Moral Humanity Proclamation
The Moral Humanity Movement Proclamation
Scattered pockets of positive change are transforming society into a compassionate community. Seeds are being planted.
The enrichment of cultures creates a moral foundation for systemic improvements in our major social institutions.
These structural improvements nurture personal and spiritual growth rooted in mutual support that helps individuals undo divisive, selfish, competitive, domineering socialization and form partnerships.
Increased ability to cooperate enhances the emergence of a sustained, massive, united, nonviolent, grassroots moral humanity movement
Mutually reinforcing nonviolent efforts are based on Gandhi’s principle: “Be the change you seek.”
Countless individuals and organizations contribute to the moral humanity movement — including those who don’t yet identify as members. The challenge is to deepen, strengthen, expand, connect, and unify these innovations. This manifesto moves in this direction.
Embrace Core Values
The moral humanity movement serves humanity, the environment, and life itself.
We, the members of this movement:
Advance justice and compassion.
Improve ourselves and support each other.
Undo oppressive social conditioning.
Honor spiritual growth.
Respect each person’s equal worth.
Set aside the desire to dominate for personal gain.
Cultivate bottom-up hierarchies.
Nurture relational equality and co-equal partnerships throughout society.
Support grassroots, broad-based, unified, independent, activist campaigns.
Ensure that everyone can meet their basic needs, participate fully in society, and fulfill their potential.
Oppose discrimination based on identity.
Create new structures and organizations to solidify these improvements.
Form Small Teams
The moral humanity movement’s foundation is a network of small teams whose members affirm the movement’s core values and support each other.
Informal teams already exist. They spring naturally from relationships with friends, relatives, colleagues, or memberships in the same organization or group.
Formal teams will deepen, strengthen, and expand the movement. Team members meet at least once a month to share reports on this question: In what way have I worked on becoming a better human being?
Other formal teams are affiliated teams who belong to an organization that affirms and promotes the movement’s values. These organizations retain their primary focus while contributing to the broader vision.
Teams are supportive learning communities — laboratories that facilitate peer learning, self-reform, collaborative teamwork, political action, and mutual support. Members become better listeners and speak honestly. They ask each other: Can we help you with anything? What’s on your mind? How are you feeling emotionally?
They learn to practice what they preach. They increase awareness of systemic realities, and how issues are connected and interwoven. They push institutions to live up to their ideals. They cultivate organizations that serve as positive models.
Peer learning counters fragmentation and excessive competition and nurtures the unity needed to sustain independent, democratic campaigns that implement lasting structural change. They build communal solidarity and advance the moral humanity movement.
One simple tool this movement can use is the Self-Awareneee Check-In. At least once a month, as meetings begin, members respond to this question: How have you been working on becoming a better person? In addition to this check-in, members can work on their self-development privately, alone, perhaps briefly — or they can engage in other activities of their own choosing, perhaps more extensively.
This method only requires from each member a monthly commitment of about 30 seconds and from each organization several minutes. With this approach, even super-busy activists focused on the outer world can find time to strengthen their inner abilities — and contribute to global holistic and systemic transformation.
Groups that use this tool can join the Network for Self-Awareness Check-Ins, which will publicize and promote their work.
Support Pragmatic Idealism
The moral humanity movement is diverse and pragmatic. We’re committed to moving forward step-by-step, focused on achievable goals within a framework of transformation.
Human beings deal with interdependent pairs: Handling these tensions requires balance, flexibility, and integration. A balance between self-care and caring for others enables us to better care for others and correct the root causes of suffering
This ever-changing mix of tensions creates countless combinations. Few individuals hold the same traits in the same way at the same time. This fluidity makes it difficult to label others, or for individuals to rigidly identify with only one tribe. Everyone is a unique member of the human family with multiple identities.
In an address to students in Cape Town, South Africa in 1966. Senator Robert F. Kennedy affirmed the value of pragmatic idealism:
The second danger is that of expediency; of those who say that hopes and beliefs must bend before immediate necessities. Of course, if we must act effectively, we must deal with the world as it is. … Idealism, high aspiration, and deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs, but we also know that only those who dare to fail greatly ever achieve greatly.
Simone Weil wrote:
There is no legitimate limit to the satisfaction of the needs of a human being except as imposed by necessity and by the needs of other human beings. The limit is only legitimate if the needs of all human beings receive an equal degree of attention… The needs in question are earthly, for those are the only ones that man can satisfy. They are needs of the soul as well as of the body…
Valarie Kaur affirms:
We are reclaiming love as a force for justice. Grieving together is revolutionary love. Holding each other in our rage is revolutionary love. Listening to each other is revolutionary love. Reimagining the country together is revolutionary love. But many young activists are dying early or taking their lives or getting sick or opting out. We’re not building enough spaces to help each other love ourselves.
A wide array of organizations advance the moral humanity movement: religious and spiritual organizations from many traditions; cultural centers and organizations; civic organizations; public education, advocacy, and activist organizations. The more they acknowledge their commonality and publicly identify with the movement, the more they advance the movement’s core values.
