What is Humanism?

What did Linus Pauling and Albert Schweitzer have to say about Humanism?

“Humanism is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity, of application of new ideas of scientific progress for the benefit of all.” – Linus Pauling.

For those of you who don’t know, Linus Pauling was the chemist and a peace activist and a Humanist. He won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He was Humanist of the Year in 1961.

What I like about the Linus Pauling definition is how much his definition is echoed in the current definition from the American Humanist Association, which includes a bit about Humanists affirming our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment to the greater good of humanity.

Humanism, for all its emphasis on morality, critical thinking, and personal responsibility is actually a joyful approach to life.  We choose to be moral, critical, and responsible so that we can be happy.  And yes, it does work – check out my other post on wisdom.

When I was researching the Linus Pauling quote, I came across this one from Albert Schweitzer.

 “Humanism, in all its simplicity, is the only genuine spirituality.” – Albert Schweitzer upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for coming up with Humanism (he was one of many but the only one to get an award for it)

What’s cool about Schweitzer was not just that he was an accomplished organist and that several of his published works are actually transcriptions of Bach organ pieces, but that he literally won the Nobel Peace Prize for coming up with a philosophy and moral system that was rational and based on a reverence for life, otherwise known as Humanism. Now obviously, he wasn’t the only one to formulate Humanism, but it’s really cool to know the philosophy was recognized as globally important.

The reason I am so tickeled with Schweitzer is because he was so stereo-typically a Humanist. Check out the Wikipedia article on him (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Schweitzer)  He didn’t have a singular interest. He was interested in everything from philosophy to theology to organ music to recording organ music (there is actually a technique for recording organs that bears his name) and medicine. If you were to pick a Humanist role model to emulate, Schweitzer would be a good one.

This makes me wonder. Who is your favorite famous Humanist? And why?

What is Wisdom?

What is wisdom and why is attaining wisdom so important to personal well being?

It turns out that while everyone wishes they were wise, finding a good definition of what wisdom is, is rather difficult. It’s a state of knowledge that is practical. A wise person is someone who not only can tell what is true and what isn’t, but who is able to apply that knowledge to everyday life, so that they can live more successfully. A wise person is able to navigate their relationships better and basically, not suffer as much over every day hassles that plague the rest of us mere mortals.

It turns out though, that some psychiatrists decided to study what it means to be wise and came up with the following definition based on surveys of wisdom experts.  (see: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/188170.php)

Here’s how they define wisdom:
• It is uniquely human.
• It is a form of advanced cognitive and emotional development that is experience-driven.
• It is a personal quality, albeit rare.
• It can be learned, increases with age and can be measured.
• It is probably not enhanced by taking medication.

It’s the second bit that resonates the most with me. Wisdom is an advanced cognitive and emotional development that is experience driven. Immature thinkers are not wise. That’s good to know.

For me, part of the goal of practicing Humanist skills like Freethought and critical thinking and learning to harness my emotions rather than being ruled by them is because, like everyone, I recognize that being wise is a state I would like to attain.

Why? Because according to the Free Dictionary by Farlex – definition #4 of wisdom is “A wise outlook, plan or course of action.”  Having wisdom allows you to be wise and that allows you to choose effective courses of actions. The more effective and good your actions are, the better your life is, the more personal control you have in your life and that translates directly into an improved state of personal wellbeing.

I’m told I’m wise and that I have a lot of wisdom. That I exist in near constant state of stupid happy contented bliss despite the vicissitudes of life is probably an indication that these assessments of my knowledge as “wise” are well founded. How did I achieve this state of advanced cognitive and emotional development? Through practice.

Learn how to think better and practice being more compassionate and you will be wise too. After all, according to the psychiatrists – it’s something that can be learned. And yes, this is the same prescription for wisdom that Humanist and Humanistic thinkers have been preaching and teaching throughout the entire course of human history.  It’s amazing to me that people still look for shortcuts. There are not shortcuts. You don’t need any mystical wisdom or woo to become wise. You either learn how to think better or you don’t. You either practice being compassionate or you don’t. This is why I teach basic Humanist life skills. So others can learn the practical skills needed to become wise. If you want to learn more, get my books and check out my courses (https://humanistlearning.com)

To be or not to be ... moral

How to choose to do the right thing when doing so will come at a cost.

