Who is the “New Human” in Neohumanism?

First, and possibly most important, we need to resist the centuries long assumptions of human exceptionalism that were central to the philosophy of Humanism. This is not to say that human beings are not unique creatures. Our complex languages, large brain size, use of tools, capacity for self-reflection, and our abilities to transmit knowledge and new ideas across cultures have helped to establish human dominion over the earth and all of its creatures. This dominion has its shadow however, as the materialism and human greed inherent in its prevailing systems of capitalist extraction, production, and unlimited consumption have brought us to the tipping point ecologically, a convergence of unsustainable factors that not only have brought about mass extinctions of animals and plants, but threaten human survival itself. It is clear that humanity’s ethical development has not kept pace with its intellectual development.

Overcoming human exceptionalism requires rethinking our relationships with the non-human others (plants, animals, fungi) with whom we share the world. We need to shift from a human-centered (ego-centric) model of relationship to a life centered (eco-centric) model, in which all life is recognized as interdependent, with all beings (human and non-human) reliant on the others for well-being and (I would add) evolutionary success. Many traditional and indigenous peoples, for whom this is not a “new” concept, have termed this a “kinship” model, one in which human beings consider all of nature as our relatives. With this expanded sense of relationship, we must expand our Humanist notions of Justice beyond the human. The stirrings of this can

be seen in legal cases now in which the rights of rivers, mountains, and endangered plant and animal species are taken into consideration (and occasionally favored).

The centuries old imperialist enterprise to “modernize” the world (increase humanity’s comfort, safety, health, and wealth) has brought benefits to many people. Unfortunately, these benefits are not universally shared; a significant minority of the world’s human population controls a significant majority of its wealth, and there are no real signs that this trajectory of accumulation is reversing. The social and political promises of Humanism have not yet been realized: we still live in a world characterized by scarcity for many, and precarity of life due to conflicts, famines, social upheavals, and climate catastrophes. The UNESCO document requires us to recognize and repair the radical disparities due to differences of race, culture, gender, language, etc. and to cultivate a universal sense of ethics that benefits all people.

I was drawn to the UNESCO document as it is the first more or less mainstream policy document that acknowledges the fundamental nature of our multiple global crises, resists mere “tinkering” with one element or another, and aligns rather seamlessly with the broad intentions of Neohumanism. It is a visionary document with lofty aspirations, though short on the details about the pedagogy and practices entailed in the cultivation of this “new human.” I believe that Neohumanist Education can provide the very practical dimensions of this vision.

Decades of establishing Neohumanist schools in various countries across the planet and communication among Neohumanist teachers (greatly accelerated with the advent of the Internet and ZOOM capabilities) have served to create a shared body of knowledge designed to attain the aims of a New Humanism. While this has been a grassroots effort, it has not been without a set of guiding principles, laid out most succinctly in Shrii P.R. Sarkar’s 1980 book The Liberation of Intellect: Neo-humanism. I have tried to capture the essence of the principles and practices in the book Becoming One With the World: A Guide to Neohumanist Education.

What does it mean to “liberate” the intellect? What does it need to be liberated from? I find it helpful to think of the worldview, or paradigm, in which we exist as a house, with the walls and floors and ceiling consisting of our cherished beliefs, assumptions, and stories we tell ourselves that shape our behaviors and give rise to patterns of human relationship. The structure has been built by custom, habit, education, religious doctrine, academia, institutions, and all of the legitimating norms and values that have been passed down from one generation to the next, including our biases and prejudices, our enmities and our chauvinisms. Sarkar names these limiting factors “sentiments” – attachments to ideas or ideologies that inhibit the expansion of our universal compassion and commitment to the flourishing of all beings, and limit the genuine growth of human intelligence.

Our worldviews are firmly secured, outer locks on all the windows and doors, and it is near impossible to break out of the edifice, or in common parlance, to “think outside of the box.” But the Earth is trembling, gentle tremors that are breaking open cracks and fissures through which light is seeping into the closed up house we live in. To carry the metaphor further, the fires and hurricanes and floods brought by extreme climate changes are collapsing many structures, and causing multitudes of people to flee their supposedly solid and secure houses. Just as the material world is collapsing for many, so too is the “old story” waning. Shrii P.R. Sarkar spoke to this, with this spiritual message:

Human civilization now faces the final moment of a critical juncture. The dawn of a glorious new era is on its one side and the worn-out skeleton of the past on the other. People have to adopt either of these two.

Neohumanist education, in theory and practice, is dedicated to the idea that humans can choose this “glorious new era” on the other side of the abyss that we face; that we can choose to build a life-affirming ecological civilization, that we can bring about a society of radical equality, that we can co-create a world grounded in ecological ethics and natural abundance, and that the sense of deep interconnectedness is the place from which all right action grows. These values and commitments form the core of a curriculum designed to prepare young people for the challenges of the Anthropocene, to provide hope, and enable them to survive and thrive into the future.

