Wish Upon A Starfish

“We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

As Melbourne, Australia, enters its second COVID lockdown in four months, we must be thankful for our (currently) relatively low numbers of cases, and for our collective socioeconomic resilience. Many people in many nations do not have such safety nets.

During this world crisis, many of our normal activities have paused or stopped altogether. Our lives and world have changed – but there are more issues at stake than whether or not we have hoarded sufficient toilet paper, or intend to use our home isolation time to catch up on episodes of our favourite TV program.

As individuals, much of our human identity comes from our activities, our professions, our families or other relationships, etc. What happens when those jobs and roles get upended by a virus that makes normal life impossible? How can we remain authentic to who we are and what we uphold? How can we each make a difference? That is surely up to each of us to decide: according to our personal circumstances, opportunities and difficulties – and mostly, according to our conscience. A large part of our personal humanity surely comes from being true to ourselves and to our greater human family around us.

We should be mindful of the modern axiom, courtesy of US writer Dan Greany, that,’a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man’. Simultaneously, we should recognise that humans work best when working together.

Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash

While we must recognise that science has not fulfilled its promise as an onward march toward perfection, we must plan ahead with an optimism that is calculated, informed and measured. Nihilist existential defeatism suggests we cannot solve all the world’s problems and therefore we should not try, but we defiantly remain optimistic because we choose to be. In reality, we can make a difference in our particular little corner – wherever that may be, geographically or philosophically. Perhaps Loren Eisley‘s famous and often unattributed Starfish story can guide us, asserting that we can only ‘make a difference’ one problem at a time. We must each decide for ourselves how best to address that conundrum, and perhaps learn how to multitask.

In this era of COVID-19, some newspapers and politicians prioritize economic recovery, but Humanists understand that all human activity – including the economy – is surely a means to an end. We need to ensure that human and environmental welfare remain paramount.

Coping with the current crisis means meeting its challenges and, beyond that, asking what we can change in order to minimise such disasters in the future. This must include tackling injustice and inequity in the world – anything that exposes humanity to pandemics and other disasters, especially for those who are most vulnerable.

I do not want to see society return to ‘normal’ after this crisis is over. I want to see society improve. COVID-19 has exposed the many inequalities and injustices across our world, and has made them worse: poverty; inadequate housing, employment and income security, food security and access to safe drinking water; insufficient health care; poor world governance and environmental protections – and so much more. There are many types of poverty, including: financial, educational, intellectual, emotional, moral, social, aspirational, even poverty of equality and justice and employment and opportunity. Let’s see those politicians who currently prioritise economic recovery also address these many other broken economies that COVID-19 has highlighted.

Around the world, COVID is like a world war, inflicting and aggravating those inequalities that already exist. Will we individually and collectively ignore those problems, or do something about them? Eldridge Cleaver is attributed with telling us most famously that, ‘There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem.’

While pondering the calamity of COVID, we should be mindful of the words of Humanist Fred Edwords: ‘Calamities destroy the promise usually because we concentrate on what we have lost instead of letting the misfortune simply focus our pursuits in a new direction.’ Rather than bewail lost opportunities, we must find new solutions for new problems. Carl Sagan spoke of alien invasion as possibly the only common foe that could unite all of humanity (Billions and Billions, New York: Ballantine, 1997, p. 181). Our current coronavirus crisis is one opportunity to prove him wrong.

We can create hopeful, humanitarian times ahead. International Humanist Andrew Copson points out that despite occasional setbacks, the history of human society has always been towards progress and social evolution; while local Australian Humanist Murray Love points to such a future though compassionate humanist interactions: ‘Humanists understand how natural human compassion, and our own intelligent thinking, get us through the dark times, and can take our children on to a bright future.’

Let’s make it so.

© 2020 Geoff Allshorn

Honouring Refugees

“A refugee is someone who has survived and who has a tremendous will to create a future.” – Amela Koluder

For World Refugee Day, 20 June 2020

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

In January 2020, the Australian media showed us images of navy ships rescuing Australian bushfire refugees who had been forced to flee by boat. In a nation that has spent years vilifying refugees as ‘boat people’, it seems surprising that Australian media commentators failed to grasp the universality of the refugee experience.

