On Being Human and Humane
Dr. Brent Waters · July 25, 2022
Incivility is rampant these days. The signs are everywhere: a casual indifference toward the miserable; the intemperate, hostile rhetoric polluting social media; the ease of resorting to offending and taking offense; the rise of violent crime; creeping authoritarian surveillance and despotic rule; the brutal war being waged in Ukraine. Humans treating each other inhumanely seems to be the norm.
My pessimism is, perhaps, unwarranted. It is not really as bad as it appears to be. The news outlets exaggerate to gain market share; bad news and fear sells, good news and equanimity doesn’t. That is undoubtedly true, but hyperbole is not the same as fabrication. The news, the media is hyping something. What might it be? A provisional thesis: inhumane behavior is ascendent, the emerging moral default stance. This ascending inhumanity ranges from a casual disregard of one another, to insipid stereotyping and vile sloganeering, to inflicting senseless destruction and unspeakable violence. It is as if a simmering sullenness is breaching the protective bulwarks of self-control and social sanction.
Why is inhumane behavior on the rise? The short answer is that we are losing sight of what it means to be human. One cannot be humane without keeping humans clearly in mind, and the status of being human is increasingly disregarded. In short, being human doesn’t count. Granted, there is some embellishment in the preceding sentence, but only just. What now counts are socially constructed categories such as race, gender, or other modes of identity. When these artificial categories (and since they are constructs, they are artificial) are given prominence, then it is virtually impossible to be humane, to treat one another humanely, because there is nothing held in common, no shared qualities binding people together.
The premise is nonsense. People, of course hold much in common. DNA, for instance. The genetic variation among individuals is slight. Appearance is another shared instance. Despite differences in physical traits, it is virtually impossible to mistake a human being as a member of a different species. Humans act similarly. Although there is a wide range of cultural variability people spend their lives working, sharing meals, dressing up and dressing down, finding and losing lovers, rearing children, dreaming and despairing, enjoying successes and suffering failures, helping and hurting each other, participating in rituals, and on and on. As St Augustine recognized, humans share strong and enduring bonds of imperfection. Answering the question, what does it mean to be human? requires a voluminous reply. But we can at least intuit that meeting another person is to encounter a similar creature, someone like me.
Being similar, however, is not the same as being identical. Individuals do in fact differ, especially subjectively. Experience varies, often extensively, and its interpretation and appropriation is presumably limitless. To say that every person is unique is a platitude, but it is nonetheless true. We cannot know fully or with absolute certainty what is going on inside another person. Even those we love most intimately retain an element of mystery. Despite the many similarities humans share, we are necessarily opaque rather than transparent to one another. This dissimilitude can prompt a reaction of ambiguity, even fear, but it can also be a source of respect, even reverence. Again, we can intuit that meeting another person is to encounter another being who is other than a projection of oneself.
Humans, then, are simultaneously alike and unalike. To ignore or aggrandize either quality is to effectively disfigure the meaning of being human into something unrecognizable. If all humans are the same, then they are simply an undifferentiated mass. And if all humans share little or nothing in common, they are little more than a series of atomistic collisions. Both of these characterizations defy common sense. In our daily interactions with one another, we encounter beings who strike us as both akin and alien. The moral challenge is to be attentive to both the universality and particularity of human beings.
“The moral challenge is to be attentive to both the universality and particularity of human beings.”
Maintaining the tension between universality and particularity is foundational to being humane and acting humanely. Humane treatment is rendered ineffectual when either pole is crumpled or discounted. On the one hand, when it is assumed that humans are essentially manufactured replicas then the wise—technocrats to use contemporary jargon—impose a social and political order upon the unintelligent and unruly; the misfits. Those unable or unwilling to comply are subjected to indoctrination and discipline, and coercive measures are at times applied to the recalcitrant. The treatment of people is neither humane nor inhumane but effectual or ineffectual, often cloaked by banal appeals to vague notions of justice or injustice.
