Humanize
We have published many pieces over the years at Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism through the popular media advocating for human exceptionalism and defending the importance of humanity. That effort will not only continue, but hopefully, accelerate in 2020 and beyond.
However, as I look to the future and the growing threats to human dignity, liberty, and equality which we founded the Center on Human Exceptionalism to address, I think it’s important to start conducting a conversation in a place of our own where we can consider the threats and opportunities to human dignity and human rights in culture, law, and policy in a more holistic way.
Enter Humanize from Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. We hope to welcome a host of contributors over time into a conversation of the many issues related to the importance of human life and our unique obligations to each other, our posterity, to animal life, and to the environment.
America is living with the ghosts of the 1960s, the ambition of that time as much as its hubris. In equal measure, those qualities shape our ethically and morally haphazard approach to human dignity and human rights, and particularly bioethical issues that have the potential to harm or damage our liberty and equality with one another as human beings.
Humanize will offer news, opinion, and analysis to spark and participate in conversations about all of these issues and more, in the spirit of a time when we believed that we could achieve success in every field with ambition tempered by honor—in short, in a way that both advances science and society and promotes human dignity, liberty, and equality.
As long as we remain fractured across philosophical and intellectual fault lines, issues of human life generally and bioethical issues specifically can only grow more vexing. We’re establishing Humanize with the hope that we can be a home for spirited and robust conversations that address the many ethical or moral issues that currently denigrate human life, as we promote a human-centered wholeness that is the only true hope for a better future.
Humanize is as much about recognizing new frontiers in science, medicine, and biotechnology, as it is about recognizing that there are perennial frontiers in the human heart that must always be addressed in our conscience as much as our law and policy. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recognized these perennial frontiers:
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
The work we thought we were finishing with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has turned out simply to be a starting point for new frontiers in a timeless conversation on the exceptional importance of being human.
Welcome to Humanize.