It has been said that Australians tend to lack empathy for others who are from outside their own personal experience, whether homeless people or Syrian refugees. Our relatively affluent, comfortable existence divorces us from collective experiences of war, catastrophic natural disaster, or some other unforeseen intolerable hardship that might create large numbers of refugees. The scope of such a forced mass migration seems unimaginable to us. Yet the UNHCR reports that of the 70 million displaced people in the world today, nearly 26 million people are recognised as being refugees. Amnesty International Australia reports that the world urgently needs to create a new, global plan for refugees based on a meaningful and fair sharing of responsibilities, and that affluent nations are not doing their fair share.

How do we, as human beings, respond to the real-life plight of refugees? Our culture promotes the ideas that refugees are strangers and non-citizens within a world that so often equates human rights with citizenship. In a cross-cultural global acknowledgment of the shared humanity of strangers in our midst, even the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences declares its support of humanist principles: “The essence of humanism is recognizing oneself as another. This recognition should be extended to everyone and in particular to those who are suffering, such as refugees, both young and old.”

Education.

Life-long learning does not end when we walk our of our classrooms for the last time; indeed, the vast majority of our experiential life learning is probably just commencing at that point. As part of this learning, we need to expose ourselves to stories, cultures and lived experiences from others who are from outside our own existential bubble.

For adults, there are many books that provide a range of stories and testimonies across space and time, teaching us that the refugee experience did not start or end with World War Two. One example on this list is a shocking indictment of Australia’s own crimes against humanity regarding current refugees and asylum seekers. Children’s and adolescent literature portrays a wide variety of age-appropriate stories that make the refugee experience accessible and understandable to children of all ages.

In this relatively lucky but uninformed country, we must educate ourselves about others who are forced to flee their home countries because of their religion or non-religion, sexuality, nationality, cultural/ethnic grouping, gender or gender identity, and race. Many experience ongoing discrimination. Women and children (who comprise up to 80% of the world’s refugees) and LGBTQI refugees are among those who face heightened difficulties in their home countries, and within those refugee camps or host nations to which they might flee. How can we think of ourselves as fully human if we live in denial of such common human experiences? How can we call ourselves compassionate if we ignore this suffering? Humanism insists that personal liberty must be combined with social responsibility. 

Participation.

Given the onslaught of discriminatory messages against refugees in our mass media, and the nationalist ‘White Australia‘ tradition which still taints our religions and culture, we need to commit ourselves to starting and encouraging new conversations about migrants and refugees in our local communities.

Thinking locally may mean delivering education campaigns, undertaking practical activism, literally rolling up our sleeves and getting involved in the lives of our neighbours; and local community outreach, including grassroots upgrading of community services. It is far better to build bridges than walls – particularly because such benevolence is often reciprocated.

Dina Nayeri suggests that we have a moral obligation to create a welcoming society: “It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks.” We would benefit from exploring what this means. Welcoming involves more than simply saying hello, and safety encompasses more than simply supplying a physical environment.

Innovation.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 is the title of both a safe-sex campaign and an artistic response to lockdown – and more. In a broader context, these words also suggest a humanist response to pandemic. Love can turn strangers into family. What does it really mean – to borrow a religious phrase – to love our neighbour? As human beings and humanitarians who claim to uphold common humanity, we need to remember that during the time of COVID-19, refugees face particular hardship. Any reasoned conversations about economic or social recovery after the pandemic must include recognition of, and solutions for, the problems faced by our human family in refugee populations and among others outside our geographic location. Human rights and human compassion do not start or end at a national border.

