How to Unleash an Unhip Humanist Movement
That Wishes It Could Bust a Move
November 28, 2009
What would it take for a culture steeped in plenty of violence to tap into some Old Skool humanist principles? Ideas like not harming your neighbor, not killing, playing nice and being fair are still floating around out there like loose dollar bills in a giant game show balloon. The citizen contestants get placed inside it to grab as many flying Benjamins as possible, but with all that forced air the whirring bills are almost impossible to snatch.
It's Sticky: The Violence Principle
Maybe it all starts in the formative years. Globbed together in places called "schools," we get our first taste of sustained interaction with a slew of other humans. But it's not long before numchucks, knives and handguns appear. In fact weapons appeared well in advance of Halo 2, a first-person shooter video game that gained popularity among teens when it was released in 2004 but became a locus for criticism for its promotion of violence.
By as early as the late '70s, school administrators in The Bronx were in combat mode, fighting perpetrators with metal detectors and screening every kid who showed up for English class. And that's how the problem has continued to get addressed ever since: more metal detectors, more campus cops, more shakedowns and more arrests. Enduring tricks from the criminal trade, a kid's formative years are more likely to get a huge smackdown from the police than a chocolate bar from the ice cream man. Welcome to the Real World—even though grownups wish it were different. Humanism? Forget about it.
By as early as the late '70s, school administrators in The Bronx were in combat mode, fighting perpetrators with metal detectors and screening every kid who showed up for English class. And that's how the problem has continued to get addressed ever since: more metal detectors, more campus cops, more shakedowns and more arrests. Enduring tricks from the criminal trade, a kid's formative years are more likely to get a huge smackdown from the police than a chocolate bar from the ice cream man. Welcome to the Real World—even though grownups wish it were different. Humanism? Forget about it.
The Bully Factor
Parents and school administrators in Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and other urban neighborhoods have dealt with explosive campus situations for years, even though it took the travesty at Columbine to get everyone to focus on the problem of guns at school, teen violence and the school bully.
But the school bully keeps coming back. Despite "zero tolerance" polices and severe punishments, he's always hanging around. Whether it's the 2009 "Kick a Ginger" incident in Calabasas, California, which resulted in seven middle school students getting assaulted for having red hair, or your average one-on-one school alley attack or your cyberbullying incidents on Facebook, boys and girls know how to be cruel.
But is treating schools like criminal breeding grounds the best we can do? If the school bully is so ingrained in our society, is there a way to stop nurturing him? If he comes with the furniture where we first learn how to behave in groups, is there a way to talk about him and address him? If his belligerent streak is learned, can he learn something else?
But the school bully keeps coming back. Despite "zero tolerance" polices and severe punishments, he's always hanging around. Whether it's the 2009 "Kick a Ginger" incident in Calabasas, California, which resulted in seven middle school students getting assaulted for having red hair, or your average one-on-one school alley attack or your cyberbullying incidents on Facebook, boys and girls know how to be cruel.
But is treating schools like criminal breeding grounds the best we can do? If the school bully is so ingrained in our society, is there a way to stop nurturing him? If he comes with the furniture where we first learn how to behave in groups, is there a way to talk about him and address him? If his belligerent streak is learned, can he learn something else?
Ethics in the Classroom
No one expects math to get passed down through osmosis from generation to generation. Every year the same multiplication tables are taught, day-in and day-out, so that the left brain skills get into immediate gear. Likewise, we do our best to put reading on overdrive. Speech and language development, we know, is marked by milestones in early childhood. But when it comes to being a humanist, to caring for our fellow school buddy on the most basic level, that part of the brain might as well be left in a coma.
Once a kid gets beaten up or taken out, an emergency assembly in the school auditiorium acts as "shock therapy." In between the shock therapy, students get daily dosages of what the rest of us are exposed to — a violence edition of the real world complete with war footage, CSI Miami episodes, Assassins Creed on the Xbox, epic films with high body counts, the five o'clock news, criminals, handguns, bullets and bullies. Two or three emergency school assemblies per year can't cut it.
And that's that. It is what it is and ethics classes are nowhere on the periphery.
No one expects math to get passed down through osmosis from generation to generation. Every year the same multiplication tables are taught, day-in and day-out, so that the left brain skills get into immediate gear. Likewise, we do our best to put reading on overdrive. Speech and language development, we know, is marked by milestones in early childhood. But when it comes to being a humanist, to caring for our fellow school buddy on the most basic level, that part of the brain might as well be left in a coma.
Once a kid gets beaten up or taken out, an emergency assembly in the school auditiorium acts as "shock therapy." In between the shock therapy, students get daily dosages of what the rest of us are exposed to — a violence edition of the real world complete with war footage, CSI Miami episodes, Assassins Creed on the Xbox, epic films with high body counts, the five o'clock news, criminals, handguns, bullets and bullies. Two or three emergency school assemblies per year can't cut it.
