humanizing civilization

Civilization inspires a lot of ambivalence. Some even believe that we would be far better off without it. Others just believe it is a necessary evil. It supposedly prevents us from the ideal, which is to live in a natural state; however, what that natural state would be is usually not especially informed by actual evidence from anthropology and evolutionary biology. 

What we call civilization was made possible by the Agricultural Revolution, which is thought to have occurred about 12,000 years ago. While that seems like a long time ago, it is not long enough ago for what has happened since then to have had much influence on human evolution. During the vast majority of the time between the emergence of the human species and now, our ancestors lived in hunter-gatherer bands, so having some understanding of what life was likely to have been like for those ancestors from whom we inherited our genetic predispositions would provide the insights into what our natural state might be. 

Evidence about hunter-gatherers past and present demonstrates that even before anything that would be considered civilization, human life was not what seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “a war of all against all”. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is far from ruthlessly individualistic. The very survival of hunter-gatherers depends on cooperating with each other. They might be suspicious of and even hostile toward outsiders, but they are deeply bonded with and intensely loyal toward members of their own tight-knit group. And while they might be “uncivilized”, they aren’t without culture. 

Our natural state is to be participants in a culture that fosters caring, generosity, and cooperation. The basic idea of being civilized ought to be to enlarge the group with whom we are caring, generous, and cooperative. The stakes are much higher. War is no longer fought with bows and arrows against the neighboring tribe. We’ve now had two “world wars”, and the next world war would likely mean the end of human civilization as we know it. Nonetheless, we can’t go back to some mythical natural state. Our best option is become more civilized. That is the only path to the recovery of humanity. 

reframing dissatisfaction

A central question in being human is what to do with dissatisfaction. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but the best strategy is usually a blend of finding satisfaction when it's possible and practicing patience when it's not immediately available. I might not always be able to directly scratch the actual itch I'm feeling, but I can always find something that provides some degree of satisfaction. If satisfaction is elusive, I might need to shift my focus, dig deeper, or go further.

Potential satisfactions might be right under my nose, or I might need to put some effort into breaking out of whatever it is that is limiting my search. There is a good chance that I'm making it more complicated than it needs to be. Human beings are more intellectually and psychologically complicated than other animals. Our power of imagination can be an affliction as well as an asset. Sometimes our restlessness is of our own making. We often don't really know what we want, or what we want is incapable of providing any actual satisfaction.

Distinctively human attributes have enabled us to enjoy significant success in the Darwinian survival game, but they can also create problems for us. It is possible to have an overly gloomy view of this. The Christian doctrine of original sin is not the only example of that. A thoroughly secular and objective assessment of the human capacity to do great harm to other living things, to each other, and to ourselves can easily lead to the belief that the planet would be better off without us. However, since eliminating the human menace through collective suicide doesn't feel like a very good solution, we are morally obligated to do what we can to improve the situation. But how do we do that?

Some would say that our only hope is divine intervention. They might argue that the main problem is that society has moved away from God and from traditional morality, even though there is no chance of ever finding agreement on just what society returning to God and to traditional morality would even look like. Or they might believe that the best path is to hasten the apocalypse. Thus increasing the likelihood of human demise through nuclear annihilation or radical climate change seems like a good idea to them. For the rest of us though, such talk leads away from rather than toward an actual solution.

There is a reason that society has become increasingly secular in modern times. As the world has grown smaller and cultures are bumping up against each other, often leading to pointless and devastating wars, it has become more and more clear that the global public arena needs to be a space that is judiciously neutral with regard to religion and matters of private morality. That doesn't mean that society would become amoral. It is just that we make a distinction between, on the one hand, morality that is in the public interest (like "thou shalt not kill") and, on the other hand, morality that falls strictly into the realm of personal values.

