for wholly flourishing humanity • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Area

	for wholly flourishing humanity gary e. davis	January 15, 2023

At first thought, a notion of wholly flourishing humanity may be a nebulous appeal of impractical leisure prospecting, perfect for Sundays, before facing Monday too soon, and nebulous ideals aren’t realistic.

“So what’s the point?”

I presume that’s the spirit of whoever received my message to President Biden yesterday via the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, which generated an automatic reply of well-honed boilerplate.

Thanks anyway.

Here’s my message:

State of the Union theme: Our Shared Humanity

Dear President Biden,

Since you are leading a foreign policy which strives for collaborative global engagement, you would appreciate that its elements integrally include:

values of sustainability
a principle-based international order (guiding the rules-based international order that autocracies debase)
fiscal commitments to climate leadership
a strong UN and
national commitments to advancing educational excellence.

Altogether, that’s a good sense, I think, of our shared humanity. The ultimate value all peoples share is the shared humanity of Our small planet.

The notion of shared humanity easily integrates us across religious faiths and national interests. It is an ultimate value: sacred fidelity
to a global conception of shared humanity that we all can share.

So, I suggest that you give prominent place to the rubric “our shared humanity” in your State of the Union address.
-
The value of shared humanity justifies your orientation to collabora-
tive global leadership, warrants long-viewed fiscal investments (not mere “spending,” as the GOP would like to spin it), and provides a non-religious national focus for the Democratic interest in long-viewed national investments.

And the notion of shared humanity gives purpose to thinking relative to our childrens’ unborn futures. The children will inherit the Earth and inherit the humanity whose potential and sustainability we all can agree is an ultimate purpose we share.

Thank you for your work, your leadership, and your time here.

Gary E. Davis
Berkeley

For one’s life, fidelity to our shared humanity involves understanding shared political life relative to our shared social life; understanding the latter relative to our shared cultures; and understanding that relative to our shared interpersonal lives: solidarities, friendships, and family.

Ultimately, though, each of us is a singular life, holding true (or idealizing) intimacies of selfidentity and being oneSelf within a relay of generations, having gained chances to contribute to futuring humanity at the scale we can.

Perhaps those two paragraphs—“For one’s life....at the scale we can”—tropes
a spirit of cohering that wholly flourishing is:

On the one hand, by marking a new year in terms of venturing, I mentioned a wide range of themes, including some which are relevant here to practically valuing
a sense of our shared humanity as wholly flourishing:

On the other hand, one might appreciate that thinking about values abstractly is quite practical relative to the above context. We should need to value well-oriented action, wanting to live long through being well relative to a life cyclicity which hundreds of generations have sustained.

Flourishing goes best when it’s well-organized, relative to authentic engagement
of oneSelf.

A conception of personist humanism is useful here for better advancing lifal value (Value). Mindfulness embodies all of this best relative to aspiring to flourish highly, which can cohere conceptually because leading virtue is implicitly very conceptual. The efficacy of mindfulness expresses a comprehensive compre-hension which is ultimately conceptual.

The best teaching has a well-formed long-term conception of its other-enabling path. Philosophy is fundamentally about teaching conceptual efficacy.

Though prospecting that easily seems abstruse, if characterized briefly (especially as conceptual joy), there is a kind of adventure there (to my mind, of course): dwelling with (and in) the scale of various continua which show how near-term foci may belong well with long-term, high-scale horizons.

Exemplifying scalarities of engagement is, ideally, integral to highly flourishing lives, leading virtue, masterful teaching, and genuine organizational leadership, across kinds of relations and media, and across generations through, let’s say,
the Archive of humanity which the university, as such, monumentally embodies.

Accordingly, the so-called “Meaning of being” is quite accessible, given one’s appreciation of intergenerational continua. We are the life of Our shared humanity which can easily be enacting a leading global agenda across generations of shared continua, in terms of our shared lives doing the best we can, through families, neighborhoods, etc., constituting an intergenerational good* of humanity.

It’s easy to seem trite about that because what’s most valuable is most ordinary, easily taken for granted, and easily devalued.

A high-scale quality of humanity is as accessible as its elemental high-scale qualities of life are practically conceivable.

Such a sense of practicality—such a progressive pragmatic view (I prospect)—
is integral to easily making auspicions conceptual prospecting worthwhile (though that practicality, which is very evident to me, stays mostly implicit in my conceptual venturing).

We contribute to the future of humanity by sustaining a prevailing good* continu-
um of communicative life, by loving to learn (or retrieving that innate love born
at birth), by networking genuinely, engaging authentically, convening aptly, organizing effectively, and exemplifying well.