And yet Australia seems torn by competing ideologies. While our Parliament hypocritically proclaims that racism and discriminatory immigration policies are anathema, it continues to practice policies that arbitrarily detain and neglect refugees and asylum seekers. Nor is Australia alone in such hypocrisy. Following World War Two, the modern world community established the United Nations and its humanist precepts, typified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Decades later, such inspiration and optimism have failed to come to full fruition. Denial of equal access to justice and the world’s resources has not only impoverished the poor but has ultimately adversely affected all of us. umair haque explains the ultimate cost of our collective world choice to not adequately help others:

“…the world still hasn’t built global systems. Not a single one. We still don’t have a Human Healthcare System — and so of course pandemics erupt. We still don’t have a Worldwide Basic Income — and so of course the poor have to cause a mass extinction just to subsist. We still don’t have a Global Education Agency — and so of course authoritarianism and fascism spread like wildfire. We still don’t even have a Worldwide Climate Agency, Fund, Bank, or Mission — and so of course the rivers, oceans, and skies go on being charred…”

Such profound failure need not discourage us from the task. Oxfam reports that inequality is not inevitable – it is a political choice. We must create political will for change. Just as modern movements such as #MeToo and Climate Change protests and #BlackLivesMatter show that change can begin with grassroots activism, we need to call for a Universal Basic Income for all people, universal health coverage, universal food security, and other aims to ensure universal health, welfare and social prosperity.

Our ability to dream for a better, noble world offers redemption for ourselves, our human society, and for our planet. We should adopt such ideals as those within the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, and make these our philosophy and aspiration. Gandhi’s words challenge us today: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” Changing the world begins with changing ourselves. We can embrace the old adage ‘The Personal Is Political‘ and embrace our role as agents of change.

World Refugee Day contains a subversive message: to change the world, we must accept the refugee as a role model: their courage, resilience and determination to hope for a better future against seemingly overwhelming odds. We must cast off all philosophies, attitudes and actions which ignore and exacerbate the sufferings of others. For too long, humanity has squandered its resources, its good will, and its potential. A better world requires the active involvement of better citizens, and that is who we must become. That is surely the ultimate form of humanism.

© 2020 Geoff Allshorn

A Candle in the Night

Life is not fair. Get used to it.

This statement is often mis-attributed to Bill Gates, but others have clarified that it was actually the words of Charles J Sykes in 1996. The idea has inspired much discussion and speculation. I prefer a more optimistic outlook:

Life is not fair. What can you do to make it better?

We must all face the fact that life is imperfect and that we have the opportunity to make this planet a secular version of heaven or hell. Sadly, we may often feel unsure about which side is winning.

According to Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff is an opportunity to redefine any number of words. For example, although ‘Gallipoli’ is revered in Australian culture as a place of heroism amidst a failed military campaign, in Liff parlance it refers to when something becomes ‘loose, floppy, useless’. Thus Adams and Lloyd provide us with an opportunity to redefine meanings in our lives for things which are meant to be significant but which may lack genuine import.

The same might be said of life itself. Every day, we must prioritise what is important and worth our limited time and effort.

As children, we are born into a world that seems full of things that are deeply meaningful and significant, and we stare in awe at the apparently mystical adult understanding of such things. As we mature, we come to realise that almost everything that we previously saw as being immutable and earth-shatteringly important is, in fact, largely open to reinterpretation and worth downgrading to the status of insignificant piffle. It is a common human revelation that reality rarely lives up to our optimistic expectations; our days rarely match our dreams.

When pondering the reduced importance of most of our everyday trifles, the more cynical among us might include such things as a child’s hero worship of their parents; their belief in Santa Claus, fairies, or divine predestination; and our naive adult conviction that politicians are noble and exemplary leaders. But as we mature, we do not need to lose our ability to seek the magical among the mundane – not literal magic and supernatural hocus pocus, but our sense of wonder and awe, our tendency to find transcendence and significance in our lives. Our parents remain our parents even if, as adults, we come to see them more as human than as superheroes; our gritty reality under the stairs of life can, like that of Harry Potter, still be full of potential for magical transformation and empowerment. Our human ability to retain a childlike sense of optimism and wonder is a strength, not a weakness, and we should cherish it as being indicative of our nobility, our idealism, and our desire to grow and create a better reality. The world around us may not live up to our expectations, but that should not stop us from being the best person that we can be under whatever circumstances we find ourselves.