What we have in common with each other is our humanity. That has to be the basis of public morality, and while some don't have a lot of confidence in the human capacity for good, it is our only hope. Only if we are able to feel empathy and act compassionately can we make any progress toward peace and general wellbeing. It is also the most reliable way to still our restless hearts, since much of our dissatisfaction is caused directly and indirectly by our repressed awareness of troubling realities. We can't solve the problem of human suffering, but we can each find what is in our hearts that can contribute to its mitigation.

rebirth

If being born again is good, why would we limit ourselves to a once-and-for-all experience of it? Why can't we be reborn every day even? Every new day requires a renewal of outlook so that we don't limit ourselves to old beliefs about ourselves and about what we are capable of. Being open to new possibilities requires that we make active choices to be welcoming when opportunities present themselves. Allowing inertia to make choices for us is to be asleep and barely alive. We need to bestir ourselves. We need to disrupt the status quo. We need to question what we've been told. We need to question inadequately examined beliefs we have adopted. 

If being born again is to have any meaning at all, shouldn't it introduce something new instead of merely leading to compliant acceptance of an outdated belief system? We celebrate the new life that children bring into our midst, so why is it often so hard for us to embrace that gift of new life and see it for what it is? If being born again would actually resemble literal birth, shouldn't it be bursting with new possibilities instead of merely being about becoming obedient to authority?

There is an unfortunate attitude toward children that often accompanies traditional religious beliefs. That attitude takes many forms, but at its essence it is about caring more about getting them to fit in than about truly appreciating who they are and the freshness their lively presence introduces. Some Christians talk about the necessity of breaking the will of their children. That approach to parenting is consistent with the doctrine of original sin, which teaches that human beings are born sinful and that our only chance for being saved from our sinfulness and its consequences is through the grace God.

I have all kinds of problems with the idea of original sin, but the point I want to make here is that we should be less concerned with taming children and more with fostering their giftedness. We have more to learn from them than they have to learn from us. We can teach them how to do some things that are generally helpful, but they keep us on our toes and remind us of what is most important.

Left to our own devises, most of us as adults naturally choose what we are used to over disruptive change. We equate wisdom with prudence. We get more conservative as we grow older. I find that rather sad. It feels like acquiescing to a so-called life that is dead to itself. How wise is that? How smart is it to deprive ourselves of the best of what life has to offer? What do we gain by avoiding risks at all costs if the main result is dying a thousand figurative deaths before arriving at the literal death that we fear so much.

However, rejecting the life that comes with each present moment in order to protect a life that we will never really live is less about conscious choice than it is about seemingly innocuous (and perhaps even ostensibly sensible) failures to show up. Which brings me back to the theme of being born again. Most of us would benefit from being born again if that is understood as a return to a childlike relationship with life in all its fullness. 

toward a warmer secularism

Many secular-minded individuals are rather hypocritical in the way they demand tolerance but often don't practice it themselves. Religion per se is not the enemy. Making religion the enemy only adds to the problem. The problem is that modern society tends to be inhospitable. Its being inhospitable is the inevitable byproduct of cultural collisions. We are thrust together with people we don't understand. Many of their values are alien and even contrary to ours. It is hard to be sympathetic toward cultures that condone so-called "honor killing" for example.

Secularists obviously don't want to make de-conversion a mirror image of conversion. What we can do though is provide viable alternatives. Secularism tends to be relatively impoverished emotionally. It is easy to understand why so many otherwise quite sensible people feel drawn to religion. I believe that if there were more emotionally warm secular alternatives, religion would lose much of its draw.

We are heirs to a splendid legacy that we have inherited from brave pioneers who were guided by a vision of a world that would be guided by reality-based reasoning. Many of those pioneers underestimated the difficulties their successors would encounter. They had their own difficulties with their superstitious contemporaries, but they believed that reason would eventually triumph once enough people began to get a taste of freedom. Theirs was a worthy vision that can still inspire us even though we seem further away from its realization than ever. 

The revolutionary thinkers whose legacy is constitutional democracy understood some of the inherent dangers and thus put safeguards in place, but who among them could have imagined their baby growing up to choose Donald Trump as its president. We seem to have made a wrong turn somewhere along the way, but I don't think we did it on purpose. Perhaps the greatest factor in our ending up where we are is backlash.

