Abstract Humanity?
A few days ago, one of my favorite Substackers
dropped a short note, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since, in the context of what I’m working on here at Pose Ponder.Here it is:
Living in the Anthropocene — an era named after the human species (human in Greek is anthropos) — and trying to be a good human in the Anthropocene, one quickly runs into the problem of setting up some working construct of “the human.”
What’s it mean to be a good human? Well, what’s it mean to be a human in the first place? Figure that out, and you’ll have a clue as to what a better Anthropocene might look like.
Over the course of human history (← note that), there has been a wide range of attempts to do the defining. Humans are “featherless bipeds” (Plato), “rational animals” or “by nature political animals” (Aristotle). Their lives are “nasty, poor, brutish, and short,” says Hobbes, concerned with the state of nature. Rousseau, by contrast, thought: “noble savages.”
The Bible has it, “God said, Let us make humans according to our image and likeness” (Gen 1.26; LXX “καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός Ποιήσωμεν ἄνθρωπον κατ᾽ εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν”). There’s the idea that the species comes in various language-groups dispersed over the face of the earth (Gen 11.8-9), and in two distinct genders, “Male and female he created them” (Gen 5.2).
Darwin explains in The Descent of Man that we evolved from a pre-existing form. Economics says homo economicus is self-interested, rational, and decision-making will maximize utility or profit.
Gandhi said, “Humanity is an ocean.”
Mill, Marx, Confucius, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islamic thought, and so on, and so on, and so on, all promote alternative powerful and influential views.
The world’s major wisdom and scientific traditions, philosophical, religious, social, and cultural, have found it necessary to offer some sort of definition or theory or construct of the human.
Now humans are — we might put it, as another working definition — the definers of a new planetary age. No longer defined by some characteristic, humans have become the definers.
And not just of working definitions for ourselves.
No longer defined by some characteristic, humans have become the definers.
At what point do definitions become ideologies — abstract ideals, rigidly adhered to — such that they depart from any concern with actual humans?
That’s the question, the poser.
Of course we want to be concerned for actual, real human beings. (John Gray, whom we’ve discussed before, says “humanity” as such doesn’t even exist.) But that doesn’t mean any thought about “the human” inevitably becomes ideology.
When there is an abstract ideal — abstract in saying what “the human” is; idealistic in saying what the best or only truly “good” human is — rigidly adhered to, that’s when thinking stops. Then you have ideology. Then there is forgetting of concern and care for actual humans, and for all other actually existing beings of all varieties of life. Then one enters the danger zone. When the definition or essence or construct, the theory, the agenda, the predetermined assumptions and conclusions, are carved in stone, then questioning stops.
The only antidote is to keep posing, and to keep pondering.