have to use the existing structure so that the existing structure can go away. And this plays out differently in certain sectors, you can imagine alternatives easier in some than others. There are certain things—politics, the economic structure—people can’t imagine another way.

The idea is that you can start to give people agency—that’s where the Internet can help—and then knitting these people together. You can, I’m sure, cite more local examples than I can, time-dollars and these various things. In fact, there’s a bank in New England that’s going to start lending local currency, which I think is so interesting. I think the key is small, local transformation that then gets knitted together. In a different vein, we’re working with Ai-Jen Po on domestic worker union rights, and she’s really helped me see a similar process, knitting together migrant workers, service workers, domestic workers, Walmart employees— there’s various constituencies that all are starting to feel that they are not alone.

GA: That’s critical, not feeling alone is politically critical.

PB: It’s huge! You need to start with extremely small and manageable, extremely bite size chunks of change that you can turn into a meal. Honestly, I think the country is too big anyway. I’ve always had this feeling that bioregions, in particular, would be a way people naturally have and can organize themselves around. And that the country could go in this direction, probably over 100 years, 20 years, 400 years? I don’t know how long it’s going to take.

GA: I’m smiling because I have argued the same thing for a long time: a continental system is too big to manage democratically. Is participatory democracy possible with 318 million people? I don’t think so.

PB: No, exactly. And that’s okay.

GA: It means that there’s a whole radical shift in constitutional structures that's necessary if you want a democratic system. There are a few places I see beginning glimmerings of this regional notion. In the Pacific Northwest, there’s a lot of discussion of regional issues, and then in New England, there is a growing effort to focus on air quality and climate change, on energy, and on food as region wide concerns.

PB: Exactly. And again, a bioregion just makes sense. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Ecotrustand Salmon Nation. That is visionary.

GA: Actually, if you go back to the 1930s and the early vision of the TVA (not what it became in WW2) what it was was a river system. That’s what they were trying to manage.

But regional scale is an argument that people have the hardest time with; when I talk about this question, and I say, no this doesn’t make sense, at some point this country is too big to manage. That’s very hard for people to get their heads around. At some point, you’re talking about scaling down the system, or it doesn’t solve the problem. That’s really tough. “Capitalism” is easy to talk about compared with actually thinking about regional scale decision-making of a genuinely serious kind.

PB: Yes, which is strange to me because history is definitely on our side when you’re talking about localism. The nation-state is a new idea and it’s an idea.  Wednesday: just an idea. America: just an idea. You have to remember that.
GA: I spend most of my time these days writing books. It’s all about ideas. And I often say, I don’t think ideas matter at all, most of the time. Except sometimes they do…and then they can matter to people a very great deal.

I think this is the first time in my adult life—including the '60s—and as a historian I would say, I think it may be the first time in American history where we are truly up against systemic limits and the systemic issues are really on the table. The Great Depression was nothing compared with the political-economic and ecological limits now challenging the system. And this makes it a really important time.

PB: And wars can’t take us out of it, which is what happened both with WWI and WWII.

GA: That’s absolutely critical. The war option is declining as an option to bail out the system. I agree entirely. And the traditional liberal solution, for better or worse, is not available largely because of the collapse of the labor movement, which was the heart of its power base.

PB: And that’s why knitting together the workers in a way that we hope we can help do is valuable.

GA: And this then points to the evolution towards a different system. That is really what we are talking about and that’s when ideas matter; it’s not just projects. I put it like this sometimes: I am really for projects. But I’m totally against “projectism,” the idea that my project is better than your project and so on.

PB: Exactly, and this is, again, part of the problem. We have so successfully individualized people that they don’t get this necessity for social interaction and working together and moving together. And I think part of it is the origin of species:  the piece of that story that got amplified was essentially every man for himself, survival of the fittest. When in fact, my understanding is that most of that story was the communal nature of the animal kingdom, which we’re a part of.

But the industrial revolution amplified the piece that mattered to them. I find that whole period so interesting. Have you read Looking Backward? I just read this after someone reacting to the op-ed suggested I should. It’s amazing and it speaks to that time where a book mattered. What that book launched is pretty extraordinary. And I do think it was only WWI that stopped, not only the momentum of the book, but the thinking of the time.

