A belief in Humanism
Humanism emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, without reference to any non-human authorities.
This does not negate the value of various religious works: books, stories, songs and other works of Art. But it does suggest that no particular religion, and no particular religious authority, and no particular religious text, should be viewed as a singular source of absolute truth.
This belief is also not meant to discount the value of other non-human life forms; rather it should be viewed as an acknowledgment that we humans are, if nothing else, irredeemably human, and so we inevitably look at the world through a human lens.
Humanism is often viewed as simply a matter of banging the drum for science, and against religion, and is sometimes treated as if it were synonymous with atheism.
What I am talking about here is more expansive than this narrow definition.
Quotations
“Art presents us with a window into the minds of these people”
Art presents us with a window into the minds of these people that other types of artifacts just can’t provide. It offers us glimpses into their world, their culture, and their belief systems.
Genevieve von Petzinger, from the interview “First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World's Oldest Symbols”, 15 Sep 2016, © CBC/Radio-Canada
“The Undisputed Sovereignty of the Human Being”
Jazz insists on the undisputed sovereignty of the human being. In this technological era we can easily be fooled into believing that sophisticated machines are more important than progressive humanity. That’s why art is an important barometer of identity. The arts let us know who we are in all of our glory, reveal the best of who we are. All the political and financial might in the world is diminished when put to the service of an impoverished cultural agenda. We see it in our schools, in our homes, and in our world profile: rich and fat, lazy and morally corrupt, with wild, out-of-control young people.
We all know that civilization requires a supreme effort. Our technology will become outmoded, but the technology of the human soul does not change.
Wynton Marsalis, from the book Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life, 2008, © Wynton Marsalis Enterprises
“Apes and Humans”
Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down – toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins.
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, from the book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are, 1993, © Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
“The center of every man's existence is a dream”
The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
G. K. Chesterton, from Twelve Types, 1903
“Chimps and Humans”
On the basis of all the evidence, the closest relative of the human proves to be the chimp. The closest relative of the chimp is the human. Not orangs, but people. Us. Chimps and humans are nearer kin than are chimps and gorillas or any other kinds of ape not of the same species.
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, from the book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are, 1993, © Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
“Cockpits with Instruments Controlled by Gremlins”
One frequent analogy casts the manager in the role of an airplane pilot guided by organizational measures that are like cockpit instruments.
Mechanistic and organic analogies are flawed because they are too simplistic. Kaplan and Norton’s cockpit analogy would be more accurate if it included a multitude of tiny gremlins controlling wing flaps, fuel flow, and so on of a plane being buffeted by winds and generally struggling against nature, but with the gremlins always controlling information flow back to the cockpit instruments, for fear that the pilot might find gremlin replacements. It would not be surprising if airplanes guided this way occasionally flew into mountainsides when they seemed to be progressing smoothly toward their destinations.
Robert D. Austin, from the book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, 1996, © Robert D. Austin
“God and Morality”
It wasn’t God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to.
Frans de Waal, from the book The Bonobo and the Atheist, 2013
“Her faith had twisted very early in her childhood”
And it was true, the religion she was raised in had always seemed vaguely foolish to her, if rich with mystery and ceremony, for why should babies be born into sin, why should she pray to the invisible forces, why would god be a trinity, why should she, who felt her greatness hot in her blood, be considered lesser because the first woman was molded from a rib and ate a fruit and thus lost lazy Eden? It was senseless. Her faith had twisted very early in her childhood; it would slowly grow ever more bent into its geometry until it was its own angular, majestic thing.
Lauren Groff, from the novel Matrix, 2021, © Lauren Groff
“Imagination is not a means of making money”
In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics. Novels are for students, housewives, and other people who don’t work. Fantasy is for children and primitive peoples. Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions. I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.
I hear voices agreeing with me. “Yes, yes!” they cry. “The creative imagination is a tremendous plus in business! We value creativity, we reward it!” In the marketplace, the word creativity has come to mean the generation of ideas applicable to practical strategies to make larger profits. This reduction has gone on so long that the word creative can hardly be degraded further. I don’t use it any more, yielding it to capitalists and academics to abuse as they like. But they can’t have imagination.
Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.
Ursula K. Le Guin, from the book Words Are My Matter, 2016
“An Invincible Summer”
In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Albert Camus, from the book Lyrical and Critical Essays, 1952
“An Irreplaceable Compact”
Euthanasia, Cadogan thought: they all regard it as that, and not as wilful slaughter, not as the violent cutting-off of an irreplaceable compact of passion and desire and affection and will; not as a thrust into unimagined and illimitable darkness.
Edmund Crispin, from the book The Moving Toyshop, 1946
“The modern horrors of bureaucracy”
Yet the people here suffered, apparently, from the fact that they were employed not by an educational institution, but by a bureaucratic system. They were all, to a large extent, clerks, neatly bound up in red tape, and, like clerks, they gave themselves the illusion of freedom by discussing and ridiculing the strictures that bound them. Kate thought lovingly of her own university, where one struggled, God knew, against the ancient sins of favoritism, flattery, and simony, but where the modern horrors of bureaucracy had not yet strangled her colleagues or herself.