The gaining of wisdom is surely the ability to outgrow outdated ideas, while holding onto those other older understandings that make our lives special, measured, and compassionate. In the 2005 comedy film, Adam & Steve, two men become reacquainted after many years apart. One of them speaks of being ‘damaged’ in that life has been hard on them and their ideals. The other insists, “We’re in our thirties. Of course we’re damaged.” This allusion to the common loss of youthful idealism becomes an example of mature life wisdom when one of their fathers suggests that it can lead to positive growth: “Happiness is accepting life on life’s terms, no matter what they happen to be. You just do your best with what you’ve been given.”

Oscar Wilde experienced difficulties in his own life, but his words: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”, suggest that optimism is a willful choice. This leads us to consider the idea that the meaning of life, of our life, is that which we choose to give it. Life is its own purpose. Even religious people who assert some divine or preordained meaning in existence, will readily admit that we must still each find meaning for ourselves. It is especially during times of darkness that our determination to be kind is most challenged, and most important. That is a form of personal autonomy that we should appreciate, nurture and celebrate.

This month offers possibly a good example of the symbolic potential within such perspectives. World Refugee Day takes place on June 20, a day in which we acknowledge the lives, dignity and humanity of some of the world’s most forgotten people, and we ponder our moral responsibility to help those who have less than ourselves. The very next day, June 21 is World Humanist Day, when we acknowledge the potential for humanity and the ideals of secular humanism as found in the Amsterdam Declaration. June 21 is also the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere, the shortest day of the year, with coldness and darkness enveloping our world in much the same way as today’s pandemic and economic uncertainty. This timing challenges us to ponder a response that we can take forward every day of the year. In times of darkness, do we fight to uphold compassion, and commit ourselves to human advancement?

Alongside the abovenamed declaration, Amsterdam also holds another claim to such optimism. Anne Frank will also be forever linked with the city during a dark period of world history. She showed a defiant spirit against the nihilism of her times, and wrote of the power of the individual against seemingly insurmountable odds: ‘Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.’ Her words evoke what was, for me, an expression that inspired many years of human rights activism: it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Despite the ugliness in her wartime life, young Anne maintained a sense of positive admiration for the world: “Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”

While finding beauty in the world around us, and in our night-time skies, we can gain a larger perspective. Douglas Adams once declared the obvious: that space is big. Amidst such immensity, it may seem easy to feel insignificant. Scientist Carl Sagan once suggested that: “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” For aeons, people have looked to the skies for companionship, whether seeking a pantheon of supernatural gods or a population of spooky aliens. Are we alone? The answer is right here, on Earth, where we are surrounded by billions of life forms, some of which are familiar and some are effectively alien – but we are all related through DNA. Even our own bodies contain multitudes. Beyond our planetary biosphere, we do not know whether life is common throughout the cosmos, or whether we may be alone. Either way, the sheer vastness of space makes life special.

What is the point of it all? Ultimately, might nihilism be seen as the ultimate in scientific reductionism: reducing life to meaninglessness? Carl Sagan would disagree. He spoke eloquently and inspirationally of our place in the cosmos. Like Anne Frank, he saw beauty within the tender candle in the dark. Amidst our seeming cosmic insignificance on this pale blue dot, he asserted, we can discover awe, wonder and beauty if we consider a bigger perspective.

Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot OFFICIAL
Passage written by Carl Sagan for the book Pale Blue Dot published by Random House, ©1994 Democritus Properties, LLC carlsagandotcom channel, YouTube.

The Pale Blue Dot promises that even when we feel overwhelmed and overpowered by situations and vistas beyond our control, we can still find grandeur in our humanity: “To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

The Universe is a grand place, and we are a part of it. Let’s make our time count.

© 2020 Geoff Allshorn

In Search of Heroes

Heroes are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances,
and extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances.

