The free market economy, having brought wide access to mass media in the 1960s, is now influencing the whole Earth, defrosting with its warm breath of freedom the permafrost of old forms and thoughts (a different, more positive form of global warming, so to say).

Alle Menschen werden Brüder today means that all humans will become consumers, in a slow but unstoppable process. In my country, Netherlands, the churches have emptied within the last few decennia. In an immigration country such as the USA this will take more time, and in the Muslim world with its deep frozen Islam the semi-tribal population will have to wait longer for its liberation.

Is it a real liberation? Yes, we regain our ancestral freedom of choice. But in the process, we get rid of an essential aspect of being human: our creation story. Humans are lingual creatures, living in a word world, a named world, a world of named things. Since prehistorical times, our ancestors used to express their experience of the world as a sung/danced creation story. We can still recognize this in the traditions of Australian Aboriginals: once, long ago, this was the way all humans on Earth experienced their world. This way of experiencing our world, transforming it into a world of named things, is the religious inclination that all humans share in some way or another.

In the last few thousands of years, this inclination became impregnated with a monotheistic creation story, attuned to the interests of the ruling male classes. The free market economy has now begun to liberate the Western populations from this suppressing ideology, but it provides no alternative creation story in its place. Of course not: this cannot be expected from an economic situation by itself. We, philosophers, have to provide a new creation story ourselves: one that is both based on modern insights in the history of mankind, and as such can provide a new, common moral base for society.

Why have we failed to do this so far? Universities do not provide a proper starting point. Philosophy fails to take up this challenge because since 2000 years, it has been the monopoly of the churches to define human nature. Furthermore, one needs cooperation with the humanities to construct an alternative present-day creation story, and disciplines such as paleoanthropology, archaeology and etiology began to spew data only since the seventies. Unfortunately, at that time philosophy still wandered in the desert of postmodernity, full of phobia against Great Stories. Philosophy as a social relevant study has still to be re-invented.

So the work on a modern science-based alternative for the monotheist Adam-and-Eve-Story is the work of humanosophers (we name ourselves this because neither humanists nor philosophers do this, and we think we are a little of both). Our goal is not to release a new Bible or Koran (in fact we have a book, nearly ready for the press) but to plea for a worldwide project of philosophers, under the umbrella of UNESCO. Indeed exactly what your initiative intends.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is based on the humanness of every human. In 1948 it was not yet possible (neither politically nor scientifically) to work out this ‘humanness. Since then the free market economy has cleared the path and provided the resources to work out a new global perspective on what it means to be human. UNESCO can make this a philosophical project: modernizing the Universal Declaration, making it into a Universal Declaration of Human Origins, Nature and Rights”.

This might lay the foundation for a never-ending project (because the humanities will forever continue to contribute new insights). Not some kind of a Holy Book anymore but a Project, a Great Endeavor. The announcement and the progress of the Project will raise enough dust all over the world to awaken everybody’s interest and to provoke ongoing discussion.

HUMANOSOPHY The shared story of Humanity

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