World Ethos

“It’s up to us, humans of the Earth, to stand up and collaborate at the drafting of a world ethical charter, consisting not only of prohibitions, but mainly of functional orientations apt to guide humanity in the forthcoming planetary era of common and responsible awareness.”

It’s an exceptional time to be alive: the world is at a turning point, and humanity is called to leave the careless attitude of its youth behind and consciously enter the adult age of responsibility.

Are we ready for it?

As never before in history, common destiny beckons us to seek a new beginning. Such renewal is the promise of this ethical charter. To fulfill this promise, we must commit ourselves to adopt and promote the values and objectives of the charter.

This requires a change of mind and heart. It requires a new sense of planetary interdependence and universal responsibility. We must imaginatively develop and apply this common ethical vision locally, regionally, and globally. Since cultural diversity is a precious heritage which must be preserved, each group may find its own distinctive way to realize it.

The new paradigm differs from the old in three essential points:

1. Peace between men Vs. Endless war
2. Harmony with nature Vs. Environmental exploitation
3. Sustainability for future generations Vs. Reckless over-consumption

1. Peace between men

At this point, no activism to change the world can tolerate the use of violence to reach its objectives. After WW2, we understood that the traditional way to solve human affairs — on the battlefield — stopped being an option since it threatened to destroy humanity in its entirety, leaving no winners or losers.

As Michail Gorbaciov stated,

“Every human is on the same boat,

and we’ll all sink or swim together”.

The only way to achieve a radical transformation of our lifestyles and a reset of our social and economic frameworks is to work together as a species. The old barriers between races, cultures and nations are relics of the phase that preceded and accompanied the process of becoming who we are today.

The struggle for survival, that shaped the transformations of living creatures, and the struggle for power, that guided the clash of human civilizations, left in each one of us a residual aggressive impulse whose primary expression is self-affirmation and repulsion of death.

The acceptance of one’s own limits (and death) as necessary steps in the universal evolution of the species, has the liberating effect of dissolving the illusory separation between the individual self and its neighbors, allowing this primordial fear of the other to be replaced by mutual love and respect.

The new planetary conscience reveals us that the only human way to solve conflicts is to convince each other; if I try to impose my reasons, either with physical or moral violence, I have already lost, the conflict and my humanity with it. The only way to free other people from the mistakes we attribute to them, is to take on ourselves the weight of that burden of pain we feel they should be suffering.

“If you do that, I’ll kill you!” — was the slogan of Western Civilization as it took over the planet. “If you do that, I’ll die!” — that’s what the prophets kept saying, from Buddha, to Jesus, to Socrates. From now on, this principle cannot remain the exclusive feature of a few enlightened masters: it must become the common ground on which to found a new, planetary human society.

What inspires this vision is an unconditional love and faith in the human potential, even when it manifests itself at its worst.

Ethical directives:

1. Eliminate unjust discrimination in all its forms, be it based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, religion, language, and national, ethnic or social origin.
2. Affirm faith in the inherent dignity of all human beings and in the intellectual, artistic, ethical, and spiritual potential of humanity.
3. Realize that with increased freedom, knowledge, and power comes increased responsibility to promote the common good.
4. Endorse a culture of peaceful coexistence between human beings.
5. Encourage and support mutual understanding, solidarity, and cooperation among all peoples.
6. Implement comprehensive strategies to prevent violent conflict and use collaborative problem solving to manage and resolve conflicts and disputes.
7. Lobby to demilitarize national security systems and convert military resources to peaceful purposes, including ecological restoration.
8. Campaign to eliminate nuclear, biological, and toxic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.
9. Remember that peace is the state of integral equilibrium created and maintained by holding the right relationships with oneself, other people, other cultures, other life, and the planet.

2. Harmony with nature

The Neo-Darwinist concept of struggle for life, strongly biased by the ethical and political ideologies of the industrial revolution, was used to legitimate an exploitative economy over humanity and nature, without considering that by upsetting the systemic equilibrium of the biosphere, our species would end up triggering the backlash of catastrophic side-effects that now threaten its own survival.

To say that life’s evolution is the result of a struggle for survival that selected the strongest and eliminated the weakest is in fact only a limited part of the story: a more careful examination of the web of interconnections that bind together all living beings, from the simplest to the most complex, from the grass blade to the thinking human, will persuade us that at a deeper level exists a continuous vital exchange, an underlying planetary symbiosis.

Living beings are made for one another even more deeply than they are made to compete against each other. Under the cruel surface of the kingdom of Fear is active, less evident but ubiquitous, the vibrant community of Love.