Amanda Cross, from the book In the Last Analysis, 1964
“Monkeys with money and guns”
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
We are monkeys with money and guns.
“The Most Dangerous of Devotions”
The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured – especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised.
E. O. Wilson, from the book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 1998
“Only a Human Being”
I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.
Albert Einstein, from The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, 18 September 1896
“Rationality is not the strong suit of our species”
My recommendations are not the typical tips from an academic about how to encourage more rational decisions. I think that rationality is not the strong suit of our species. We are Homo tributus, not Homo economicus. Certainly, tribal instincts are part of the problem in many pressing conflicts, but they also can be — and, I think, have to be — part of the solution.
Michael Morris, from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together, 2024, © Michael Morris
“The Real Problem of Humanity”
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.
E. O. Wilson, from the article “Harvard Magazine”, September 10, 2009, © Harvard Magazine Inc.
“Safe in the hands of a force far greater”
For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves.
Lauren Groff, from the novel Matrix, 2021, © Lauren Groff
“The sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency”
Humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves. This is a complicated biological fact about us.
Amélie Rorty, from the book The Identities of Persons, 1976
“Start with romance and build to a reality”
I think it’s part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality. There’s hardly a scientist or an astronaut I’ve met who wasn’t beholden to some romantic before him who led him to doing something in life.
Ray Bradbury, from the book Mars and the Mind of Man, 12 Nov 1971
“Symbolic Language”
At the moment, the most powerful marker, the feature that distinguishes our species most decisively from closely related species, appears to be symbolic language. Many animals can communicate with each other and share information in rudimentary ways. But humans are the only creatures who can communicate using symbolic language: a system of arbitrary symbols that can be linked by formal grammars to create a nearly limitless variety of precise utterances. Symbolic language greatly enhanced the precision of human communication and the range of ideas that humans can exchange. Symbolic language allowed people for the first time to talk about entities that were not immediately present (including experiences and events in the past and future) as well as entities whose existence was not certain (such as souls, demons, and dreams).
David Christian, from the book This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity, 2008
“To end up here in a pile of bones”
Not until we showed them some of the stuff we got at Dachau, that George Stevens photographed with his crew, did it actually impinge itself on the mind of the horror, the horror of this whole thing. Man, the highest of all the animals… the Man who created God… to end up here in a pile of bones, burned… it left me just speechless, colorless, bloodless. I couldn’t possibly believe that there was this kind of savagery in the world, you see.
Frank Capra, from the interview “Bill Moyers”, 1984
“To prolong our presence on the face of the Earth”
What we’re doing now is trying to think like nature, in the sense that we are aware that species that have gone before us have disappeared from the face of the Earth. We’d like to use our intelligence and our creative capacity to prolong our presence on the face of the Earth as long as possible. It requires, therefore, that we develop the kinds of tactics and strategies amongst ourselves so as to assure that this can occur, to assure that we will not destroy ourselves or the planet, to make it uninhabitable and to allow the fullness of the potential of the individual to be expressed, to flower.
Jonas Salk, from with Bill Moyers, 1990
“To refuse Apocalypse in all its forms”
She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.
Leif Enger, from the book I Cheerfully Refuse, 2024
“To simply see human beings”
If I ask you all today to look around and tell me who you see…. When you look around, I don’t want you to see black, white, Asian, I don’t want you to wonder if a person is Democrat or Republican, gay or straight. When you look around, I just want you to simply see human beings – nothing more, nothing less. And I guarantee you, if you can begin to see people that way, just as human beings, you’ll begin to treat them a little differently, you’ll begin to understand their points of view.
Charles Woodson, from the speech “2018 University of Michigan Spring Commencement Address”, 28 Apr 2018, © The Regents of the University of Michigan
“We All Derive From the Same Source”
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
Henry Miller, from the book Henry Miller on Writing, 1964
“We are in Eden still”
There runs a strange law through the length of human history – that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.
This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.
“We're part of something continuous”
Edith Pretty: We die. We die and we decay. We don’t live on.
Basil Brown: I’m not sure I agree. From the first human handprint on a cave wall, we’re part of something continuous. So, we… don’t really die.
Moira Buffini, from the film The Dig, 2021
“When machines are considered more important than people”
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.
Martin Luther King Jr., from the speech “The Three Evils”, Aug 31, 1967
“A Work Ethic Gone Mad”
The blend of corporate mysticism and transcendental consumerism he [Tom Peters] offers has its roots planted in the pragmatic, optimistic, can-do American work ethic. But, like the Taylorist philosophy from which it springs, it is also a work ethic gone mad. It begins with the idea that work can be meaningful and stretches it to the point where there is no meaning outside work. It becomes a deluded form of optimism, a feverish activity that masks an underlying anxiety about the meaning of life, a form of self-alienation so complete that the self disappears entirely into its consumer preferences and transactions.
Matthew Stewart, from the book The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong, 2009, © Matthew Stewart