And that's that. It is what it is and ethics classes are nowhere on the periphery.
Ethical Focus Blog:Man is the Measureof all Things sip it
Why is that? Is it because there are no AP exams or SAT scores that would validate ethics classes? Is it because they wouldn't help a transcript or a G.P.A. come college application time? Is it because they come with no incentives or federal dollar bills attached? Is it because they lack federal goals and targets for public schools, making them unappealing, unrealistic and meaningless?
With U.S. schools hyperfocused on reading and writing and competing with a global pool of students who easily trump American students in math and science, humanist classes about caring are fairly unattractive. Inside the walls of the Education Department, administrators want to stay on task — keep up literacy rates, leave no child behind and use limited resources to prep students for all those standardized tests. In other words, ethics classes just don't pay. In the short run.
So in the world of being nice, a formative mind, for the most part, has to go it alone. For those who attend church or temple over the weekends, the schism gets compartmentalized: school cops Monday through Friday with prayer on Saturdays and Sundays. The "good stuff" becomes a religious function and during the weekday it becomes a paralyzed dream.
Wouldn't it be great if "good stuff" were a simple function of society, whether or not you believe in God or Allah or a Hindu deity?
With U.S. schools hyperfocused on reading and writing and competing with a global pool of students who easily trump American students in math and science, humanist classes about caring are fairly unattractive. Inside the walls of the Education Department, administrators want to stay on task — keep up literacy rates, leave no child behind and use limited resources to prep students for all those standardized tests. In other words, ethics classes just don't pay. In the short run.
So in the world of being nice, a formative mind, for the most part, has to go it alone. For those who attend church or temple over the weekends, the schism gets compartmentalized: school cops Monday through Friday with prayer on Saturdays and Sundays. The "good stuff" becomes a religious function and during the weekday it becomes a paralyzed dream.
Wouldn't it be great if "good stuff" were a simple function of society, whether or not you believe in God or Allah or a Hindu deity?
Ethical Culture, founded in New York in 1876 by Felix Adler, began as a movement to make people of all religions and creeds aware that "we are one" — not "we are one" in a pick-an-international-charity-Bono sort of way, but in an everyday way that inspires basic kindness in casual settings like schools. The Movement's schools, most notably Fieldston in Riverdale, New York, teaches ethics classes. But over the past one hundred years or so the Movement has remained largely consigned to about three dozen societies scattered across the U.S. with a membership base that is static or dwindling.In the Movement's efforts to "advance the science and art of right living," it's gotten left behind on the national stage. "Right living" often gets assigned to faith, faith to religion and religion to Saturdays and Sundays. "Right living" may also be too close to telling someone how to live his or her life, even though the movement is largely free of dogma. Modern Americans in particular prize a society where no one tells anyone what to do. You choose. And if you screw up you simply go to jail.
But a student can in fact continue to make his or her own choices while also having more guidance and the guidance doesn't have to be religious or dogmatic. It can be daily teachings about what it takes to be a decent person, particularly when that person is under stress or in the throws of anger.
For the half dozen students from California who got interrogated by the police for allegedly kicking and punching redheads because a Facebook post told them to do it, more guidance might have been a good thing. Ditto for all those school tragedies that have ended in serious injury, emotional duress and death. If we can attempt to teach math, maybe we should attempt to teach kindness. Plenty of schools do active charity missions and teach students the importance of helping those less fortunate but again, it's not about Saturdays and Sundays and elderly people in nursing homes. It's about daily kindness from peer to peer and figuring out a good way to maintain it in our lives.
Humanistic Religious Naturalism
"an appreciation and celebration of the human as the portal to the infinity of nature, the grandeur and tragedy of life." sip it
William R. Murry defines "humanism" sip it
The Ethical Culture Movement with its inspiring ideals has been as sleepy and peaceful as a koala chillaxing on eucalyptus leaves. Even though it's a movement, everyone lets it slumber and no one goes near it. Maybe they need a new look. Maybe the organizers need to hire a cultural tastemaker like Russell Simmons or an ad agency like Goodby, Silverstein & Partners who told people to "Get Milk" and they got it. Maybe they need a jingle or a new moniker or a new logo or something to make kindness and enrolling in kindness classes as cool as buying Modern Warfare 2. Maybe they need a video game or a reality TV show on Hulu.
Maybe it's as simple as that: packaging kindness. That could go a long way to unleashing the power of an unhip humanist movement whose pretty cool caring we could all get used to. NewsSip
Maybe it's as simple as that: packaging kindness. That could go a long way to unleashing the power of an unhip humanist movement whose pretty cool caring we could all get used to. NewsSip
Photo Credits: Breakdancing Kurt by Socrbeast; Bully Free Zone by Eddie~S