Cultivate Collaborative Leadership
With collaborative leadership, we avoid ego-driven competition that aggravates social fragmentation. We build the unity that’s needed to sustain lasting, deep change.
Members rely on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Six Principles of Nonviolence:
Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.
Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.
Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform.
Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.
Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.
And they channel anger into action by relying on Dr. King’s Six Steps of Nonviolent Social Change:
Information Gathering To understand and articulate an issue, problem or injustice facing a person, community, or institution you must do research.
Education It is essential to inform others, including opposition, about your issue.
Personal Commitment Daily check and affirm your faith in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.
Negotiation Using grace, humor, and intelligence, confront the other party with a list of injustices and a plan for addressing and resolving these injustices. Look for what is positive in every action and statement the opposition makes.
Direct Action These are actions taken when the opponent is unwilling to enter, or remain in, discussion/negotiation.
Reconciliation Nonviolence seeks friendship and understanding with the opponent.
Ever more nations support the rule of law, according to which, as affirmed by the United Nations:
All persons, institutions, and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards.
Ever more nations support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
The General Assembly,
Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction…
We establish personal and economic security and overcome fear and hate. If people have a foundation of security and fairness, they want the right to vote, free speech, the freedom of nonviolent protest, and other democratic ideals — and are more willing to cooperate.
As Albert Camus wrote in 1946:
Modern nations are driven by powerful forces along the roads of power and domination... What if these forces wind up in a dead-end? There is no reason why some of us should not take on the job of keeping alive through the apocalyptic historical vista that stretches before us, a modest thoughtfulness which, without pretending to solve everything, will constantly be prepared to give some human meaning to everyday life.
Pursue Compassionate Action
The moral humanity movement is inspired by the Charter for Compassion:
We therefore call upon all men and women to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion — to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate — to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures — to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity — to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings — even those regarded as enemies.
We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous, and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological, and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensable to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.
Moral humanity movement members learn, grow, and become better and more effective human beings. We engage in self-examination, work on self-improvement, acknowledge mistakes and resolve not to repeat them. We’re willing to be vulnerable, fail, and pay the price required for personal and social growth. We recognize when our actions offend others and apologize. We acknowledge implicit biases, or negative gut reactions, and work to prevent them from influencing our words and behavior. We accept responsibility for reinforcing the status quo with our daily actions.
We care about what’s best for the nation, the planet, and humanity. Rather than merely building our organization, we form alliances with like-minded organizations.
A key to moving forward is balancing the individual and the community. Strong individuals nurture strong communities, and strong communities nurture strong individuals.
We challenge top-down structures We care about public policy and engage in political action. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
We are reforming our nation and the world — our cultures, communities, institutions, and ourselves. Self-reform advances social transformation and social transformation advances self-reform.
Promote Holistic and Systemic Transformation
This moment calls for a massive, independent social movement similar to yet more potent than the union, civil rights, and women’s movements. The need now is for a multi-issue, other-centered, spiritual movement rooted in universal moral values committed to gains for all humanity, the environment, and life itself.
Changes promoted by the moral humanity movement synergistically reinforce each other. They nurture the transformation of the self-perpetuating System, which consists of our major institutions, our dominant culture, and ourselves as individuals who reinforce the System with our daily actions.
A holistic, systemic worldview avoids placing total blame on a particular individual or group. This approach involves a paradigm shift from ego-consciousness to eco-consciousness — a shift from a focus on self-interest to commitment to the Earth Community. It enables institutions to pursue their highest ideals and serve the common good. It facilitates peer learning and mutual support.
We nurture cooperation and partnership. We enable others to meet their basic needs — including economic and personal security, democratic equality, dignity, respect, and having a voice in affairs that affect them. We promote the right to be free from discrimination based on religious, ethnic, or sexual identity.
With healthy patriotism, we love and improve our nation. We join with people worldwide in the global moral humanity movement. We cultivate moral re-awakening and build a global foundation on which people of goodwill can stand.
The moral humanity movement includes multiple, independent campaigns that conduct lobbying, phone calls, office visits, rallies, nonviolent civil disobedience, consumer boycotts of corporations that refuse to support the legislation, and work boycotts. The movement is building a deep unity that enables broad-based alliances to achieve more together than they can alone.
Reconciliations contribute to holistic and systemic transformation, which takes place within individuals, communities, corporations, and nations, and with how countries interact with each other.
As people awake to the need for profound change, inspire each other and help each other improve social practices, we’re nurturing profound change and building a moral humanity movement that advances comprehensive transformation. As these changes ripple through society, they’re forming a compelling vision on the horizon: a society that looks, feels, and is NEW!
Find Your Way Forward
The moral humanity movement path is summarized here:
Embrace the movement’s core values.
Form or join a small team.
Support pragmatic idealism.
Cultivate collaborative leadership.
Pursue compassionate action:
Undo social conditioning.
Break down oppressive hierarchies.
Form compassionate partnerships.
Promote holistic and systemic transformation.
Encourage system change everywhere.
Build massive, unified grassroots campaigns.
Persist with transformation.