The Tie That Binds

I was chatting with a new Facebook friend, and I was telling him about my blog. He asked what kind of stuff I wrote, and I told him, humor pieces, political pieces, news analysis, stories about science and technology, animal stories, holiday essays, movie and book reviews, stories about growing up in the 60's and 70's, fiction, poems - just anything and everything that caught my attention.

He asked me if there was something that tied them all together. I thought for a few moments and a word popped into my head - humanism. We chatted for a while longer, and when we logged off, I Googled the word humanism. I went to Wikipedia, which is always my first line of defense, and found this definition:

Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence over established doctrine or faith.

Humanism dates back to ancient Greece where the philosophy was founded on education and training in the liberal arts, or literally translated as "the good arts."

Founding Father Thomas Paine called himself a theophilanthropist, a word combining the Greek for "God", "love", and "man", and indicating that while he believed in the existence of a creating intelligence in the universe, he entirely rejected the claims made by and for all existing religious doctrines.

Humanism identifies pollution, militarism, nationalism, sexism, poverty and corruption as being persistent and addressable human character issues incompatible with the interests of our species. It asserts that human governance must be unified and is inclusionary in that it does not exclude any person by reason of their personal beliefs.

Philosopher Dwight Gilbert Jones wrote that Humanism may be the only philosophy likely to be adopted by our species as a whole.

In fact, a new psychological perspective rose to prominence in the mid-20th century in response to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory and B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism. The approach emphasized an individual's inherent drive towards self-actualization and creativity.

"Cosmos" creator Carl Sagan said, “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”

So perhaps after all, humanism is the modus operandi of my writing, but the tie that binds them together is love.