Naturalistic Humanist communities can promote several approaches to taking care of each other without having to coerce people with guilt, shame, or fear of not pleasing God. These include supporting a far more generous, publicly funded spectrum of social services.
Unfortunately, many professional caregivers — people employed to provide care to the very young, the elderly, the mentally, or physically disabled or developmentally delayed — are often treated very poorly as they are on the bottom of the patient care provider hierarchy. Physicians, nurses, department heads and most administrative staff are generally well paid and receive a comprehensive set of benefits. Professional caregivers closer to the bottom of the patient care provider hierarchy are often under paid, overworked, subject to injury, and frequently condescended to by supervisors, and sometimes by the patients and their families. How can we as a society can expect these workers to treat the vulnerable people they care for with kindness and respect when they themselves are being treated so poorly?
With sufficient public investment such professional care givers could be far better compensated, with their working hours reduced, resulting in fewer professional care givers who must endure physical and mental exhaustion. Increased public support should also enable a greater array of alternative institutions such as small group homes, and stay at home care.
Institutional settings might also be made far more humane and kind by actively encouraging experimentation between care giving facilities and the community. In the past pressure to care for disabled or elderly family members, or neighbors could be overwhelming, requiring subordination of dreams and desires. The advent of institutional care saved many a coerced care giver from this fate, however our present model may go too far in the opposite direction. As professionals assume the bulk of our society’s caregiving it becomes possible for everyone else to essentially forget about both the caregivers and the patients.
Perhaps family, and friends, or community members can participate in caregiving in a limited way, without the burden of commitment as fear of commitment can cause many people to stay away.
Technology might be a key factor — an application could help potential caregivers, including a family member, friend, neighbor, or a volunteer schedule a patient’s care and social visits. If a designated caregiver cancels, a backup caregiver could be available. This approach might make participating in a disabled person’s care feel less daunting to family members or friends.
Such an application might also facilitate visits with service animals and or children, where allowed. Informal or spontaneous appearances by local talent such as singers, musicians, performance artists, and portrait artists could also be managed by such an application.
For healthy people altruistic acts are in themselves gratifying and pleasurable — nearly 25% of adults volunteer their time to help others. Random acts of kindness also happen regularly and are reported on the website Random Acts of Kindness[1].
Advanced technology can also facilitate a greater degree of interconnection between us. Numerous smart phone apps can alert people to others in their community who want to connect, or are in need of help. Here a just a few examples of some, available apps at time of writing:
Kindly — Whatever your talent or passion, Kindly lets you explore social volunteering opportunities. You share your skills and have social impact while doing activities like preparing food at a shelter- teaching skills to immigrants- reading with kids – walking shelter dogs-Writing newsletter articles -Harvesting a community garden- and working with seniors
Wakie — Tap a button and talk to people 24/7 in the easiest way possible, share true emotions, get instant reactions, have fun and allay boredom or practice a foreign language all day long in a place where friendship happens.
Be My Eyes — a simple, free tool for the visually impaired “to see the world better together.” The app provides visual support with tasks like reading small print, matching clothes, troubleshooting technology, setting up home appliances, or any other simple task a volunteer can complete over live video.
Some websites also facilitate community members helping each other such as Casserole Club which connects people who like to cook and are happy to share an extra portion of a home-cooked meal, with older, or infirmed neighbors.
Crowd sourced projects like crowd funding websites can raise money for projects, business ventures, and for charitable purposes. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is probably the most successful example of a voluntary crowd sourced project with an average of over 7 billion page views in one month and the majority of its content written and edited by tens of thousands of volunteers.
Expanding and improving our social safety net and applying advanced technology to help connect people support and care for one another, are essential components of becoming a kinder and more loving society. Removing the justification for blaming, the practice of Naturalistic Humanism strongly supports our treating each other with compassion and deference. As we recognize that “There, but for that person’s determinants, go I” we are impelled to empathize with others who might outwardly seem very different than us.
Our mainstream culture assumes that most people only care about themselves, in reality healthy humans have an extended sense of self interest. It feels gratifying to be helpful to others even when those we are helping are unable to respond with appreciation.
Today, non-reciprocal, unconditional, loving relationships are a common feature in most healthy parenting. And many people behave with kindness to others because doing so feels really good. When we take care of those around us we benefit physiologically, and emotionally. The mainstream narrative of life being a ruthless competition is a destructive and dangerous mindset. When we are responsive to our extended-self-interest we take good care of each other and ourselves as well.
[1] https://www.randomactsofkindness.org/kindness-stories