We need to honor what we have learned from the collective mistakes of the past, bring with us the ancient wisdom that can still serve the interests of humans and non-human others, hold onto what is useful, good, and true from the modern era of science and rationalism, but gather and bury the bones of the “worn out skeleton of the past,” the remains of the isms that divide, conquer, and destroy us: predatory capitalism, ego-centric individualism, rampant materialism, anthropocentrism, sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, ageism, classism, ableism.

We truly are at the dawn of a new era in that science itself is pointing us in a transcendent direction, awakening us to the deeper mysteries of the universe even as it answers many of the questions that have been with us for centuries. The great discovery of contemporary science, says the cosmologist Brian Swimme, is that the universe is not simply a place, but a story—a story in which we are immersed, to which we belong, and out of which we arose. This new story is drawn from the descriptions of matter generated by quantum physics, from the power of cosmological observations enabled by advanced telescopes, and from the intricacies of the plant world revealed by the electron microscope and time lapse photography. The botanical sciences, for example, are exploding with empirical research that points to some stunning revelations about plant intentionality, communication, intelligence and even consciousness!

The new story from Western science parallels Indigenous knowledge in multiple ways: in the recognition that there is no separation between us and the whole of nature; that everything exists not as inert (mindless) matter, but in relationships and fluctuations at the boundaries of matter and energy;

that nature is not a collection of objects but a flux of processes, and that everything is truly ALIVE. The new story reminds us of the importance of attending to the basic interconnectedness of nature and to and to the sensitivity and complexity of natural systems. Beyond the material connections we share with all of creation, the new story recognizes our participation in a spiritual universe as well. In contemplative science, the vast amount of research on meditation is pointing toward unrealized dimensions of mind, a causal level of cognition encompassing everything in the universe, past, present, and future. And as centuries of practitioners of meditation have taught us, our destiny, in this new story, is one of uniting our “small minds” (ego-centered consciousness) with the Cosmic Mind, an overarching intelligence that exists to guide human evolution toward a greater sense of love for all of creation.

This new story is essentially about relationships —connections with the “pluriverse” of beings—plants, animals, and animate and inanimate matter; connections with other humans; connections with a field of energy that underlies all of reality—a universal consciousness that is the wellspring of wisdom. Everything is literally connected to everything else. From this sense of connection springs a radical empathy, and with it the capacity to discern meaning and purpose, for meaning is fundamentally relational. We begin to see that we are not alone, isolated creatures trapped inside our skin. We are porous, a part of everything, we breathe shared air, we are nourished from the soil and the living plants, the way we live our lives and what we purchase and consume has consequences for other’s lives. We begin to realize that we have been hostages of disconnection and the tragedies are everywhere in the forms of illness, mental and physical, drug addiction, and despair.

What does the new story mean for education? Just as the “old Humanism” gave rise to principles and practices of education that have shaped our modern world, so the new story—the “new Humanism” — offers new ways of thinking about teaching and learning. Neohumanist education shares the essence of the visionary aims of the UNESCO document, but takes us further down the road with its focus not just on transformational theories, but the pedagogical practices that might enable us to attain these ideals.

The philosophy of Neohumanism, which includes wide-ranging prescriptions for social change and justice in the spheres of politics, economics, and culture finds one of its most developed expressions in educational theory and practice, at the heart of which is an ontology (Greek: ōn, ont-, ‘being’ + -logy, ‘study of’) of relationality. Deeper and more connected ways of knowing, thinking, doing, and being are at the heart of Neohumanist pedagogy, supported by the understanding of the roots of conflict and domination in limiting geographic and social sentiments such as the rigid attachments to nation, class, caste, race, religion, or species that divide the Beings of the Earth. Overcoming destructive cognitive and affective sentiments is a significant task of Neohumanist education, a pedagogy that integrates and synthesizes critical pedagogy, decolonization, academic learning, and spirituality in ways profoundly relevant to the present world-historical moment.

Two approaches capture the essence of this task. The first is the cultivation of an awakened rationality capable of discerning limiting sentiments when they arise, even when they are well-disguised. In place of the limiting sentiments is the principle of social equality, the cornerstone of building a genuinely just global society. In Sanskrit, this movement of humanity is termed Sama Samaj Tattva. This disposition to develop what Sarkar terms a “rationalistic mentality” (1980, p. 74) is not merely the adoption of a set of beliefs, however. In Neohumanism, the process of cultivating such a mindset depends on the second approach: a psycho-spiritual practice, that is, the conscious mental effort to expand the radius of one’s care outward from the limiting sentiments to a universal love for all and a concern for the common welfare. This process involves developing awareness of one’s inner world, and expanding the heart through meditation and empathy.

Worldviews are persistent. Only when some individual or societal crisis forces us to recognize how maladaptive our worldview has become, are we prepared to consider something new. I believe the evidence is clear that much of what constitutes our modern way of life is maladaptive. This has opened up the possibilities for a new story to emerge, with new practices that can serve to cultivate the “new human” with the wisdom, the knowledge, the skills and the disposition to survive and thrive in this new era.