It might seem strange that there are a lot of people who honestly believe that political correctness is the source of all our problems, but it is not so strange if we view it in context. It is a solipsistic conflation of feelings and beliefs. They feel put down, and they, not wholly without warrant, believe that their being put down says everything about the extent to which democracy has been undermined.

Their (solipsistic) inability to imagine democracy as anything other than people like them getting their way creates a no-win situation for everybody. They would rather steer the ship into the rocks as one big "f*** you" than accept the imperatives of a culturally pluralistic democracy, and everybody is paying the price now and probably will for years to come.

How do we recover from this cultural, social, and political crisis? How do we calm the storm created by backlash? How do we recapture a vision of a truly inclusive civil society? What is the message that we can put on the banners that we would raise high?

an open heart

The driving force behind Recovering Humanity is a desire to connect some seemingly random dots by being more aware and showing up emotionally, to generate some goodwill that can contribute to a meaningful and sustainable basis for coming together around common interests and goals, to tease out a more intellectually honest and viscerally rewarding set of understandings, and to articulate a coherent vision for what we can accomplish. It involves two moves. First, there is a move toward inhabiting that by which we know ourselves to be human, individually and collectively. That involves becoming mindful of and fully present to what is going on around us filtered through an awakened conscience, cherishing and nurturing what our awareness stirs inside us, even as though it can be disturbing, responding, and actively engaging. In other words, wake up, show up, and step up. The second move is to become concerned about efficacy, to do what we can to promote individual and collective well being, and to pay attention to the actual results of our efforts.

The common denominator is the heart. From the heart come not only the inclination to be compassionate and the inspiration for spontaneous generosity that is ennobling, enriching, and uplifting, but also psychological attributes that enable us to respond with rugged resolve, audacity, insistence on good faith participation in win/win solutions, mutual encouragement by which we bring out the best in each other and replace vicious circles with sustainable virtuous circles, painstaking attention to detail, adaptive responsiveness, and perseverance. Our words courage and encourage come from the French word for heart. To have courage or to be encouraged essentially means to be heartened. Recovering Humanity is about finding our hearts and unleashing creativity, confidence, fortitude, and the capability to respond constructively even though the ever present conflicting demands from multiple directions take a toll on us. It is easy to be discouraged or disheartened, but if we can look beyond the endemic confusion and rise above the inevitable clashes, we can bring our highest aspirations into sharp focus and do what it takes to see them through to their fulfillment. 

Our only impediments are our excuses, the blame games we play, the relentless equivocation and prevarication by which we deflect attention from the obvious and shift the focus away from what we don’t want to admit, our attempts to buy our way out of being inconvenienced by reality and to escape what we know in our hearts, and any of the other abundant, familiar defense mechanisms we so ingeniously construct, anything that gets in the way of radical self-actualization, everything we use to hide from the best that life has to offer, what we fearfully cling to, our favorite certainties, our core assumptions, our most cherished sources of identity, our most indispensable beliefs, that which we habitually rely on to provide meaning and purpose, anything that would prevent us from showing up with our shoelaces tied, ready for the time of our lives, willing to be transported into unimaginable possibilities. 

In short, it is even more deeply challenging than we might have initially imagined. We can achieve the kind of personal wellbeing that has been a central concern for philosophers at least as far back as Aristotle, but “the good life” (what Aristotle called eudemonia) is more philosophically and psychologically complicated than having a happy-go-lucky attitude and following the line of least resistance. It is a life that is not available to the faint of heart. There is no better life, but it comes with a price – vulnerability, exposure, risk, and perhaps being stigmatized with labels like “uncool”, “foolish”, “annoying”, “holier than thou”, “bleeding heart idealists”, and “dangerous radicals”. Transformational freedom, latent strengths, and deeper satisfactions beckon, but they will remain forever out of reach unless we can begin to experience the world around us with a welcoming spirit, however modest, tentative, and awkward the willingness to venture out of our cocoons might be. We miss the mark because our interest, our imagination, our sense of purpose, our passion, and our thirst for experiences that inspire us have gone to sleep and because we actively thwart and jettison opportunities directly and indirectly. 

