October 18, 2016 at 7:45 am, by Carl

What does it mean to be human?

 

I’ve spent the past several years writing about the idea that how one views the human is critical to culture.   Our culture has taken a view that eliminates the spiritual dimension leaving the human has something less than, often ascribing to the human a disconnected, overly-individualistic viewpoint that leads us to a dark place….a culture of death and destruction.

 

In our pursuit of what some would claim as a move towards more inclusion or more pluralism or more tolerance, what instead has happened is an unmooring of what it means to actually be human.  Most importantly to this view is the need to eliminate any possibility of the transcendent, the spiritual aspect that suggests that what it means to be human starts with a Higher Power, a Creator.

 

Scholar Joseph Atkinson suggests that in our modern world, we have accepted three dangerous falsehoods about what it means to be human.  He describes them in a series of adjectives:   isolated, autonomous, and self-determining.

 

If you’ve read my work over the past twenty years, then you know my view that our best health as a society comes in community.  Sadly, in those same 20 years, we have continued our move towards a deeper isolation, even in the face of a greater connectivity through technology.  Great isolation doesn’t mean that one never speaks to another human or has no interactions at all…many do have several interactions.  However, even as more and more technological connections occur, more and more people are isolated.  At best, they stare at a screen for hours on end typing or having digital interaction with (hopefully) another human somewhere else.  But there is no touch, no human sharing of the soul.  And perhaps most significantly, this isolation is a rejection of community.

 

This view ignores the experience of a corporate personality as a community.  Atkinson shares the antithesis to that sick view in an Africa proverb:  “I am because we are.”  This sense of other-ness in connection is wholeness and health.

 

The radical individualism that leads to isolation—“I need no other”—is sickness and death.  This poor view of the human (that I can be as an isolated being) blends into a view of autonomous.  This means to believe that one has independent power with a freedom to act as one wishes, regardless of others, regardless of the community.

 

That is a poor idea not only because it suggests a power to self that simply is not true…you cannot keep breathing, you cannot keep eating, you cannot keep being mentally sane on your own power.  Ask anyone at the moment of death if they can autonomously prolong their life.  They cannot, no matter how much they may wish it.  Food, equally, does not magically spring up onto your table, but in a circle of life motif, must be cultivated, emerging life from death (a seed must die for a new plant to emerge; an animal being must die to provide a form of life-giving food for another animal).  Our mental health deteriorates quickly as we find isolation.  The purpose of the character of “Wilson” in the movie Castaway, as explained by the survival expert brought in by the movie to aid Tom Hanks character was that for a human to survive, to mentally stay sane and even physically alive,  we must have connection to stay alive.  It certainly worked for Hanks’ character in the movie and the depth of the relationship is at the end of the movie, when he loses the volleyball on the high seas and is so distraught over the “death” of his friend.

 

 

We believe, sadly, though that we can be this individualistic and autonomous because we fall prey to perhaps the worst lie…that we are self-determining.  This is an open rejection of the idea of Creator.  If there is a Creator who has made me, then that Being has a clear opinion to both my form at creation (“He made them, male and female”) and to future path (“Trust in the Lord…and He will guide your steps.”).  If one decides that the human is self-determinging, then there becomes a god-like pursuit of power, a grasping of self-will to the point of claiming an independence in one’s being.  Meaning, it is to assume the role of creator for oneself.

 

It’s a nice idea, I suppose, but not one that can be sustain upon scrutiny.  As I wrote last week about the passing of my friend Matt, no one has the authority or power to actually transform or possess a constitutive nature.  We want this, perhaps…this ability to “have the power to establish or give organized existence to something.”  But it does not lie within our powers to do this…and to consider that we do is to lead us, inexorably back to a culture of death.

 

See, if I think in terms of isolation, then to see others eliminated is of no issue to me.  If I think it terms of autonomous, then I am not concerned with how something I need came to being…even if it came to being through nefarious means such as slavery.  If I think I am self-determing, then all beings must be so…but then if their self-determined choice is what I consider evil, then what do I do?  What if they consider my self-determining choice to be evil?  If we are all merely independent demigods, then there can be no rules above us, nothing to bind us…and thus chaos, violence and a “might makes right” culture emerges.

 

A culture of death.

 

 

 

How one views the human has consequences.  If one believes that the human is “merely a cosmic random collection of cells with no purpose or intent…almost a mistake or insignificant occurrence”…then a thing that I can ignore or even simply throw away, or maybe worse, a self-forming being that can choose one’s own status and nature….violence and death comes.   However, if I understand the human to be “created in the image of God” then he/she is a beautiful thing (even if a specific human does ugly things)….thus, the human has value.  The human, a being created to be of worth, really does matter.