Being moral isn’t easy. If it were easy, everyone would do it. Even people who want to be moral have a problem being moral all the time. It just takes so much work to think through your actions properly and then, sometimes, being moral comes at a cost.

Sometimes it is just easier to be immoral or ammoral through omission than it is to stand up and do the right thing. This is one of the reasons why bystanders who witness bullying rarely do anything about it.

I’ve been asked to address this topic and I think the best way is to start by talking about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs - if you are unfamiliar with this concept).  Maslow was a Humanist and like all Humanists he was concerned with what motivates us humans to do what we do. Like, how do we choose the right thing when doing so comes at a cost?

The reason the concept of the hierarchy of needs is helpful is because it helps us understand that we have competing needs and how we choose to act is going to depend on what need we place highest in our hierarchy. Not being hurt is certainly something that everyone needs. It’s easy to see why this need would trump our need and desire to be moral.

The way I solve this common dilemma for myself is to do four things.

1) Prioritize being moral. This is a hierarchy and if you don’t prioritize being moral it will be trumped by your other needs.

2) Think Critically - Do a cost benefit analysis of acting vs. not acting. What will I likely accomplish by acting? Is it worth it?  It is very easy to give in to the need to not be hurt, but even if you prioritize being moral, you still need to engage in some critical thinking to decide whether or not it is worth it to act. Is this easy? No. It’s not. There is no guarantee that you will get it right. Moral reasoning is hard, but that’s part of what it is to be moral. If you do this step and decide not to act, you will feel better about it than if give in before this step.

3) Remind yourself of your responsibilities. If you don’t do this moral thing, who will? Humanism is about personal responsibility. Even if your cost benefit shows that nothing would be gained by your action, you may still want to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Part of your cost benefit must be whether you can live with yourself if you don’t act. Additionally, you need to remember that by your actions, even if futile, you can inspire others to be more moral as well. And that may be worth it.

4) Can you be clever? Often, if you spend some time thinking about how best to accomplish your objectives, you can do the right thing and reduce or eliminate the harm that is directed at you for doing the right thing. I teach this actually in my anti-bullying programs. This is a bit Epicurean, you may want to sustain some harm for a longer term gain, in which case, it is totally worth it to do the right thing.

How do you convince yourself to do the right thing despite the pressure not to? 

Mindfulness in everyday life

3 ways to be mindful in everyday life.

Humanism is not an abstract philosophy. It has real world and immediate implications for how you choose to live your life.  In order to be a truly moral person it is important to think.  The question is what should you think about and how can you think in a way that improves your life instead of causing you to get into a endless thought rut.

Here are 3 ways you can think about your everyday actions that will help you to be more mindful and to gain greater enjoyment from life at the same time.

1) Think about what is moral. Being mindful isn’t helpful if it is selfish. Think about what you are doing as a question of morality and you will automatically be more mindful. You will also feel better about who you are as an individual.

2) Start with small things. Like – do you return your shopping cart and why at the supermarket? Are you smiling and making eye contact with people at the supermarket?  Choose one thing at a time to work on that you do multiple times a week and you will find it not only effects your mood immediately, it will also become habit forming because you get to practice it often. These habits will also transfer over to other areas of your life as you experience the benefits of a more mindful approach.

3) Remind yourself to be compassionate with the jerks in your life. When we are dealing with a negative situation, our focus is often on how to defend ourselves. When you find yourself getting stressed and defensive, remind yourself to think compassionately about the person who isn’t behaving properly. Don’t insist they behave better, they aren’t capable of it and insisting that they do is part of why the conflict is persisting. Just compassionately accept that for whatever reason, they are incapable in this moment of behaving better. Forgive them and move on. This will help you feel better immediately and help you navigate these difficult situations in a way that you will feel good about instead of beating yourself up afterwards for what you could have or should have said. Feelings of compassionate eliminate that need.

If you want to learn more, consider my Humanist life skills course – Living Made Simpler. (http://humanisthappiness.com)

Life isn’t fair. Now what?

What to do when life isn’t fair. Advice from a Humanistic Psychologist. 

One of the questions I get regularly is how to maintain not only a sunny outlook when things go wrong, but more importantly, how to maintain our sense of moral justice when the universe seems set on punishing us for no reason whatsoever.

We humans are programmed to look for cause and effect. We are programmed to believe that if something happens. It has a cause. And further, if something happens to us, we probably caused it.