Our default settings inure us to shutting down, shutting up, closing in on ourselves, walling out whatever makes us uncomfortable or that challenges us, being closed to different points of view, slamming the door on what doesn’t fit into our limited understandings, shutting out what we are afraid of, and locking away anyone who creates trouble for us. What all that banishing, shielding, blocking, and locking down amounts to is a lot of missing out on life simply because our habitually hopeless, defeatist mindset wards off any possibility for an awakening of that within us which is most vital, quintessential human qualities like curiosity, spontaneity, ingenuity, courage, inherent dignity, a sense of pride, and a capacity for joy. An awakening of all this and much more is inalienably ours if only we are willing to reopen, reexamine, and reconsider the forbidden, the unthinkable, the abandoned, and the forgotten and to re-approach with open minds, open eyes, open ears, open hearts, open lips, and open arms what we have rejected. 

taking action

Being numb and unresponsive is not who we are, but nobody wants a guilt trip. Most of us already feel guilty about plenty that we can’t do anything about. We don’t have to be reminded that we’ve become unable to respond humanly to what we see directly right around us and indirectly on the news or that we’ve unwittingly become participants in a deeply entrenched unjust social and economic system. It is not readily apparent what specifically any of us can actually do. Even if we truly want to make a positive difference, it’s hard to know how to get a handle on actual solutions. What difference can our woefully small acts of compassion possibly make in the grand scheme of things? Being compassionate seems to have negligible impact, and the risks involved are high. Why should we care about the poor, the war refugees, and the future generations who are going to inherit the messes we leave? The payoff from doing the right thing in the face of what feels like an impersonal, unyielding monolith is low. It has negligible benefit, and the risks involved are high. It’s especially unwise to care too much with regard to issues that are so big they threaten to swallow everything in their path. Our hopeful idealism sets us up for demoralization and hardened cynicism.

Caring is risky. Admitting we care is not cool. Being sensitive invites bullying and mockery and earns us a reputation for being weak, soft, and prone to wallowing in emotionalism. It’s a sure way to become marginalized. (It’s endearing in children, but women and men of consequence in the real world know better.) Caring enough to invest in solutions is costly, frustrating, or just inconvenient. Even if we allow ourselves to be exposed to and to care about troubling realities, even if we fully embrace our humanity, even if we truly want to help out where we can, we can’t escape from the recognition that the human community is rife with human need that can seem like a black hole, with competition for scarce resources, and with recalcitrant selfishness. It feels unsafe to be without any defense against realities that take us out of our comfort zones. The cost-benefit ratio of becoming less numb seems low. Why would we bother ourselves with unpleasant realities and set ourselves up for certain failure and disappointment? Why should we go to the trouble of doing what it takes to come up with actual solutions?

We grow numb amidst a ravenous race to the bottom. The most sensitive burn out. The smartest among us are baffled. The most optimistic become discouraged and give up. The best and the brightest retreat into ivory towers. The most resourceful direct their creativity toward constructing cocoons for themselves. The most ardent social activists become reduced to cartoonish stereotypes. The whole point of working for a more just and compassionate society and seeking effective solutions is buried or just discounted as passé. The resulting fatalism and cynicism creates a social climate that is ripe for an unfortunate glorification of greed and an open season on the cultural values, the attitudes, the sensibilities, and the social institutions that are conducive the common welfare. Some of the problem is that we are immersed in information overload and compassion fatigue, but any honest and informed examination of the human condition puts us face to face with the recognition that not only are we not going to solve the most troubling problems that are inherent in life as we know it, our most well-meaning efforts can and often do make things worse. It is inevitable that we are going to experience a certain amount of discouragement, lost idealism, dampened enthusiasm, and resignation to certain inevitable facts and features of modern life.