On the other hand, when it is presumed that every individual is inimitable then self-expression is paramount and sacrosanct. Every person is a self-made artifact of one’s unique will and imagination, and the craftsmanship on display must not only be tolerated but admired and celebrated. There are no common standards determining if the actions associated with expressing one’s artificial self are right or wrong, good or bad. Consequently, notions of humane and inhumane treatment are rendered impertinent since there is no shared sense of what being a good human entails, no norm from which the beliefs and deeds of expressive individuals comply or diverge.
One pressing moral task of our present age is to recover a vital and shared sense of what it means to be human, and concomitantly what it means to be humane. Yet strong social and political forces are aligned against this recovery. There is much at stake in keeping people divided, of propagating the fable that there is no common and binding humanity to be had. And yet a recovery of what it means to be human and humane needs to be undertaken. Where to start? Again, it would be silly to pretend that this question can be answered in a short essay, for altering cultural trajectories requires extensive and deliberate critique. But I will hazard a suggested starting point, one among many possibilities.
The accuracy and efficacy of popular shibboleths should be challenged. “Diversity,” for instance, is a prime target. Today diversity enjoys a nearly unassailable status, especially when paired with inclusion. An inclusive collection of diverse people has effectually become a moral norm that everyone is expected to affirm and support. In respect to issues of social, political, and moral ordering, however, the concept of diversity is, at best, sloppy, and, at worse, dangerous. Diversity presupposes multiple origins or starting points. Whatever shared reality that may exist is the outcome of somehow cobbling together discrete parts, a process that certainly does not preclude and may at times necessitate coercive force. The perilous nature of this enterprise is pronounced when the task at hand involves ordering the social, political, and moral interactions of people, the many must, to some extent, become one. This goal can be achieved through persuasion and consent, or through coercion. Historically, the latter option has been more prevalent. At times the coercive method of inclusion is overt such as invasion and occupation. More often the coercion employed is less explicit; inclusion is achieved through the threat of social, moral, and legal sanctions. Make no mistake, in both its overt and subtle manifestations this is an imperial strategy of diversity and inclusion: the many, willingly or otherwise, are included, slammed together into a single empire. Both instances are driven by a false premise of what it means to be human, resulting in actions that are invariably inhumane.
Again, Augustine offers a more promising declaration to guide the ordering of our common life together: out of the one, many. Rather than including diverse elements into a contrived whole, there are pluriform expressions of a singular origin or starting point. This is a central biblical affirmation of created order. God did not bring into being many creations, only one. This originating unity has important moral implications. Augustine, for example, invokes the opening chapters of Genesis to remind that all humans are descended from one set of parents. Regardless of how hot or divisive our disputes become, we must recall our shared origin and look for familial resemblances.
One need not be a literalist to understand the import of Augustine’s argument. What divides is not irreconcilable but a disagreement, often highly contentious, over what is indivisible. Our disputes are with kin. Consequently, there are both imperatives and limits on how we should regard and treat one another, rather than trying to force a union out of difference, the task is to honor and negotiate particularity stemming from the universal. This is not a mere rhetorical distinction. A shared humanity is the indispensable prerequisite of being humane. Nor is it an alternative rhetorical construct. To the contrary, the conceit that discourse creates reality is a treacherous temptation to be resisted. Rather, our discourse should describe a given reality that we encounter from our varying vantage points. It is embracing the sound realist posture that if our lives are to reflect any semblance of what is true, good, and beautiful, then we must deal with the world as it is and not how we would prefer it to be.[1] The ensuing moral task entails a humane ordering of our pluriform understandings of our common humanity.
To be clear, the preceding proposal is not a cure-all. There is no guarantee that we will get our anthropology correct, or that we will subsequently become more humane. It is likely we will fail on both accounts. As Augustine understood, we cannot see clearly and thereby act correctly because we are plagued by disordered desires, disordered loves. We cannot know or will the good of ourselves and the good of others.[2] We know neither humankind, nor how to be humane, at least not completely or effectively.
