Humanity
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the Humanity page
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The word humanity is from the Latin humanitas for "human nature, kindness.” Humanity includes all the humans, but it can also refer to the kind feelings humans often have for each other.
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Core ideas
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Fundamentally human features
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Mobility
The most fundamental function of having a brain is movement (towards the environment or others in the environment). Living things (for example plants) that do not move also do not have a brain or a rudimentary nervous system.
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Unpredictability
We are able to move into a realm where things are not predictable, and that is a central argument for freedom and responsibility. But if we can be made more predictable, domination will also become easier.
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Factuality
Reality has its merits.
An example. Musk and Zuckerberg present themselves as innovative heroes of our time. Things like Facebook and Twitter are child's play regarding technology and innovation. The software is easy and completely uninteresting. They can make much money with this because they create monopolies by being the only players in a particular market. However, the government ultimately underlies their successes because the internet they depend on was built with American taxpayers' money. They are free riders at the expense of the federal government.
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Nestedness
| We must re-adopted nestedness to restore human and planetary wellbeing.
The current dominant culture has pulled away from humanity’s millions-year-old adaptive heritages, impairing species-normal capacities and potential in a feedback loop of greater disconnection and possible destruction. Human nature is fostered by deep nestedness, horizontal development across our cultural time and space, and vertically in Earths more technical devolpment. Why is humanity destroying its wellbeing and its habitat, Earth? The suggestion here is that the dominant culture has unnested itself from humanity’s millions-year-old adaptive heritages, impairing evolved capacities and human potential in a feedback loop of greater disconnection and destruction. Humanity’s heritage is to be nested horizontally, respectful of deep history and future generations, nested developmentally with evolved ways of raising children to foster thriving, and nested vertically, consciously participating in Earth-cosmos dynamism. Nestedness fosters capacities that are often missing in westernized peoples: ecological relational consciousness and knowhow, which were central to human adaptation. The dominant culture undermines their development. Mainstream western scholarship has accepted the slippage in baselines, collaborated with industrialized and is now caught and caged in the limitations of its models and metaphors. (1) |
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| (1) | Darcia Narvaez, Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Notre Dame - Practical Wisdom - 2024 |
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Deep dive
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Are we WEIRD people?
It’s a clever acronym, to denote people who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. But the acronym is meant to indicate something else as well, that psychologically, those of us whose ancestors hail from Western Europe, or who live in counties shaped by their culture, are weird, that is, different, in terms of our psychology, our norms, our sense of right and wrong, than the rest of the world.
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Indigenous Peoples
There are more than 5,000 different Indigenous Peoples around the world comprising 476 million people – around 6.2% of the global population. They are spread across more than 90 countries in every region and speak more than 4,000 languages.
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