Blog: Humanist Voices

What is the Global Mind Charter? You could call it a manifesto in support of human potential from a secular humanist perspective, although one needn't be a fellow atheistic freethinker in order to agree with nearly all of it. It's also intended as an ethical statement soliciting the widest possible support. As a vision of the farther reaches of mind, of humanist consciousness, it's also intended to prompt doubts about the adequacy of current systems to either sustain let alone accelerate progressive improvements in all of our abilities to think, create, learn, and generally function at the highest levels in all domains of mental capability.

Why was it written and what is its practical purpose?

"To put it bluntly, we need a different kind of human being," wrote Maslow in his Farther Reaches of Human Nature (p. 56). That is putting it bluntly, but that is where I'm at and I assume many others. How can we look at our world of problems, of human error, from sexual assault to climate change, from war to religious fundamentalism, from "crystal healing" to the Tea Party, from the alleged end of the world in 2012 to child abuse, from the Bush presidency to deadening and design-impoverished architecture to cancer to the wastelands of popular media and forever on, and not think that a whole suite of capabilities, the entirety of our humanness in fact, have been systematically underdeveloped in our species?

It occurred to me that we really need a wholesale redesign of every relevant system in order to maximize every person's capabilities. This is not a new idea, of course. The basic impulse is present in many different times, places and thinkers. But I've never seen a manifesto or political program that placed comprehensive improvement of the human mind at its center.

Other ideas were floating around at the time of its writing, with which I won't labor the reader's attention other than to elaborate on two points. First, I've long harbored a frustration with the secular movement's inattention to the future. What are the possible, probable and preferable futures that we wish to inhabit, both for ourselves and for future generations? What are the possible details of these futures? How do we know what road to take if we haven't really thought about where we're going? (More on humanism's relationship to the future in a future post.) What maps do we use? The GMC is my attempt to spur more dialogue about the humanist future--the future of the movement, the future-oriented kind of dialogue that must happen more often, and the stories we tell ourselves about our purposes.

Second, if we assume that rational argument and evidence won't persuade many or most people [1], that indeed we live in a culture in which we don't have the right kind of soil in which reason can grow, then what are the factors that can change this? How much is the skeptic movement spinning its wheels when it doesn't address the many social changes necessary to build a more intelligent, creative and evolvable culture?

So, there it is. Perhaps a small contribution to a humanist politics, an example of 'what is humanist ethics'....

This is a first draft, and I'd love your feedback. What have I missed? How do you understand the future of the mind?

-Eric Snyder

Archived Comments