Some years ago, as a teacher, I held a class in which I asked some young people to explain who were their heroes. A surprising number of these kids argued passionately that their parents or older siblings were heroes because of their tireless work to help family and others in their immediate community. While it may seem easy to dismiss such an insular view, I actually think that a child’s perspective can be quite profound. They saw past the cliché and recognised that being a hero doesn’t require fighting, wearing a cape or being a crime fighter. They instinctively understood a more universal human truth:

Heroes are those who act sacrificially for the betterment and welfare of those within our extended human family.

Children, it might be argued, see heroism (as they see many things) in its most simplistic form. Ethicist Peter Singer explores how humans, as social animals, initially see their world as family and kinfolk, and then expand their awareness of, and empathy for, others, in an expanding circle of ethics and altriusm. Perhaps heroes are those who can see this circle at its broadest.

Heroes can be first responders, scientists, and medical workers. They can be life rights activists and environmental activists. Ordinary or marginalised people can become heroes, including those whose contribution is often overlooked. Heroes can be teachers in Grimsby, UK and Kasese Humanist School in Uganda, or students in Ontario, Chicago and Mingora (Pakistan). The list is almost endless.

It has even been suggested that a folklorist whose exploration of the literary Hero’s Journey across time and culture (expanding upon the Hero Pattern to which I have referred in a recent blog post) is himself a hero.

To have heroes is to be human. My personal heroes include scientists and astronauts who inspire us to aim for new discoveries and knowledge; and artists, musicians and authors who stimulate our imaginations and challenge us to catch their visions for intellectual, aesthetic or social betterment. My human rights heroes include refugees and refugee activists around the world, who battle incredible adversity in their lives and who often face indifference or bigotry from others.

Another hero of mine is a personal friend, a Holocaust survivor, and a tireless worker for human rights and humanist ideals. Her decades of activism are as much a testimony to her principles as are the recollections within her autobiography, in which she summarises the noblest of heroic motivations in a world beset with problems: “Love lights this place up. Without love, it would be dark and cold here.” (The Testimony, Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2012, p. 200).

Why do we have heroes? Heroes provide an optimal human template. While dictionary definitions vary as much as cultural stereotypes, heroes are ubiquitous, so it seems that the heroic essence is an ineffable human quality within us all, most obviously involving altruism but also extending beyond that into what psychologist Philip Zimbardo explores as heroic imagination. Both individually and collectively, we align our inspiration, aspiration and perspiration towards our heroes and the values they represent.

I would suggest the following as a preliminary list of values to which humanist heroes align:

Heroes take lemons and make lemonade. They work to bring the best results out of bad circumstances and human weaknesses. Even our symbolic cultural superheroes are flawed: Achilles forgot to wear protective footwear; Pandora was overly curious; Superman had his kryptonite. Despite whatever difficulties they experience, real-life heroes aspire to be the best people that they can be, and they create opportunities for others to do the same. Heroes are role models and mentors because they lead by example.

Heroes are activists who intervene to change a course of events. This is perhaps why many people are attracted to the nobility of heroism while simultaneously being resistant to its personal cost: heroes make the sacrifices that are necessary in order to change the world. Do we dare to join them?

Heroes inspire our cultures and mythologies. Some of my own earliest childhood memories include the excitement of Thunderbirds, a popular 1960s children’s puppet television series in which the heroes of International Rescue saved people from all kinds of disasters. Thunderbirds may have introduced many youngsters to the humanist concept of offering practical, hands-on help to others because we have the capacity and responsibility to do so.

Heroes have the potential to help not only others but also themselves. Peter Singer suggests that altruism and benevolent actions enrich the giver as well as the recipient: ‘For millennia, wise people have said that doing good things brings fulfillment’ (The Life You Can Save, New York: Random House, 2009, p. 171). Heroes change people’s lives – including their own.

Being a hero is more than doing a good deed; it is a lifestyle choice. The most radical challenge of heroism is that it ultimately moves beyond the individual, and redefines being human as a collective and communal experience – a noble aspiration for animals such as ourselves who form communities. While some people seek the existential meaning of life, heroes live it, demonstrating that our noblest legacy is to leave behind a world that is better for our having been in it.

Everyone can be a hero – if we have the courage to change ourselves and our world.

© 2020 Geoff Allshorn