What forward movement would even look like is beyond what most of us can grasp. Even if we are determined to do what we can, we rapidly become disheartened because our best efforts seem to have no real impact. Delegating, donating, and doing token volunteer work don’t do much to eliminate the nagging sense of inadequacy that visits us in our moments of greatest honesty. Where do we start solving the problems we can solve? How do we even tell the difference between a problem that can be solved and one that can’t? There are many ways to fail. We can doom our best efforts by superficial assessments of the problem, seeking easy answers, proposing simplistic solutions, or having unrealistic expectations. It is easy to fall into the seductive trap of being smug arm chair generals with imaginary magical powers to command obedience and to authoritatively issue orders that would make the world a better place (at least for people like us), but getting to solutions is going to take more than that, and it is going to take more than pouting, impetuous demands, reckless threats, shadowboxing, creating scapegoats, or mounting protest votes.

The situation is all the more baffling and discouraging because, in spite of the fact that we have at our fingertips an amazing array of technology, knowledge, and other resources, we are embarrassingly inept at challenges that require basic social skills that are taught in kindergarten. Our grownup problems are very messy and complicated, but solving our problems depends more on becoming able to be motivated to find solutions, put aside our personal agendas, get along with each other, and work together than it depends on expertise, special talents, brilliance, or fancy technology. We can’t blame the situation on being confused or on being unable to identify effective solutions. Knowing, in a basic way, what needs to be done is usually not a great mystery. In fact, what it would take to do the right thing can be and often is simple, obvious, and compelling; nonetheless, even when the best response is plain, summoning the courage and resolve to face the task of coming up with realistic ideas, translating them into specific actions that can be carried out by actual human beings, and choreographing the many pieces within the effort can seem like an impossible goal, especially when there is competition for finite resources and our efforts are hampered, as they invariably are, by obstacles like unmotivated and hostile participants.

There is a sense of powerlessness that comes out of feeling like our lives are being invaded by forces over which we have no control. We are assailed by intrusive, insistent social and cultural currents that come at us from all directions. With all our spectacular leaps in technology, communication, and mobility, not only are we constantly and unavoidably exposed to strange, new realities that are too overwhelming to process, but also major collisions of radically differing political and religious viewpoints and the emergence of deep, intractable conflicts in fundamental values have become routine. The global village greets us at our doorstep. There is a perpetual sense of instability and uncertainty that leads to fear, avoidance, anger, and backlash. Information overload and “compassion fatigue” are chronic conditions. Many people feel besieged, frustrated, and full of impotent rage. They consequently adopt escapist beliefs, play the blame game, create scapegoats, and grab onto simplistic solutions. It would be strange if we weren’t bewildered at times. Life comes with a panoply of experiences, impressions, feelings, reflections, and options, which can pile up and become overwhelming.

The good news is that there is a solution; the bad news is that it involves a steep climb. It entirely depends on fallible and fickle human beings like you and me – ordinary human beings with ordinary human abilities and with the usual human flaws. There are no gurus or messiahs who can lead us to the Promised Land, but solutions for our biggest problems don’t depend on extraordinary brilliance. They are not beyond our abilities. The main part of what needs to be done is not terribly complicated or technical. While there are aspects of the solutions that will require special expertise, most people can understand enough to participate in a process whereby we find common cause, pool our talents and personal resources, create new possibilities, and bring about actual solutions. We can’t delegate the work of finding alternative pathways to brainy specialists, to elected officials, to government bureaucrats, or to saintly altruists who toil selflessly on our behalf.

As in the movie “The Wizard of Oz”, we have come to the end of the yellow brick road. We are beset by feelings of bewildered inadequacy and are easily taken in by seductive, distracting spectacles, but it turns out that what we are really looking for is not wizardry after all. The solution is instead conspicuously human, ordinary, humble, and much closer to Kansas, or wherever our home might be, than we imagine. What we need, like Dorothy and her companions, is to discover, recognize, and foster what is already in us. The problems we face are formidable, complex, and intractable, but most of what it is going to take to solve them is not the intervention of a special class of people. No matter how dedicated, talented, brilliant, or capable some among us might be, the biggest part of the solution depends on enough ordinary people imagining new possibilities, participating in planning and implementation, investing in success, embracing uncomfortable change, and most of all, finding unsuspected resources within themselves and in the connection we can have with each other.

