Tiny Manifesto #9

It is my intention to study what is good for humans, taking into account what is good for the whole earth.

Towards a Personal Pattern Language for Political Action: Iteration 2026
Manifestoes 1-50: Preparatory actions I can intend without involving anyone else but myself

It remains for me to discover what other Tiny Manifestoes encompass or are adjacent to this Tiny Manifesto, or perhaps even from what starting points I arrive at this pattern in my pattern language for political action. As I mention at the end of this Tiny Manifesto, it is pretty obvious to me now what pattern this one encompasses, but it took me decades to come to that realization.

[Note (January 23, 2026): I am changing the numbering of this Little Manifesto to make room for a new #10.]

Perhaps for my twelfth birthday my father gave me the pictured copy of P. S. Dreyer’s Die Wysbegeerte van die Grieke (The Philosophy of the Greeks, HAUM, 1976) and upon reading it I knew that I wanted to be a philosopher. A couple of years later I somewhat improbably found a secondhand copy of The Next Whole Earth Catalog (1980) in a downtown bookshop in my birth town of Bloemfontein, South Africa, which, along with my reading of Ursula Le Guin’s The Disposessed and Frank Herbert’s Dune and my observation of the apartheid society in which I grew up, persuaded me that the kind of concerns that would require my attention as a future philosopher would be ethical and ecological, with a side glance towards the technological. And so, while I may have articulated it differently over the years, my primal concern as a scholar came to my attention quite early in my life.

It is my intention to study what is good for humans, taking into account what is good for the whole earth.

Growing up as I did in apartheid South Africa from my birth in 1966 to the formal end of apartheid in the early 1990s, this was never a merely scholarly concern. Rather, it was an existential concern, a topic of everyday conversation in the home of my parents and of vigorous debate (legally and clandestinely) among all South Africans. My neighbours answered the question of what is good for humans not only in kitchen table conversations and formal debates, but by their very lives. And their answers were not only very diverse but also incommensurable.

After reading everything addressing my concerns available from my birth city’s public library (still a cathedral of wonder in my memories) I decided to major in philosophy and sociology at university, intent on finding good guides for my explorations. After reading Calvin Seerveld’s Rainbows for the fallen world and Bob Goudzwaard’s Idols of Our Time, I found my way to the philosophical writings of Herman Dooyeweerd, and the work of these three philosophers and their various students appeared to me, for decades, to be adequate guides. I still regret that I did not follow through earlier on my interest—prompted during my fourth university year by a seminar on (among other recent texts) After Virtue—in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre.

This pattern generates several problems that I had imagined resolved for myself in the decades following my university education, but which in my fifties re-emerged as I found the philosophical tradition in which I had been trained inadequate for coming to terms with some of the objective realities in which I found myself: How to study what is good for humans? How to study what is good for the whole earth? How to connect these two sets of goods? Who to trust as guides into the exploration of these questions? How to approach such studies. In my later fifties (and so in the early 2020s) I discovered more adequate resources for addressing these problems, most significantly so in the published results of Alasdair MacIntyre’s lifelong project of moral inquiry and through MacIntyre, in Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Karl Marx. Thus a key connection in this personal pattern language, between the pattern I describe above and a pattern it encompasses, which I articulate in Tiny Manifesto #11: It is my intention to come to terms with the claims of “those philosophers who have thrown most light on political and moral life, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx.”