The Moral Humanity Movement
Scattered pockets of positive change are transforming society into a compassionate community. Seeds are being planted.
The enrichment of cultures creates a moral foundation for systemic improvements in our major social institutions.
These structural improvements nurture personal and spiritual growth rooted in mutual support that helps individuals undo divisive, selfish, competitive, domineering socialization and form partnerships.
Increased ability to cooperate enhances the emergence of a sustained, massive, united, nonviolent, grassroots moral humanity movement
Mutually reinforcing nonviolent efforts are based on Gandhi’s principle: “Be the change you seek.”
Countless individuals and organizations contribute to the moral humanity movement — including those who don’t yet identify as members. The challenge is to deepen, strengthen, expand, connect, and unify these innovations. This manifesto moves in this direction.
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
NOTE: This manifesto is a work in progress. Please review and use the form below to comment.
Scattered pockets of positive change transform society into a compassionate community. Seeds are planted. Awareness of basic realities increases. Good people relieve others’ suffering — and correct the root causes of preventable suffering. Efforts to improve public policy persist. The moral humanity movement unites these fragments and reverses humanity’s downward spiral.
Enrichment of our shared culture creates a moral foundation for systemic improvements in our major social institutions.
These structural improvements nurture personal and spiritual growth rooted in mutual support that helps individuals undo divisive, selfish, competitive, domineering socialization and form partnerships.
Increased ability to cooperate enhances emergence of a sustained, massive, united, nonviolent, grassroots moral humanity movement that persuades Washington to respect the people's will while respecting minority rights.
Mutually reinforcing nonviolent efforts are based on Gandhi’s principle: “Be the change you seek.” They liberate inherited instincts that modern societies suppress. They strengthen positive capabilities and correct weaknesses. They affirm the equal value of every individual and awaken moral commitment to compassionate action. They set aside self-centered domination and blind submission.
Countless individuals and organizations contribute to the moral humanity movement — including those who don’t yet identify as members. The challenge is to deepen, strengthen, expand, connect, and unify these innovations. This manifesto moves in this direction.
Read MorePolitical organizations don’t encourage members to engage in self-reform to undo divisive social conditioning, including the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit. And personal- and spiritual-reform organizations don’t nurture political action to help change oppressive public policies. If these two communities made simple shifts in their approach, they could come together and build an independent social movement powerful enough to persuade Washington to respect the will of the people, transform social structures throughout society, and support compassionate personal growth.
The first step is to agree on a shared worldview rooted in compassion.
Read MoreImagine a moral America. Americans treat each other as they want to be treated and respect everyone’s equal value. If you live elsewhere, imagine the same for your country.
We love our country, live good, compassionate lives, care for others as we care for ourselves, avoid both selfishness and self-sacrifice, improve ourselves and the world, are politically engaged, work to undo racism and all forms of oppressive domination, and nurture partnerships throughout society.
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Systmic/Essay
Reflections on Elizabeth Anderson
By Wade Lee Hudson
NOTE: Following is the text used in my January 12, 2020 “Democratic Equality and Democratic Dialog” PowerPoint presentation at the Humanists and Non-Theists committee of the San Francisco Unitarian church.
The article that had the biggest impact on me last year was “The Philosopher Redefining Equality” in The New Yorker. The subtitle reads: “Elizabeth Anderson thinks we’ve misunderstood the basis of a free and fair society.” That profile of Anderson begins: [play audio]
She ended up studying political and moral philosophy at Harvard under John Rawls and teaching at the University of Michigan, where she stayed, despite being heavily recruited by other universities.
In 1999 the esteemed journal Ethics published her path-breaking, widely reprinted article "What is the Point of Equality?" She’s also written three books, including Value in Ethics and Economics, which argues that some goods like love and respect should not be sold on the market or otherwise treated as commodities, and The Imperative of Integration, which examines how racial integration can lead to a more robust democracy. Her many podcast interviews include a great one with Vox.com founder Ezra Klein.
Last year Anderson received the no-strings-attached $625,000 MacArthur “Genius” award. Included in their announcement was this [play video].
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Guaranteed Public Service Employment
By Wade Lee Hudson
Growing interest in a federally funded public-service job guarantee — as reflected in the Job Guarantee Manifesto — challenges the assumption that avoiding poverty is primarily an individual responsibility. In fact, a personal deficiency is not the main reason workers can’t find a living-wage job.
According to conventional wisdom, the cause for poverty is lack of skill, lack of discipline, or emotional instability. The solution therefore is assumed to be more education and training, better habits, or mental health treatment — so poor people can get a job, gain experience, and find jobs that pay a non-poverty wage.
Based on these assumptions, society only provides minor, stigmatizing relief, claims its apparent lack of compassion is justifiable tough love, and denies any responsibility to prevent poverty. People say to the poor, Get your act together. Climb the ladder
If you focus only on the individual, there can be some logic to this argument. Any one individual may be able to do more to improve their situation. But if you look at society as a whole, the flaw in the argument is clear. There aren’t enough living-wage jobs for everyone. If one individual finds a living-wage job, countless others can’t get that job. It’s a game of musical chairs.
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Racial Healing: Rhonda Magee
By Wade Lee Hudson
Racism continues to inflict enormous suffering. Rhonda V. Magee, an African-American law professor, reports, “I often notice a lingering feeling that I might be in danger—that I could, at any time, be discounted, rejected, disrespected, injured, or even killed for no reason other than my perceived ‘blackness.’” This reality provokes heated resistance from oppressed people, while relatively advantaged people experience guilt and denial (a majority of white people claim to be color-blind). Tensions are high. Discussing these issues is often difficult.