The credo of the World Ethos could hence be summarized in:

“Love all life as yourself”.

The new ethics rests upon the compassionate interdependence between every element of the biosphere. We must recognize at once the fundamental interdependence that stands between humanity and the other living species, since the ultimate balancing of budgets is not within society, but between society and nature.

In the words of D.C. Wahl:

“As we cease to be paralyzed by the fear-driven cycle of separation, scarcity and the struggle for control and power, we will begin to unfold the potential of a compassionate, empathic and collaborative culture of creativity and shared abundance, driven by biophilia — our innate love for all of life.”

Ethical directives:

1. Respect life in all its different forms.
2. Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love.
3. Prevent cruelty to animals kept in human societies and protect them from suffering.
4. Protect wild animals from methods of hunting, trapping, and fishing that cause extreme, prolonged, or avoidable suffering.
5. Avoid or eliminate to the full extent possible the taking or destruction of non-targeted species.
6. Recognize that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless of its worth to human beings.
7. Accept that with the right to use and manage natural resources comes the duty to prevent environmental harm.
8. Conserve and restore the integrity of Earth’s ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.
9. Adopt patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction that safeguard Earth’s regenerative capacities.

3. Sustainability for future generations

At least since Relativity, our cognitive understanding of the universe reveals us that Time is not an abstract principle indifferent and external to the living phenomena: Time is life’s most intimate substance, its evolutionary curve, so that the present contains it’s entire past and also the seeds of its future.

But life’s time on Earth should not be taken for granted, since it’s directly related to the energetic mass of our universe, and is going to end when this energy runs out. It follows that life’s possibilities after us are dependent on, to a large extent, to the use that we make today of the biosphere’s non-renewable resources.

Our actions shape our future irreversibly, since for every energetic transformation there’s a cost that is subtracted from the total energy stock.

“If a flower dies, nothing will ever be the same.”

“If I waste energy, I shorten the duration of Life on Earth.”

The world’s energetic heritage belongs indiscriminately to the entire biosphere, present and future.

Based on these assumptions, a new sustainable ethics is one for which

good is what favors life, and bad is what accelerates its entropic decline towards death.

The future reveals to be the most profound dimension of this new responsibility. Traditionally, moral choices were conceived regarding the present or the immediate future, the only foreseeable time-span on which we could judge the effects of our actions.

Today we know that our actions, by affecting the entropic process, will determine the living conditions of the future generations, and eventually the total duration of life’s journey on Earth.

From here, the ethical consequence is very suggestive: a true love for humanity involves also the generations yet to come. The idea of ‘Humanity’ implies of course all the generations that preceded us, and prepared the ground as well as the spiritual and material contents of our lives: the cities we live in, the language we speak, the tools we use, the food we eat. We should be grateful to our ancestors, since they left us a chance. But we must learn from their mistakes, since this the only way to evolve.

Inspired by the World Ethos, at the dawn of the new era, it is time for humanity to prove its maturity once and for all.

We can lead humanity out of this crisis only by committing ourselves — as adults — to the goal of shaping together an ecologically-sustainable world, able to take care of our common home, the Earth, and provide for our children, the next generations of humans that will inherit the planet.

Ethical directives:

1. Secure the Earth’s natural heritage for present and future generations.
2. Recognize that the freedom of action of each generation is qualified by the needs of future generations.
3. Advance the study of ecological sustainability and promote the open exchange and wide application of the knowledge acquired.
4. Prevent harm as the best method of environmental protection and, when knowledge is limited, apply a precautionary approach.
5. Ensure that decision making addresses the cumulative, long-term, indirect, long distance, and global consequences of human activities.
6. Transmit to future generations values, traditions, and institutions that support the long-term flourishing of Earth’s human and ecological communities.
7. Recognize and preserve the traditional knowledge and spiritual wisdom in all cultures that contribute to environmental protection and human well-being.
8. Enhance the role of the arts and the media in raising awareness of the ecological challenges we are facing.
9. Provide all, especially children and youth, with educational opportunities that empower them to contribute actively to sustainable development.

Feel free to leave any comment or question below, and join the discussion on the dedicated forum.

Also in Eden Planet:

• Alternative Culture — A new vision for humanity
• Earth Constitution — Legal framework and eco-justice
• Planetary Confederation — Grassroots glocal organization

Other WAM! publications:

Life Tribe

A new humanity

Coop Network

A new economy

Conscious Forum

A new consciousness