GA: The socialists and all of that early movement were especially interesting because when it came down to earth it was community socialism. Municipal socialism, like in Milwaukee. But it was community-based, it was not just state socialism.

PB: And these nationalist clubs that started spawning up all over, and it gets back to projects versus projectism, because it’s people recognizing the similarities of what they’re doing, even though it might be different for their particular locale.

GA: We have to have the chutzpah to imagine and declare that this period of history could be the pre-history of the next great transformation.

PB: And that’s exciting to people. As opposed to scaring people.

GA: And we need to discuss it openly. Say that it’s a system problem and it’s capitalism. Working for the next three or four decades laying groundwork for transformation becomes meaningful if people acknowledge and embrace the first proposition.

PB: What’s encouraging is that we are at a point where if you say the problem is capitalism, you don’t get branded something. All you’re doing is saying—and this is what the op-ed was about— that from the place that I sit, this is what I’m seeing. Saying that doesn’t make me something else; it just makes me an observer of the state we’re in, let’s all work towards something else. But I’m not going to brand myself some brand from the past that will serve to demonize me or put me outside the circle in someway. And that’s the trick, because the system wants us to do that.

GA: Absolutely. We just held the first meeting for something we’re calling the “Next System Project” this past Thursday. We had 18 people in the room, including the president of the American Political Science Association, who just finished her term, and the president of the Academy of Management, that’s 19,000 business school professors, along with others, professors, activists, and so on.

The issue we were discussing was: if we are facing a systemic problem, how do we put that on the table and how do we talk about it seriously? Every single person in that room, hands down, said it was a system problem, not a political problem. Not a social problem. Isn’t that interesting? We were surprised at the unanimity and clarity; it was striking just how enthused everyone was about tackling the question at the level of the system.

PB: I will say that, to me, that’s probably Obama’s greatest gift: he’s shown that nothing that stays within our current system is going to work. He really did that for all of us.
GA: I think we’ve been in some sense dropping the ball. People understand more than we have been saying. Particularly when the rhetoric is dropped.

PB: That gets back to the needing to knit together. And I think that’s happening. I loved that the most searched words in Merriam-Webster was capitalism and socialism. These are the kind of things we can measure now—technology will be extremely valuable in terms of saying that this is undeniable and here’s why.

GA: We need to make this shift manifest to people. This is a different time in history, and this is really the moment. People are beginning to adopt a frame that the next two to three decades count and that we need to be thinking in terms of movement-building, project-building and idea-building. I think of it as the pre-history of the next great shift. National People’s Action is talking about a 40 year plan; BALLE, who we both work with, is talking about a generation of work. You know the progressive era—it took this long, but if you can get rolling, things can really change, and that’s what we’re talking about. The way I sometimes put it, and it drives some people crazy, is well, you want to play this game? The chips are a few decades of your life. That’s what it’s about.

PB: I tell staff here, we’ll probably be dead when the things we’re working on actually come to fruition, and that’s okay. We want to see indicators, but don’t count on being at the party.

GA: I’m going to give you two numbers that really resonate in my experience. In the talks that I’ve been giving, the one that really floors people is that 400 people in the US have more wealth than the bottom 180 million. I used to say that this was literally medieval, but I don’t anymore because a medieval historian came up to me and told me it was never that bad in the medieval period.

PB: Oh my god.

GA: It’s a staggering number.

PB: And in a global context, it’s even more staggering.

GA: But it also points towards one of the things any serious alternative systemic design will need to address.

The other number emerges when I tell people that we don’t have any economic problems, and they say what are you talking about? And I explain that the current American economy today produces roughly $200,000 for every family of four right now. We don’t have an economic problem, we have a political problem managing the wealthiest economy in the world. If we were at full-employment, it’d be closer to $250,000. Or—I then say—$100,000/year with a 20-hour week.

That opens one’s eyes. About equality and inequality, and the distribution of work and work time.

PB: And the framework around “deserving” and welfare, all those claims that if people just wanted to work, they could. That stuff drives me crazy.

GA: The technical term for that is "bullshit."

PB: Another number: how small Occupy was in terms of constituency, 250,000 people at its peak. And think about how nervous just that many made a whole lot of people.