This dynamic applies to all people of color, but I focus on black-white relations, which are most problematic in the United States. When white people fail to fully understand black anger, they often respond with calm, paternalistic advice. When black people find this paternalism offensive, they sometimes end their relationship with the offender. When white people sense what’s happening, they often “shut up and listen” as a way to increase their understanding. Many white people feel they should censor themselves when they talk with black people about race-related issues. As a result of these and other factors, many white people end up unsure about whether, when, and how to speak about racism and race relations. Friendships fade. Unity dissolves. The potential for joint action is undermined.
Within this context, Magee’s work is helpful. Magee teaches meditation to her law students and conducts racial-healing workshops based on her ColorInsight methodology. Her wide-ranging, challenging, and insightful magnum opus, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness, includes many compelling personal narratives and useful self-help exercises, such as “Mindful Speaking and Listening Practice.” She argues that mindfulness practice can help us acknowledge bias and choose how we respond to conflict and division.
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Face-to-face Democracy
By Wade Lee Hudson
A fully democratic society relies on empowerment — self-empowerment and collective empowerment — and respect — self-respect, respect for others, respect for everyone’s essential equal value, respect for individual rights and liberty, and respect for everyone’s right to make ends meet and fully participate in society without being subjected to discrimination or oppression based on race, class, gender, or some other arbitrary characteristic.
Practicing how to be democratic — how to relate to others as equals with compassion — nurtures a more democratic society — a society with self-confident, assertive, respectful, empowered members. A democratic society, in turn, nurtures grassroots movements that promote ever more respect and empowerment — an upward, virtuous circle.
At the same time, however, self-centeredness and hyper-competition promote a lack of self-confidence and passivity among the general population, and, among activists, fragmentation and asymmetrical polarization — a downward, vicious circle that sucks ever more people into its vortex and may eventually hit bottom, unless we, the people, mobilize massive, grassroots movements to transform our nation into a compassionate community.
Book clubs, church groups, and activist committees often cultivate democratic equality. These groups are democracy laboratories that cultivate respect and empowerment.
Face-to-face, horizontal, self-regulating, self-perpetuating, peer-to-peer open-ended “democracy circles” explicitly committed to advancing “face-to-face democracy” could build on these examples. Organizations could incorporate such circles into their current work. Existing groups could supplement their activities with such open-ended dialog. And new circles could emerge independently, perhaps with two individuals inviting one or two others to form a circle, which would increase its numbers organically.
Many methods could be used to structure this face-to-face democracy. Systemopedia associates are engaged in brainstorming and evaluating some such options. Following is one possibility.
Read MoreSocial/Books
PRIVATE GOVERNMENT
How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It)
Elizabeth Anderson
Private Authoritarianism
By Wade Lee Hudson
Americans are sensitive to government curtailing individual freedom. They’re less concerned about employer violations — such as businesses that unjustifiably control workers’ behavior on the job or monitor them off-duty. Widely embraced “free market” ideology proclaims that workers are free. Nevertheless, one in four workers consider their workplace a “dictatorship.”
In her pathbreaking 1999 article, “What Is the Point of Equality?” (see “The Democrats: What Happened to Equality”), Elizabeth Anderson insightfully examined social equality, authority, esteem and social standing. She follows up on these issues in her powerful 2017 book, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It).
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About/Wade Lee Hudson
My Story: Peer-to-Peer Community (Part One)
By Wade Lee Hudson
My first organizing was on sandlot softball fields. Boys would show up and two “captains” took turns selecting teammates, assigned positions, and set the batting order. Two of the better players, which usually included me, served as captain, but anyone could do it, and many often did. There were no arguments about this decision. Each captain was dispensable. The players weren’t dependent on a leader. Little did I realize that this simple, horizontal, self-regulating, self-perpetuating, peer-to-peer structure would become a community organizing model for the rest of my life — though, alas, I followed it imperfectly.
My second project was the high school chess club, which I initiated. After advertising, some fifteen students joined and met weekly. At the first meeting, we randomly determined each student’s initial position on a vertical ladder. Players moved up and down the ladder as they won or lost. Another peer-to-peer structure, this one within a larger, democratic hierarchy: the school administration.
During high school, as is common, I participated in a clique. Mine was a group of five boys who read and discussed iconoclastic literature such as H.L. Mencken and Bertrand Russell and frequently gathered at night to smoke pipes and play poker. That informal structure also nurtured a rewarding sense of peer-to-peer community. As Bob Dylan sings, “I wish, I wish, I wish in vain / That we could sit simply in that room again.”
When I entered the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, I joined a student co-op as a boarder.
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Building a “Full-Stack Society” with “New Power”
By Wade Lee Hudson
Process is important. So is product. Advocates for democracy who focus on mobilizing popular power can forget that the tyranny of the majority is a real threat. New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World -- and How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms acknowledges this reality, and offers a solution. …
They make a strong case for dynamics that are “open, participatory, and peer driven.” Yet they also write: ”As we see with ISIS and the growing hordes of white supremacists,... the tools that bring us closer together can also drive us further apart.” Heimans and Timms argue we can avoid this danger by creating “a world in which all major social and economic institutions are designed so that [all] people can more meaningfully shape every aspect of their lives.”
According to their vision:
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