It’s a tall order. Much will be required of us, but it’s not about being exceptionally smart, talented, or well-equipped. We need a certain amount of courage, resourcefulness, commitment, and willingness to do what it takes, but it is not about being heroes or saints. Doing what it takes to find our hearts and recover our humanity stretches us, but it’s not about guilt or maudlin emotional appeals that manipulatively pluck our heartstrings. Instead, what we need is a new narrative about who we are individually and collectively. We need to move toward a social arrangement that is more about a win/win mindset and less prone to the win/lose culture of rapacious greed. That would mostly involve simply building on what normal, healthy human beings do best – making choices based on what is in our own best interest and that of those we care about, enlarging and deepening what we care about, extending our reach, and intelligently applying ourselves in ways that produce better long term results. It is a more enlightened understanding of self-interest. 

Inherent in this argument is a claim about the psychology involved in the beliefs, perceptions, illusions, desires, attractions, and motivations that drive the pursuit of what will purportedly provide satisfaction. It comes out of questions about how neo-classical economics defines rational choice and a critical examination of what it means to be rational. It is the pursuit of an alternative to the way we allow the market to determine values, thereby repressing our basic humanity, abdicating responsibility for the consequences of our choices, stifling natural human responsiveness, and negligently abandoning our duty to ourselves, our children, and each other. It is, most of all, a claim about what constitutes “the good life” and an invitation to seek something other than, deeper than, more long-lasting than, and greater than settling for the usual fare, being lulled into a distracted stupor, compliantly herded into servile conformity, and hypnotically sedated by bright and shiny objects alluringly dangled before us. It is a claim that there is more to a truly happy life than short-term gain, self-gratification, and getting as much money and power as we can. What most enriches our lives is a blend of elements like being inspired by a worthy sense of purpose, feeling connected to other people and to the natural world, finding a sense of belonging, participating in something larger than ourselves, making sensible choices that lead to experiences of deep satisfaction and true fulfillment, building up reciprocal goodwill, and opening ourselves to serendipitous encounters and unanticipated developments.

But how do we come to terms with conflicting priorities? Where is the line between responsible citizenship and healthy self-interest? Our responses to these questions make a difference. What we care about determines the kind of society we end up with. Caring only about ourselves, money, and power leads one way; caring about children, social and economic justice, the wellbeing of human and other living beings, and ethical and aesthetic choices that are grounded in human responsiveness leads another way. While some would say that the former direction is just about being smart and that the latter is recklessly mushy-headed, most sentient human beings, when push comes to shove, have a preference for responses that are basically kind. If we are confused, fatigued, and numb, that’s all the more reason to chart a course for ourselves that replenishes our innocent hopefulness, awakens new possibilities, welcomes challenges, anticipates setbacks, and avoids pitfalls. For that, we need a sturdy blend of heart and head. To be fully human is to care, but how we act on that matters. We need to use our heads to assess and solve problems, drawing from our experience, our educated understandings, our reasoning powers, our skills, and the gritty pragmatic wisdom of those on the front line.

Conceding defeat is not an option for two reasons. First, the very real prospect of a catastrophic environmental, economic, or geopolitical crisis that would strike at the very heart of civilization as we know it doesn’t really fit into our plans, and second, there are personal costs associated with becoming dehumanized. As Socrates said as he faced the death penalty for refusing to conform to the status quo, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” However we define life, without self-awareness, whatever satisfaction we might find is fragile, hollow, and brief. Even those who seem to go through life obliviously happy, trapped in their cozy bubbles and totally cut off from the difficulties of people around them, are missing out on the best life has to offer, and when a crisis comes up, they have all their eggs in the basket of blissful ignorance and don’t know what to do. To some extent though, we all insulate ourselves from the consequences of our own choices and actions as if we were in a narcotic-induced stupor. Confirmation bias causes us to only see what we want to see. Avoidance and neglect form a vicious circle. We become apathetic, cynical, and complicit. We can put the blame on that amorphous group of supposedly negligent and incompetent people known as “them”, but virtually all of us share some of the responsibility for the way things are.

