human?

A friend of mine recently wrote a post about being human. It got me to thinking . . . .

What on earth do we imply when we claim to be "just human" or "merely human". I had never really caught on to how loaded those phrases truly are, and now that I am, I don't think I like them much. Obviously, claiming ourselves as merely human is used to imply that we can't be more than that, to which I would agree. But, the way this phrase is typically used is to justify some kind of short-coming on our part. We don't meet up to excessive demands on ourselves because we're "only human". We give into impulses because we are human. And, eventually we justify our sin as something that is simply human.

Now, when I say sin, please don't assume that I'm adhering to the stale, evangelical sense of the word. That's not what I mean, and I'll get to my true idea of its meaning later. My point in the above is to show how when we make such statements about "being human", we are really being pretty pessimistic about the nature of humanity. I imagine there are two lines we could trace in regard to this attitude of human nature. One being the Calvinistic/Lutheran theological line that emphasized the full depravity of man. The second line could be the secular scientific view that we are the next step beyond chimpanzee's which would justify our occasional primal behavior. I think both lines of thought are basically a bunch of crap. Full depravity is a characature, which attempts to fit the world into a stale doctrine that never has adequately explained our world and never will. Degenerative evolutionists on the other hand strike me as lazy people who failed to grow out of the egocentrism and typical behavior one can witness in most toddlers.

And, all that to say, I think we've inherited some wrong ideas about "being human". In fact I think modernity has given us a very perverted view of what exactly makes us human. It seems to me that we need to flip the statement around: instead of saying we are "merely being human", we should start saying instead we are being a little bit less than human. To modernity we are human because we evolved beyond gorillas and increased our capacity to think. So, we find Decartes' "I think therfore I am" as the cliche t-shirt slogan for people up to the 1960's. Yet, now that postmodernity has come on to the scene, people think less highly about our race's intellectual capacity. And so, pop culture has devolved and come to embrace our animal instincts. We've become the first species to evolve to world domination and then wish we could go back.

As a Christian humanist I think there's a different meaning and a different criteria to "being human". It's something that I don't think the English vocabulary has the capacity to handle well, so the best I can describe it is this: I think to be human is to in some weird trancendent kind of way live beyond ourselves. In escence, to be human is to be more. Scientists have enough evidence now to make a very convincing (though maybe not comprehensive) case for evolution on some level. So, if one pulls the Bible verses out of their ears and stops screaming "la la la la la" when an evolutionist opens their mouth, they would probably have to concede, not that the evolutionist is right, but in the least that he makes a good point. So, if we are basically primates with opposable thumbs and abstract reasoning, is that what being human is?? NO.

Being human is being capable of living beyond our immediate environment and finding experience beyond that which immediately involves our senses. One of the greatest residual traits of the God who created us in his image is creativity that goes beyond our intellectual capacity; we explore the abstract even beyond what our mind is capable of grasping. We create not just based on what we know and what assets we have available. We, in essence, create out of nothing.

Now, when I say we, I do not mean each of us individually. I do not mean 'we' as in small groups of people either. Ultimately I mean 'we' as in humanity. I think that this too is what it means to be human. I think those who are the most human are those who are learning the most how we all function as one race. Not that I think that the individual is unimportant. Ultimately I think that the whole only proceeds as far as it relative parts proceed. Still, I think that to be human, and truly human, is to realize that on some level all things are integrated and interdependent.

so, I offer that as today's convoluted mess of philosophical grappling, enjoy.