Yet there is an overlay of hope in this Augustinian diagnosis of the human condition. The task at hand is not to rhetorically reconstruct humankind, an exercise that is ripe for abuse and nihilistic excess, in which what is deemed to be “humane” is little more than an empty vessel devised by the willing and then foisted upon the unwilling. The problem is not to manufacture a better creation. That is a task best left to God, for playing God is a profoundly hubristic game always ending in ruin. The problem, rather, is to correct our disordered desires and the subsequent actions flowing from the mess. And this a manageable problem. Our desires can be reordered, reoriented, redeemed. A combination of will and divine grace can refocus a desire to seek the good of others as well as the good of ourselves. In such refocusing we gain insight, some greater clarity on what it means to be human and humane. Our desires, this side of eternity, will never be perfected so our subsequent social, political, and moral ordering will always remain flawed. But improvement is possible, so, to borrow from Augustine, what we will is driven by what should be our chief love, namely God.
Tracing how loving God and God’s love creates and sustains moral insight into what is truly human and humane begs critical inquiry and constructive ascription. And again, this venture lies far beyond the boundaries of this essay, as well as my intellectual and imaginative skills. But I offer a hunch: an enduring, restless quest to discover what it means to be human and humane should, at the very least, inspire humility. There are two sources from which this humility is derived. The first is empathy. Granted, is has become an overused word, employed in trivial and banal ways. Yet it is an important word that needs to be protected and used correctly. To empathize is to share an affinity with another, to recognize and sympathize with another person not unlike oneself. It is crucial if one is to develop any semblance of moral capacity. As Adam Smith saw clearly, the foundation of morality is not abstract thought but the sentiments and their proper alignment to self and neighbor.
The second source is alterity. Otherness: it seems so obvious. I encounter, interact, and live with other people every day. Otherness is a fact that cannot be denied. And yet I quite readily ignore this fact. I do not view the other as other but as a projection of myself, an artifact of my furtive imagination. And I treat this so-called other as such, which is to say as an object rather than another subject, a treatment that, even in its most polite and subtle expressions, is patently immoral and far from humane. Effectively denying alterity is an egregious violation of the Golden Rule. As Iris Murdoch insists, we learn to see the other through disciplined, sustained, and “unselfed” attentiveness. We must see the other through a just and loving gaze to identify and enable his or her good.
Together, empathy and alterity promote the humility required to acknowledge the universality of being human and the particularity of human beings. We can empathize with others because nearly everyone has experienced something akin to loving and being loved, hating and being hated, succeeding and failing, suffering and rejoicing. But the ways they are experienced and interpreted are not uniform and can never be known by others completely. Attending to the good of the other is to encounter an enigmatic similarity, but it is nonetheless the foundation of being more fully human and humane.
“Together, empathy and alterity promote the humility required to acknowledge the universality of being human and the particularity of human beings.”
It is time to come clean. This essay is little more than a reflection—and a personal one at that—on the second great commandment. I am commanded by God to love my neighbors. All of them. Given our current circumstances, this is no easy command to fulfill. Easier to loathe than to love. Why? In part because the religious and moral importance of being human and humane is steadily eroding. A couple of snapshots to serve as evidence: Scripture no longer commands the respect it once did because, in part, the academy, and even some churches, regard it as a collection of ancient texts rather than the Word of God. Additionally, the teaching and scholarship in the humanities or liberal arts are in tatters due, in part, to higher education’s desperate attempts at making itself relevant by offering a useful education. Both dull one’s anthropological and moral sensibilities, for a transcendent point of reference is effectively eliminated.
Is recovering a more fully human and humane sensibility possible? Yes, but it entails a long, arduous process. This recovery begins with rediscovering genuine leisure. True leisure is, Josef Pieper contends, a “receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.”[3] It is thereby also an affirmation of one’s created ontological status that cannot be divorced from being human and humane. Pieper also reminds that the English word “school” is derived from its Greek and Latin antecedents for “leisure.”[4] A small step toward recovery that can be taken for those who spend their time in the academy is, perhaps, to spend less time trying to offer a useful education and more time toward being receptive to the created order in which they are commanded to love its creator and their created neighbors, a love that is human and humane.
[1] For a concise and artful exposition of this realist posture, see Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
[2] For an insightful account of this disorder, see Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
[3] Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture and The Philosophical Act (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2009), pp. 46-47.
[4] See Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, pp. 19-20.