That maintaining our humanity in the midst of everything that is going on around us is painful, hard, and demoralizing doesn’t mean we need to quit caring about starving children halfway around the world or just not be concerned about problems like climate change. It just means we have some questions to ponder. The most obvious question is what is that we can actually do to turn things around. The operative word is “we”, but not “we” as in an amorphous herd, instead “we” as an aggregation of intelligent participants actively contributing to solutions. It’s not about some “them” that needs to be cajoled or shamed, nor is it about “society” as an objectified “it” that is “out there”. We can’t just mold the social order into something that we want it to be or direct it the way we want it to go. There’s no steering wheel or rudder; instead, society as we know it is an aggregation of individual choices, our choices. Everything we do is a vote for some intended or unintended social reality. There is no ready-made mechanism by which society as a whole can creatively and aptly respond to problems. Nothing short of a radical change in the basic equation will lead to the tipping point we need.

making it personal

We live in a time of creative destruction. Disruptive technologies and cross-cultural interactions are perpetually fraying the social fabric we had previously become accustomed to. Old ways of doing things are no longer viable. Mobilizing activists who want to participate in solutions is not something that can be pulled off using traditional means of organizing, but new capacities have also created new opportunities for collaboration. Most of us have not even begun to wrap our heads around the daunting but extraordinarily fertile social realities that are now emerging. We have barely scratched the surface in imagining possibilities for collaboratively solving complicated and previously intractable problems. Given the depth and the complexity of the problems that need to be solved, we need all hands on deck; however, coordination of the effort can’t be a top-down function from a centralized point. We have to come to terms with new challenges and seize new opportunities.

·         We need to forge together a precarious alloy of extraordinary and ordinary human qualities. In other words, we can’t afford to ignore, dismiss, or neglect the professional expertise and skills of the most brilliant among us, nor can we afford to waste, bury, or thwart the valuable contributions from the most talented, competent, heroic, and self-sacrificing would-be participants in the solution; nonetheless, the most crucial feature in strategic solutions of complex problems is an ability to inspire and empower an unlikely gaggle of self-organizing, loosely coordinated amateurs who are committed to working together toward real solutions.

·         Without sufficient buy-in, we will never achieve critical mass nor overcome the entrenched resistance to change and circumnavigate the well-funded special interest opposition to the common welfare.

·         There are significant challenges involved in the intricate coordination of the all the little pieces that have to fall into place. Even apart from conflicts within the ranks and overt opposition from the outside, we still have to come to terms with challenges having to do with imperfect information, the usual points of friction that impair everyday human interaction, covering the costs of organizing, inefficiency, impatience, and scalability.

The human capacity for collective problem solving is mostly embedded within the “six-degrees-of-separation” network that loosely links the human community together. Significant contributions are made by advances within academia and research communities, but we need to broaden the base of contributors. We need find ways for more people to be able to contribute to the knowledge commons and to expand its functionality. Building a platform that would facilitate an awakening of a powerful collaborative effort might seem far fetched, but then, according to conventional wisdom, Wikipedia is not supposed to work. The number of creative individuals who are willing to spend their valuable time contributing articles, spotting problems, and working out disagreements regarding specific content is nothing short of astounding. Can we aspire to anything less when it comes to the central questions of our times? Wikipedia didn’t just happen. Jimmy Wales translated his very specific vision into action, created the kernel around which it has thrived, and has put a lot of work into facilitating its success. We need to become catalysts for a richer, more diverse, and more robust knowledge commons. Wikipedia didn’t just happen. An actual human being named Jimmy Wales translated his very specific vision into action, created the kernel around which it has thrived, and has put a lot of work into facilitating its success.

