Most of the time, many of you are reading this online, either at your computer or maybe on your mini-computer (that device you carry around that also can make a phone call). What does it mean though to be an authentic human? According to the new culture that we inhabit over the past decade, that concept of being human is understood with this equation: sharing = authenticity.
However, is this really clear enough? Is it accurate? Is the person posting online really that person, or merely “the person” that the being projects?
What does it mean to be human? Who are we today? Is identity merely a shared performance before others? Is that identity really you or only the you that one happens to build? For Facebook, Twitter and others, it would seem that to be authentic demands a certain set of rules. Jacob Silverman Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection suggests that authenticity includes, at least, these ideas: radical transparency, exhibitionists, relentless positivity, prideful consumerism.
As I have been trying to suggest over the past several years, we have arrived at this place with such a warped idea of authentic humanity due to modernity’s attempt to remove God, to remove any Source above the human, to anything or Anyone who is transcendent, from the equation of social life. Of course, this is not a spiritually neutral position, this desire to remove anything above us, any sense of a set of rules or guidance, of the possibility that there is a Being who has set out such guidance or Who has an opinion about things. Regardless of what the moderns tell us, certainly anything postmoderns tell us, the desire to eliminate transcendence is a motivated concept.
But where has that left us? Awash in a society that doesn’t know anything about what it means to be human. We see this in the continued headlong rush to redefine, or perhaps better said eliminate, concepts like family or gender.
Today, many people believe the human is simply an isolated, autonomous, and self-determining being. Thus, simply to focus just on the first point…we pursue a sense of being a person only within a digital way. We end up with the only authentic human being the person who posts the most or who is the quickest to post about their recent purchase (what Silverman called “prideful consumerism”).
Our view of the human, our anthropology as I said last week, have consequences. I will continue to flesh this out in future posts, but from the issue of life to the concept of how civic entities should be governed all will be impacted by how we view what it means to be human. I join a small chorus of voices who suggest that to get this issue correct is to bring flourishing. To get this wrong is to bring destruction, perhaps death.
I mean, as one example that is huge currently, if we view the human as a being created by God, then all peoples work collectively in a way that aids life for all races, all peoples…including those who deeply disagree with you on some issue such as gender or religion. As one looks around today, many voices are crying out for change or for a betterment or for some redress to past wrongs, implying that certainly there is no flourishing in the society, or at least not in those cultures or groups. however, few of the decrying voices make the point that it is our own broken anthropology that have led us to this point. If we think there is no God, no transcendent Power in which we are bound, then how I feel about another person based on their race or religion or choices is “none of your business.” Meaning, you can’t hold them in contempt if they do not think black lives matter or if they detest police lives. It is only when there is a higher standard to which we are bound that we can begin to discuss the concept that human life matters at all, and I, as another one of the human lives, should care.
We have formed a culture of death, and while many complain and worry about this, we continue to march down this road away from the transcendent. Our national anthropology suggests that the human is merely some finite grouping of cells that has no responsibility to a higher power. Worse, we have introduced a radical individualism that isolates even as we have the most powerful tools in human history to strengthen and encourage communication and connection. We have lost communion with real flesh-and-blood people, replaced with the typed words on a screen, maybe an emoji or two.
In the end, as you approach your life, I urge you to consider how you view the human. I would offer that to be an authentic human is not about how much you post online or the number of pictures you take, certainly not the number of likes you receive. It also is not something that occurs in the solitude of your face in a screen, privately publishing something for all the world to see…and yet remaining disconnected from others.
Rather, the human is a created being, brought to life with the breath of God, intimately created (knitted together as the old King James Bible puts it) by a Being who has given us insight on how to live. Remember, as I have told you previously, quoting C.S. Lewis, there are no average or regular people that you pass, but instead each is a beautiful creation.