Principles of Adult Behavior by John Perry Barlow

Be patient. No matter what. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you. Expand your sense of the possible. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself. Tolerate ambiguity. Laugh at yourself frequently. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right. Never forget that,...

 Science Teaches Humility

Science even more than the Gospel teaches us humility. She cannot look down on anything, she does not know what superiority means, she despises nothing, never lies for the sake of a pose, and conceals nothing out of coquetry. She stops before the facts as an investigator, sometimes as a physician, never as an executioner, and still less with hostility and irony.

 The Virtue of Humility

Humility, like so many of these virtues, is about caring what others think and feel, about giving validation to others instead of seeking it all for yourself. The best way for parents to teach this, of course, is to model humility ourselves. Monitor your next conversation. How often can you catch yourself saying, “I may be wrong about that”—no one should know more than a skeptic that everything includes an element of doubt—and how often do your kids hear you saying it? How often do yo...

 The Neurotic

It is one of the triumphs of human wit ... to conquer by humility and submissiveness ... to make oneself small in order to appear great ... such ... are often the expedients of the neurotic.

 A Response to Leopold's Description

The passage shows how different aspects of virtue connect. Patience is part intellectual virtue, part moral virtue and part physical virtue, as it is portrayed here. The humility which allows Leopold to lie down in the muck unselfconsciously is a moral virtue, but humble recognition of our own ignorance is also a key intellectual virtue, as Socrates so often reminds us (see also William Beebe’s description of the ideal naturalist quoted earlier). Humility also makes possible Leopold’s aes...

 Tolerance for Ambiguity

I have a tolerance for ambiguity. It's clear to me that there's some questions that humans don't have the answers to and what arrogance to imagine we have answers to all questions. Science is sometimes, I know, attacked for supposed arogance, but I think it's the most humble occupation and discipline around. Because, instead of trying to impose our preconceptions, our predispositions on the Universe, we are open before the Universe to see what the Universe has to offer. Science is in the busi...

 Why "Spiritual Naturalism"?

Our response to the natural world is one of reverence and humility in the face of a mystery that transcends empirical knowing-now, certainly, and perhaps forever. "Agnostic" does not do justice to the celebratory aspect of our position. Nor does "pantheist" adequately express our sense of what nature hides. "Creation-based spirituality" has a respectable pedigree, although "creation" hints at an anthropomorphic Creator. "Religious naturalism" gets close to the mark.

 1973 Humanist Manifesto II - Ethics

Ethics THIRD: We affirm that moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics is autonomous and situational needing no theological or ideological sanction. Ethics stems from human need and interest. To deny this distorts the whole basis of life. Human life has meaning because we create and develop our futures. Happiness and the creative realization of human needs and desires, individually and in shared enjoyment, are continuous themes of humanism. We strive for the good life,...