Embracing a vision of a brighter future may not be as cute as pet videos, but it can become more deeply compelling if we can summon the courage to imagine ourselves as fully actualized human beings and can craft a deeply resonant rallying point. We can put our faith in the democratic process, not because it’s perfect, but instead because the results are usually greater than the sum of the ingredients that go into it. We know how easy it is to become derailed by intransigent selfishness, but we also know that can translate our imperfection as individuals into a collective strength. Rather than seeing each other mainly as competitors for scarce resources, we can create vibrant pockets of human responsiveness where any willing individual can bring assets to the table and make a contribution. It’s our best chance for success. While there are many among us who are fearful, reluctant, resistant, or unwilling to get involved, preferring to sit on the sidelines, to take without contributing, to mount frontal attacks, to disingenuously sabotage, or to create mischief, there are enough of us who would like to see different outcomes from what we’ve been doing is getting us.

But summoning the political will and actually bringing it to bear in the realm of concrete activism requires participation at the individual level. We have to stand in solidarity with each other and speak out against injustice, irresponsible business practices, political corruption, oppression, bigotry, and violence. Influencing behaviors involves a carrot and stick approach, sweetening the deal by providing attractive alternatives and incentivizing desirable behaviors yet also holding government, law enforcement, business interests, and each other accountable, putting teeth in the enforcement of new norms and expecting offenders to pay the price for their violations and suffer real consequences. There is a lot of outrage in the air, but to bring an effective political action to fruition we need to build unity, and that involves creating warm pockets of empathy and compassion, enriching the social spaces right around us, and sending ripples through the rest of the human community. We need to simultaneously focus on two levels, the individual and the collective, and enhance the reciprocal relationship between personal self actualization and the work of building a thriving society.

We need to direct our caring in a targeted way but also use our heads to restrain unproductive responses, to respond intelligently and pragmatically, to strategically leverage our strengths, to connect with others and build alliances, to plan, to execute, to build up a spirit of cooperation, to coordinate our efforts, devote rigorous attention to realities on the ground, and plow the insights that come from feedback back into the effort. While the collective patterns we are most aware of might be groupthink, mob psychology, and general stupidity that is greater than the sum of its parts, we can actually be smarter together than we are apart. Obviously, the process by which we get there is crucial. Collective intelligence depends on intelligent participation, but also on design. It is important to not only find ways to solve the signal-to-noise ratio problem but also to move beyond mere talk, beyond abstract ideas, and beyond theoretical solutions and to reach concrete, actionable decisions. We need heart, not only in our desire for something different, our motivation to succeed, and our willingness to contribute, but also in our need to stay focused, to be courageous, and to persevere.

Recovering Humanity is about the modest suggestion that anyone can make a difference by using their hands and feet to vote for a society that is all about employing win/win approaches, finding deeper and more enduring satisfactions, making those satisfactions more broadly available, creating a rising tide that lifts all boats, building up experiences of success and momentum, achieving a stable sense of confidence, articulating (in word and deed) a different narrative about who we are, bringing about a shift in cultural values, and advancing values that are less about greed, competition, self-glorification, and ego gratification and more about interdependence, beauty, adventurous pursuits of sublime delight, having a real stake in actualizing the brightest and most exciting possibilities, and living out our fondest dreams. It would take us on a path that will often be discouraging and won’t always seem worth the angst, the risks involved, the inconvenience, the expense, the frustration, the pain, and the inevitable disappointments; nonetheless, when the dust settles, we will find that we are left with an intangible profitability that is of great personal benefit.

And in the meantime, we will have immediate access to updrafts of inspirational energy and will, against all odds, accumulate many encouraging experiences along the way that are not dependent on what anyone else thinks about us. We will fall short, but we don’t have to take our losses as a sign of defeat or be reduced to lifeless acquiescence. The crucial work of rekindling the longing for greatness that is within each of our hearts and of translating that longing into commitment and strategic action that can mitigate the catastrophic consequences of human malice, arrogance, reckless overreach, and irresponsibility has to start somewhere.