The problem is that sometimes, stuff just happens. You can do everything right and things still won’t go your way. It is very easy for religious people to place the blame on a god or a devil or to rationalize what just happened as cosmic karma or based on a cause and purpose we have no real knowledge of. But Humanists? We are stuck with the reality that stuff just happens. There is no one to blame and no way to rationalize it.

So, the problem we have to solve is how to not let reality get us down when reality is being manifestly unfair to us. Especially since we are smart enough to know that formulation is anthropomorphizing reality and it’s ridiculous.

I have a friend who is a Humanistic Psychology. His name is Dr. Leon Seltzer and he writes a column over at Psychology Today. He says “that discovering how to accept the bad things that gratuitously happen to you--that is, to take them in stride--is absolutely crucial if you're to achieve a steady, virtually unshakeable, state of well-being.”  I agree.

The question is how. Dr. Seltzer recommends at AAA approach, which is basically freethought combined with the serenity prayer and a healthy dose of self-empowerment. Here are what the 3 A’s stand for. (Assess, Accept, Act)

A- Assess (this is the freethought part) – Assess just how bad this setback really is. In the moment in may feel unjust, but if you think about it, it may just be a temporary setback.

A – Accept (this is the serenity prayer part) – Accept that there are things you have control over and somethings you don’t. Sometimes bad things happen that you don’t have control over. Stop fighting that reality and some serenity will follow even if it is a disappointed serenity.

A – Act (this is the self-empowerment part) Once you have assess just how bad it is and have gained some acceptance that it won’t magically change on it’s own just by appealing to the universe for fairness, the next thing you need to do is decide how to act given what has happened. Do you need help? Is there a work around? You don’t have to stay stuck or stay down. You can choose another course of action. Sure, you might get knocked down again, but trying to succeed is better than wallowing in despair.

To read Dr. Seltzers full essay and others – go here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the-self/201104/when-lifes-unfair-how-deal-fines-being-alive

Good Leaders Align Needs

Why the death of homo-economicus requires managers to change their management tactics and adopt a humanistic management model.

How a manager manages people is largely dictated by their concept of what it means to be human. In the world of business, the dominant model for a long time has been homo-economicus.

Homo-economicus, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is basically the assumption that humans are rational animals and that given good information; we will make rationally optimal decisions. Most people who advocate for the value of unrestrained free markets do so because they believe in the homo-economicus model.

Now, in case you weren’t aware of it from the obviousness that we humans aren’t very rational, the Evolution Institute has put out a journal with studies that provide the evidence that we humans aren’t very rational. See the journal here: http://evolution-institute.org/node/144

The studies they cite show that humans actually make decisions more how the Humanistic Psychologist Abraham Maslow suggested we do based on our hierarchy of needs.

What does this mean for a manager? It means that if you want to successfully encourage people to make decisions that benefit your company, you need to take their real decision making process into account, which means you need to understand that we humans seem to make decisions by weighing our hierarchy of needs against one another.

When you understand this, you understand that your job as a manager is to help people align their various needs so that the “right” choice is the overwhelmingly obvious choice and the easy choice to make because SO MANY of their needs are met when they make that choice.

To do this you need to help align an employee’s individual needs with the needs of their working group and the working group’s needs must be aligned with the needs of the company. A Humanist manager takes that another couple of steps further by aligning the needs of the company with the needs of the society and with the needs of the ecological biosphere that is earth.

And this really is the Humanist approach in a nutshell. Using a realistic and scientifically based view of humans to better help humans achieve not only their needs, but the needs of the society in which we all live. Can I get an AMEN?

Choice, Feminism and Humanism

Why having a choice in life matters.

I have a friend. This friend is a woman who chose not to have children. Her choice was not to be child free, just to not have children of her own. Her choice wasn’t even to have an abortion; it was a choice to not get pregnant in the first place. For some reason that choice was and is still considered radical. It’s one thing if you can’t have children of your own. That makes you an object of pity, but to choose to not have your own children ever? Well, that just isn’t normal. Is it?

And this gets to the heart of the matter and why choice, feminism and Humanism are so important even now. I am a mom. I love being a mom, but that is a role I chose for myself. I choose a lot of things for myself, like what I will eat and wear. Where I want to live, who I want to live with and what sort of work I want to do. Every day I make a slew of choices. Most are mundane, but sometimes, they are life altering, like the decision to get married and another decision to become a parent.

