*** You can now read the first chapter of this book, "The Advent Of Humanisation", here ***
We are free.
We - we in certain fortunate parts of the globe - may go where we please. We may say what we wish. We may read and write what we want. We may listen to what we like. We may give, or refuse, assent where we decide. We may know without fear. We may create without trepidation. We may produce without condemnation. We may love - and marry - whom we choose. We may wear what we choose. We may eat, or drink, what we choose. We may not be slandered without recompense. We may not be beaten or abused or oppressed without redress. We may not be forced to work. We may depend on the law. We may feel secure that society, the society in which we live, is so ordered that we are safe from arbitrary arrest or prosecution. We may feel satisfied that in most areas of our public and private lives we are protected by a hard-won body of rights and agreements. We may feel happy that for the first time in the history of the species these rights and these agreements apply to all members of our society and not to some selected few or many. We may feel privileged - and proud - that we are the first generation, the first composite generation, in the history of the species to participate in a society to which all the above applies.
But we don’t, we don’t really feel privileged. And we are certainly not proud. And we don’t feel secure. And we are definitely not satisfied. Indeed, our dissatisfaction is profound. Where once we had faith and hope and belief and aspiration and anticipation…we now have dissatisfaction! We also have indifference. And apathy. And alienation. And, if we still care at all, we have despair. So please don’t talk about society. We don’t feel we are part of any society. We refuse assent to society. It is our right to refuse assent to society. It is our right to say no. It is our right to do what we want. So we do what we want. I do what I want. I spend my time as I want. I certainly spend…and I wear and I watch and I dance and I diet. And I don’t care. I don’t care! So why should you care? Why do you care anyway? I mean, what’s your problem? Is there something the matter with you? Are you weird or something? Are you fucking weird? Why don’t you leave me alone? Why don’t you fuck off and leave me alone? Fuck off! Fuck off and leave me alone!
Or:..
No, we don’t, we don’t really feel privileged. And we are certainly not proud. And we don’t feel secure. And we don’t feel protected. We are certainly not protected from crime or drugs or violence. And we may not produce. We are denied the right to produce. And we don’t feel that we are part of any society. We are certainly not part of your society. Your society excludes us. It ignores us. It deems us non-entities. It calls us the under-class, says we are spongers, wasters, ne’er-do-wells, criminals. It says we are beyond hope, beyond redemption. The goods and services and rights and privileges created by your society pass over our heads. They mean nothing to us. They belong elsewhere. They belong to nothing that we know or share.
Or:..
No, WE don’t feel privileged either. And we are not secure. And we are not protected. We may have a body of law - but it is inoperative. We are not free from arbitrary arrest. We are not free from abuse or repression. We are not free from disease. We may not love whom we wish - or marry whom we wish. We may not wear what we wish. And we may not eat what we wish, or drink what we wish. Often we may not eat at all, or drink at all. Which society did you have in mind? Where is this society? Where is it? It is far from our shore, that’s for sure. It exists elsewhere. It is in another continent and has another colour and another faith. We are not part of that society. It excludes us too. We service it and produce for it - indeed in many respects we actually pay for it; it is paid for by our production and our natural resources and our bodies. But we are not part of it.
So…
How do we solve these difficulties? How do we remove alienation on one hand – and exclusion on the other? We did try in the past. Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s we tried mightily – and had considerable success. And, of course, we are still trying. But the tide of events seems to have left the mighty efforts in its wake. The zeal is gone; also the great hopes of these decades. Instead, government and the middle classes seemed to have settled for a stultifying game of privilege, a larger game then before, involving consolidation for one and tax-cuts for the other, but a game which excludes forever anybody not already in it.
The great creeds of our age - freedom, democracy, capitalism - seem incapable of breaking this deadlock. They seem to have gone as far as they can go. Maybe these creeds, having created a world in their own likeness, lack the wherewithal to advance that world? Or maybe the intrinsic nature of this world is to consume the moral purpose of its own members? Maybe freedom and democracy and the panoply of rights, once achieved, become a mere possession, a passport to sanctioned self-interest, sapping the will of any further purpose.
