Introduced by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar in 1982, Neohumanism widens the circle of care beyond humanity to animals, plants, and the whole living world, and explains why every narrower sentiment ends in exploitation.
Humanism was one of the great achievements of the modern mind. It said that human beings, all of them, have worth simply because they are human, and it built rights, laws, and institutions on that claim. Love and care extended past humanity to every living being and the whole of creation., introduced by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar in 1982, accepts the achievement and asks a simple question: why stop there? If worth does not depend on nation, race, or creed, why should it depend on species? Neohumanism is the widening of humanism into universal love for all beings: an ecology of the heart.
Existential value
The center of the idea is a distinction between two kinds of value. Utility value is what something is worth to us: a forest as timber, a river as power, an animal as food or labor. Existential value is what something is worth in itself, simply because it exists. Every being has the second kind, whatever it has of the first. A holistic philosophy designed to protect the existential value of everything in creation, regardless of its utility to humans, is what Neohumanism sets out to be.
This is not sentimentality. It follows from the cosmology described elsewhere in this section: if everything that exists is Consciousness on its way back to itself, then nothing is merely raw material. The tree is not a lesser thing than the person who cuts it; it is at an earlier stage of the same journey. To treat it as if it had no value of its own is a mistake about what it is.
How sentiments narrow the mind
Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti's analysis of what goes wrong is the most useful part of the theory, because it explains so much. Human beings naturally attach themselves to something larger than themselves, and the attachment feels like love. But most such attachments are sentiments: feelings for one's own group that stop at the group's edge. Geo-sentiment is love of one's own land, which turns easily into contempt for other lands. Socio-sentiment is love of one's own people, class, religion, or language, which turns into the exploitation of everyone outside it. Even humanism, when it stops at the human species, is a sentiment of this kind: it licenses the destruction of every other form of life for human convenience.
Each sentiment narrows the mind to the size of its group, and a narrowed mind is easy to exploit. The people who profit from division have always known this. Pseudo-culture, the manufactured version of a people's culture that keeps them passive and consuming, exists precisely to maintain the conditions of psychic, social, and economic exploitation. Neohumanism's answer is not to suppress the feeling of belonging but to keep expanding it until there is nothing left outside.
Rationality and devotion
The way to expand it, Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti argued, is by two faculties working together. The first is rationality: the habit of examining one's sentiments, asking whom they exclude and why, and refusing to act on a feeling that cannot survive the question. Rationality alone, however, produces only tolerance, and tolerance is thin. The second faculty is devotion: the felt recognition that the same consciousness moves in every living being, which is what meditation cultivates. A person who has touched that recognition does not need to be argued into caring about a stranger or a stream. The care is already there. Neohumanism is what that care looks like when it is turned into a philosophy of society.
What it changes
Neohumanism was intended as a liberation ideology: a way of giving common ground to the many movements that fight exploitation separately, among them anti-imperialism, animal welfare, women's rights, civil rights, and environmentalism. Each of these, seen through Neohumanism, is a refusal of one particular narrowing of the mind, and all of them are the same refusal. It joins social liberation, the ending of exploitation in the world, to inner liberation, the ending of narrowness in the mind, and holds that neither is complete without the other.
In practice, Neohumanism shapes Ananda Marga's work in three visible ways. It guides the schools: the Neohumanist education described in the library aims not at fitting children to an economy but at the integrated development of the whole person and a genuine universalistic sentiment toward all of creation. It guides service: relief work, community kitchens, and ecological projects are extensions of the same care, not separate causes. And it guides The Progressive Utilization Theory: a social and economic model of cooperatives, economic democracy and basic needs for all., which treats the balance between human communities and the ecosystems that support them as a condition of a decent economy rather than a luxury.
The daily version
Most people will never write a theory of society, and Neohumanism does not require it. It asks for something smaller and harder: to notice the moment when one's care stops, at the border, at the species line, at the edge of one's own family, and to push it one step further. To spare the insect. To ask where the cheap thing came from. To hear the argument of someone from the other side of a border as if it might be true. The expansion of the mind that spiritual practice works for from the inside, Neohumanism works for from the outside. They meet in the same person.
"It is necessary for every human being to understand that to construct anything or keep anything alive, a close coordinated cooperation among the different parts is essential." — Shrii Shrii Anandamurti