My friend took the decision to be a biological parent seriously. After all, it’s a big choice and it has a huge impact on your life and so of course you should have the right to choose it.  Except that when it became publically known she had chosen not to be pregnant, not because she couldn’t, but because she didn’t want to, she lost her job as a teacher and ended up becoming an advocate for a woman’s right to choose to be childfree.

I take my ability to make these choices for granted because I grew up in a household where I was given autonomy.  I was not indoctrinated in religion because what I choose to believe is just that, my choice. So it shocks me when I meet people whose choices, that impact them and them alone, are not accepted by others, like the reaction my friend still gets as a result of making her choice public.

Her story is a fascinating one and I highly recommend you read her book: Confessions of a Childfree Woman: A Life Spent Swimming Against the Mainstream 

It’s not about what others do

Why focusing on your own morality is more important that focusing on the behavior of others.

As you may know, I have a thing about shopping carts. I believe it is moral to return them for a variety of reasons. It helps keep parking lots clear of carts, reduces damage to other people’s cars, it makes the job of the cart jockey’s easier and it’s just a nice thing to do. Plus, I could use the extra exercise, even if it is just walking 2 spots over to return a cart.

The other day I was very excited to see a guy at a market pick up a cart from the lot that wasn’t put away and take it with him to the store, thus making one less cart left in the wrong spot in the lot.  I felt like giving him a high five of solidarity.  I didn’t. I thought it might be a bit weird, so I just put mine back in the cart return and headed home.

Of course, he could have asked me for my cart, because sometimes people do that, but I realized it was actually better that he took the one that had been left out. If he had taken mine, the other would still have been left out and would have been a hazard. With him and me together, that was two carts put away properly instead of one.

Here is the thing though; he did not know that I am the sort of person who returns my cart. For all he knew, I was going to leave my cart out too.  He took that cart without expectation that anyone would notice or care. He did it because he thought it was the right thing to do, even though it might have been undone immediately by the next person.

To me, this speaks to the heart why I choose to be a Humanist. It’s not about what others choose to do. It is about what I choose to do, regardless of what others do.  And this for me is what makes Humanism so powerful. Yes, it’s about morality, but it’s actually more about how I choose morality for myself. Not to be a self-righteous jerk dictating how others should behave. But because this is who I want to be for me.

Meaningless slogans

Why having a slogan for a mission statement won’t help you create an effective strategy.  

Consider this a lesson in Humanistic Leadership. In order to lead, you have to know where you are going and more importantly, why you are going there.  Having a mission statement or goal is a good way to direct your activities towards achieving your goals. The problem is that all too often groups create a mission statement that is more of a slogan that an actual statement of their goals and objectives.

The reason this is a problem is because without an actual mission, you can’t create an effective strategy to get there. I am working with a group right now that has a great slogan for a project they are working on but it’s empty. No one can tell me what they are trying to accomplish with the project. Sure, they have a catchy slogan, but not much else. They can’t even tell me what the slogan means. As a result, none of the activity they are doing is even remotely related to their slogan. There is a disconnect and it’s impacting their ability to connect with their members and fans effectively.

There is a huge different between having a slogan and having a strategy. Don’t make the mistake of creating a meaningless mission statement. Spend some time thinking about what you really want to accomplish and more importantly why you want to accomplish it.

The why is your real mission. When you understand why you are doing the things you do it becomes easier to do them and you can better focus on that which accomplishes your true mission and avoid activities that steer you off course. Understanding your real mission or goals provides clarity and helps people rally to your cause because they understand what your cause is. In short it helps you to be more strategic in your actions instead of doing something and hoping for the best. And that’s always a good thing.

I keep saying this but it doesn’t seem to stick. Critical thinking isn’t just for debunking religion. It is for helping you solve your problems more effectively by helping you not only define what your real problem is, but also it helps you find solutions that will actually work so you don’t waste your time on activities that don’t work. This is just as true for business strategies as it is for scientific endeavors.

So please don’t create meaningless slogans because it is easier than doing the hard work of actually thinking strategically about who you are and what you really want to do and accomplish. The hard work of thinking through your objectives on the front end will save you a tremendous amount of wasted time and energy that doesn’t accomplish anything because it is ultimately directionless because your slogan was just that, a slogan and not a call to action.