GA: And that’s just openers.

PB: We’re talking just 1 or 2 percent of the population, to really get something going. To build that movement, you need to give people a sense that there are thousands and thousands of people out there working for the same things; you need to give them a sense that they’re not alone.

GA: And that there may be a path. There may be a direction. There may be a different system out there if we build it.

Peter Andrew Buffett is an American musician, composer, author and philanthropist. He is an Emmy Award-winner and co-chair of the NoVo Foundation.

Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and the co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative. His new book, What Then Must We Do? has just been published by Chelsea Green.

The Charitable-Industrial Complex

Op-Ed Contributor

The Charitable-Industrial Complex

By PETER BUFFETT

Published: July 26, 2013

I HAD spent much of my life writing music for commercials, film and television and knew little about the world of philanthropy as practiced by the very wealthy until what I call the big bang happened in 2006. That year, my father, Warren Buffett, made good on his commitment to give nearly all of his accumulated wealth back to society. In addition to making several large donations, he added generously to the three foundations that my parents had created years earlier, one for each of their children to run.

Early on in our philanthropic journey, my wife and I became aware of something I started to call Philanthropic Colonialism. I noticed that a donor had the urge to “save the day” in some fashion. People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem. Whether it involved farming methods, education practices, job training or business development, over and over I would hear people discuss transplanting what worked in one setting directly into another with little regard for culture, geography or societal norms. 

Often the results of our decisions had unintended consequences; distributing condoms to stop the spread of AIDS in a brothel area ended up creating a higher price for unprotected sex. 

But now I think something even more damaging is going on. 

Because of who my father is, I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. There are plenty of statistics that tell us that inequality is continually rising. At the same time, according to the Urban Institute, the nonprofit sector has been steadily growing. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits increased 25 percent. Their growth rate now exceeds that of both the business and government sectors. It’s a massive business, with approximately $316 billion given away in 2012 in the United States alone and more than 9.4 million employed. 

Philanthropy has become the “it” vehicle to level the playing field and has generated a growing number of gatherings, workshops and affinity groups.

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. 

But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life. 

And with more business-minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector. I now hear people ask, “what’s the R.O.I.?” when it comes to alleviating human suffering, as if return on investment were the only measure of success. Microlending and financial literacy (now I’m going to upset people who are wonderful folks and a few dear friends) — what is this really about? People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast? 

I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism. 

Often I hear people say, “if only they had what we have” (clean water, access to health products and free markets, better education, safer living conditions). Yes, these are all important. But no “charitable” (I hate that word) intervention can solve any of these issues. It can only kick the can down the road. 

My wife and I know we don’t have the answers, but we do know how to listen. As we learn, we will continue to support conditions for systemic change. 

It’s time for a new operating system. Not a 2.0 or a 3.0, but something built from the ground up. New code. 

What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it. Foundation dollars should be the best “risk capital” out there. 

There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff).  

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.

It’s an old story; we really need a new one. 

Peter Buffett is a composer and a chairman of the NoVo Foundation.

Changing the world - the psychology of belief

OpEdNews Op Eds 2/11/2014 at 10:33:39 Changing the world-the psychology of belief By Rick Staggenborg, MD (about the author)     Permalink       Related Topic(s): Belief; CHANGE; Democracy; Psychology Emotional Intelligence; Psychology Emotional Intelligence,

opednews.com

A child's world is booming, buzzing confusion.
(image by mazaletel)

It is impossible to build a movement without having a shared understanding of the problem we are trying to solve.  The difficulty in doing this is that all of us view the world from different perspectives, often radically divergent ones. To build a movement of sufficient influence to change the dangerous trajectory the world is currently on, we need to be able to get the broadest coalition of individuals of differing philosophies possible.

We are up against a powerful coalition of wealthy and influential individuals with the simple goal of consolidating their control over the nations of the world and their resources. Our objective has to be as simple and must appeal to people across the spectrum of political ideologies. In this third in a series of articles about how to dismantle the New World Order, I consider how opinions are formed and use my experience as a psychotherapist to explain how even deeply held beliefs can be challenged and changed.

