Human Abstractions

Someone brought up the question of what it means to be human. While I normally find her responses insightful, this one seemed like a whole mess of bat-shit crazy, ad hoc, hippy ravings. The idea that the what makes us human is our obligated answer to social responsibility is like an unwanted Cleveland Steamer.

Awkward and somewhat insulting.

Maybe I've just got an aversion to anyone telling me what to do, but it's a slippery slope to start defining what it is to be human by a definition of what social and environmental responsibility means. Who gets to determine what those responsibilities are? Me? You? Government? And if someone disagrees with that definition, are they less than human for their opinion, and thereby easier to disregard?

I like that she vehemently believes that being human is being 'good,' but unfortunately that isn't always the case. Is being afraid of social situations, embarrassment, or incarceration basic animal instincts? When these fears determine our response to adverse conditions, causing us to make admittedly poor decisions, does that make us less human? One could say that animals share some of these fears, if on a simpler level, and that's true. Their ideas of their social standings are there, albeit less complex. Technically, what makes us human, what separates us from animals, is our greater and more complex level of abstraction.

As we grow from spitting, mewling, infants, we do the same thing as all animals: we try to come to terms with our surroundings. We try to figure out on the simplest levels, what is me and what is not. This process continues through our lives as we form, shift, destroy and recreate our identities. Where we diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom is the level in which we abstract that identity, what it is we include in our idea of what is 'me.' Family, neighborhood, city, state, country, planet, even our solar system, can be added to our identity.

An animal may consider itself part of a pack, but for the most part, that's as far as it goes for them.

We can fall in love with someone across the internet because of what they IM us at night, and we can consider new friends as close as family, sometimes more so, because their belief system is so close to our own. We can see the planet as an intrinsic piece to our existence and hold faith that we can affect change for its betterment, even in the face of its degradation despite our efforts.

This is human. We abstract our identity to include those things which speak to our ideologies, something no animal can do.

Conversely, being human also lies in our ability to make a complicated abstraction of what is not 'me' or of 'the other.' It's unfortunate that we can look at a map and point to a country with a social system we consider in direct opposition to our own, and hate them for it. It may not even be something they said, but rather something that we were told they said, and want to wipe them from the face of the planet. We may never have even met anyone from there. No animal has claim upon ideological hatred. Only humans. Racism, Fascism, Homophobia, Fundamental extremism, these are all human creations.

It is our ability to think upon things that don't exist, ideas of things, that defines human nature. Our penchant for systems of illusions is what drives us through this world, trying to understand it and define it, even when its overwhelming complexity begs to be beyond definition. But we keep trying, cause that is the way of our people. We don't have to be 'right' or 'good' to be human. We just have to wonder if we are.

To wit: the very question of our humanity is the very best example of it.