So…
How can we transform this powerful consensus? If democracy and freedom and capitalism are already in place (at least nominally), if they are, indeed, essential components of the consensus they, on their own, cannot generate a momentum to transform it. Something else – something OTHER – is required to puncture the consensus from outside. Indeed, maybe now we need a new creed, a new seeing, one that takes us beyond the complacent certainties of our age.
In an effort to find this new seeing The Advent of Humanisation searches deep into our place in nature and into the course of our history as a species and in so doing proposes a vast new concept of human potential, one based less on the exercise, sometimes divisive, frequently fickle, of rights of often dubious provenance than on the existence of a particular range of skills and capabilities that we, the human being, brought out of evolution, the exercise and development of which enhance and enrich our societies and our sense of ourselves.
This 50,000 word polemic, soon to be published in Dublin, challenges the central tenets of our time, whilst yet extolling them. It suggests that today’s Western society represents a particular culmination of human striving, a profound expression of the potential made flesh on our arrival on the planet so many years ago. But, it suggests, we hardly see this potential; only the struggle to achieve it. The struggle to achieve freedom and prosperity and an unprecedented exercise of right so engages our minds that we see little else. Thus, we are without a human past, the drama of our colonisation of the planet negated. Equally, we are without a human future, the huge challenges ahead discounted. Freedom, the moment, is all. This concentration induces a psychic exhaustion that often leads to indulgence once our goals are achieved. Our very stridency renders us incapable of solving the complex problems that confront us. Likewise, the same stridency renders us highly vulnerable to the global perils – terrorism, energy shortages, climatic changes – that are forecast ahead and to the technological advances – artificial intelligence, genetic transformation – that already challenge our concepts of humanity. Only when we see our emergence in full, when we realise how far we’ve come as a species, will we be able to achieve a harmony and a breath of vision to encounter these challenges and only then too will we be able to find the renewed energy and the intelligence to incorporate the excluded members of the human society into the fold.
This is not an “End of History” scenario – using the word “end” in its more usual sense. Nothing is at an end. If anything we are at a beginning : the beginning of the time on this planet when human society is forced to come to terms with the unhindered dynamism of human nature. This is a true liberation from the daemons of history. But without an allied vision of human emergence any such liberation could easily tend towards excess and the exclusions already mentioned. The Advent of Humanisation seeks to provide just such a vision.
Nor is this just Humanism by another name – though certainly the society to which it gives rise is intensely humanist in outlook. It is less the particular belief itself than a theory of human history, a theory asserting that our age is the first time in our history when the endowment – intellectual, artistic, inventive, social, motor, sexual - we brought from evolution may be exercised globally, or almost globally, without fear or favour. As such, this age might justly be called Humanisation.
The relevance of this proposition to the opening paragraphs of this web-site might be questioned. How can the belief that this is a special time in our colonisation of the planet be of assistance to the man or woman in a poor country or a poor part of the city who wishes to improve the lot of the people? Because he or she, if success is to follow, will have to go far beyond the verities of democracy or capitalism, will need to resist the most grievous temptation, will need a profound sense of the complexity of human behaviour and, most important of all, will need an abiding and enduring faith in the possibility and the necessity of success. All of these the theory of Humanisation seeks to provide.
Assisting this effort will be a vastly augmented sense of a human role in the Cosmos. We are the mind of matter - not in a strict physical sense, nor, either, merely in a metaphorical sense, but in the very real and representational sense of being the only being we know composed of matter that is conscious of the nature of matter. This, The Advent of Humanisation asserts, confers upon us a vast role, not only on this planet but in the universe as a whole, a role, it contends, which is as challenging and as inspiring as any of the great roles proffered during the Age of Religion.
The author of this book goes by the name of Joseph H. It is as good a name as any. Publishing details will follow in due course. In the meantime the interested reader is invited to submit an observation by e-mail or through the Google Groups. This book is an effort to see the truth - “to see as clearly as possible what might be visible to the naked mind”. Any observations received will be read with some interest.
Joseph H
joseph@humanisation.org
August 9, 2004