Listening to self-identified "liberals" and "conservatives" debate, it almost seems like you are listening to people who live in different worlds. In a very real sense, they do. That is because each of us exists within a mental reality we construct based on concepts we acquire early in life and that far too often, we do not challenge. The more divergent our most fundamental beliefs are, the more it seems that we are speaking in different languages when we try to discuss politics. The solution is not to avoid the subject, but to recognize the source of these differences and try to find a common language with which to discuss possible solutions to problems that affect us all.

It helps to understand that we are fundamentally more alike than we are different and that it is our commonalities that make us human. Thinking of ourselves as humans first and members of any other group second helps us keep in mind that we all share important basic values and concerns. We must use the awareness of our common interests to stay focused on the task of building a future in which all can thrive. Rather than fighting each other, we must remember that our differences are a source of strength if we are willing to listen to each other with respect, learn from each other and integrate diverse points of view into a formulation of a problem that we can agree on. If we then put ideology aside and develop common strategies based on shared goals and values, it is possible to change the world. We have to try, because the alternative is almost certainly the self-destruction of human civilization.

We are all born into a world that is an undifferentiated confusion of sense impressions. We only gradually come to make sense of it by forming concepts that approximate what we perceive and experience. When a young enough child sees something round, it sees "a ball." It doesn't matter if the round thing is a baseball or a basketball. The concept serves the purpose well enough until the child is old enough to understand that various balls are used in different sports for specific reasons. But what if a child looks at the sun and sees only a ball? It certainly looks round. The child has to learn to develop more sophisticated concepts about round things  to understand how an apparently round object that they cannot touch is fundamentally different from the "ball" it resembles. Understanding such differences is essential to building a personal model of reality that corresponds to "objective" reality as defined by logical conclusions based on observations and the applications of internally consistent theories about the world.

So it is with all simple concepts. As we grow and acquire more information, we have to modify and refine the concepts by which we construct our views of reality. Failing to do so in a changing world leads to increasing divergence between our personal world and objective reality. When people who disagree start to rely on ideological arguments that conflict with observable fact, the collective consciousness becomes literally "schizophrenic" in the sense that it is a "split mind." That is the key to understanding why those who think themselves liberals and conservatives really do live in different universes. Only when they find a common language to share their world views can they come to a common understanding of how the world works and how we can change it together.

The fundamental obstacle to people uniting around common values and goals is the nearly universal conservative impulse. Far from being unique to those who identify as conservatives, it is based on a fear of change that most of us have whether we are conscious of the prejudice or not. Any psychotherapist knows this from experience. Many if not most of the people we work with come to us with problems so painful that they are willing to ask for help, yet seem to reject any suggestion that solving the problem requires sometimes painful questioning of basic philosophical beliefs that form the core of their identities.

This tendency is of course even more pronounced in those who blind themselves to the fact that they are in pain. It is even harder to address this pain when the individual insists that he must solve all his problems on his own. At least those who seek help in psychotherapy have taken the first steps of admitting that they have a problem they cannot solve on their own and are willing to seek help thinking through the problem from another person's perspective. When therapists encounter what they call "resistance" from those who find it difficult, they may throw up their hands and place the blame on the patient. However, the effective ones try to find ways to help motivate patients to change. That is the essential task we face in awakening our fellow citizens to what they have to do to change the political reality that is the ultimate source of our pain.

The first step in establishing dialogue between people of different political philosophies is to abandon the notion of "conservative" and "liberal." As soon as you label yourself, you start to see people who see things differently as "the other." You attribute beliefs to them that they may not hold, at least when their beliefs are held up to close questioning. When we try to talk to each other in a friendly and nonjudgmental manner about our differences, we are showing that we are not engaged in a contest of wills but seeking genuine understanding. If we manage to communicate our desire to work together toward common goals based on common values, we have the basis for healing the artificial left-right split. This is the Great Divide that keeps us fightingeach other instead of the common enemy: the economic elite who would have us become their slaves in a permanent fascist New World Order.

Thanks to a corporate media and the politicians whose interests it serves, the concepts of "conservative" and "liberal" have been turned on their heads. Traditionally, the intellectual defense of conservatism was the belief that radical change can lead to chaos and the loss of all the gains that have been made in creating governments more responsible to the needs of the people who form them. It is based in part on the idea that everyone is inherently corruptible, or at least those who seek the power to determine the destiny of nations and the world.

There is a logical basis for this fear, given lessons of history. However, thanks to the politics of division and corporate media and politicians that frame political debate to serve the interests of their wealthy patrons, most people who consider themselves conservatives today have supported the most radical turn away from representative democracy to date. Those most dissatisfied with the results not only blame "liberal" politicians and their supporters but fault the party most have supported for years because they do not think they favor change that is radical enough.

Modern liberalism has been as drastically perverted. With the Democratic Party moving ever closer to outright support of fascist policies in an attempt to appeal to what the corporate media defines as the political center, it is gradually moving that illusory center away from the ideal of representative democracy and toward an ever more powerful plutocracy.  The effect is to have turned traditional liberalism into its antithesis. Instead of realizing that radical change has become imperative, they seen content with the incremental efforts of a corrupt party that claims to challenge the economic elite while voting to support it on nearly every issue where the corporate interest conflicts with that of We the People.

This can only end when partisan Democrats learn to question their deeply held belief that if and only if they can elect more Democrats can the country be saved from the depredations of a wealthy and powerful aristocracy that has in fact gained control over both parties. As with the Tea party movement, liberals most angry at the direction the country has taken have taken to actively opposing the Democratic Party. They blame the stubborn refusal of the rank and file to hold their leaders accountable for the miserable state of what passes for liberalism in America. In their ridicule of all Democrats, they fail to acknowledge the legitimacy of trying to work within the system for those who choose to do so. Instead, they are abandoning the political process altogether or forming an ever-expanding array of third parties that further divide their cause because they cannot seem to work together.

Fortunately, psychotherapy offers a way to resolve the conflicts between political reality and the way most people perceive it, whether they consider themselves liberal, conservative or neither. The trick to dealing with the patient who resists examining their own role in creating their problems is first establish rapport, then help them explore their beliefs. If those which are healthy and life-affirming can be shown to be incompatible with those more deeply held, one of the beliefs must change.  If the person is capable of honest self-reflection, the healthy belief will be retained and beliefs based on cognitive distortions will be rejected. As a result, the belief system itself changes.

The alternative is to distort information that reveals the contradiction so that one can resist that change. Either way, being aware of two contradictory beliefs simultaneously creates a form of anxiety known as cognitive dissonance. It is the reason Albert Ellis' rational emotive therapy technique works. In RET, the therapist's job is to help the patients look at their lives objectively so that they may choose to change rather than resist it at a cost to not only their psychological integrity but their happiness. When the therapist succeeds at helping the patient see the connection between the simplistic beliefs that made the world make sense to the child and the problems they experience when they try to hold onto these beliefs as adults, it is possible to help them find more nuanced ways to view the world that are consistent with their core values.

I will not go into the basic differences in the modern conservative and modern liberal mind sets. I have little to add to George Lakoff's description of the one as favoring a stern, paternal view of government that encourages individuals to succeed on their own in a rigged system and the other as favoring a nurturing, cooperative society with a prominent role for government. I suggest that those interested in exploring these ideas read his excellent treatise Don't Think of an Elephant. What is more important is what he doesn't say, which is how to reconcile these different world views. That requires focusing not on the differences in the beliefs we are raised with, but the ideals we were all taught to regard as sacred. Among these are the principles of representative democracy and liberty and justice for all.  While concepts of these ideals differ, there is nearly unanimous agreement that they are thwarted by a system that is deeply corrupted by special interests.

By framing our common interest as ending the corruption that is threatening America and the world, we can find a way to talk to each other about how to create a united national and international front against fascism, even if we choose not to put it in those terms. How we might best have that discussion will be the topic of a future essay on tactics for conducting a nonviolent, democratic revolution.

Previous essays in this series are here:

Part I: Toward a Strategy for Global Revolution
Part II:  Setting Goals for a Real Global Revolution

http://www.soldiersforpeaceinternational.org

I am a former Army and VA psychiatrist who ran for the US Senate in 2010 on a campaign based on a pledge to introduce a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood. Now that the general public is beginning to understand the (more...)

           

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.