Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Century to Stop Hating Humans

Some Thoughts on Being a Humanist in Inhumane Times

"It was the best of times, it was the BLURST of times??" You stupid monkey!

-Montgomery Burns

I like to think of myself as a humanist. I like to, but humans make it hard in practice. I mean, have you seen humans lately? Or really at any point in history? They're...a lot.

So, I like to think of myself as a humanist sort of in the way we might like to imagine ourselves pulling a stranger from a burning car if we needed to. It seems like a nice idea, but I'm haunted by doubt.

Who-manism?

Let me take a moment to clarify what I mean when I use the word 'humanist' and clear up any lingering confusion about it being a secret lefty code for "cannibal". It is not. Please stop spreading those rumors.

While definitions of humanism vary, they generally share certain core ideas. Humanists International codified their principles with their extremely comprehensive Amsterdam Declaration.

For me, humanism is a perspective that says:

• Morality and ethics originate from humanity, not some deity or divine source.

• The universe is a natural phenomenon and science and reason give us our best tools for better understanding it.

• We are the ultimate arbiters of meaning and purpose in our own lives.

• Humans have value and worth, as does all life on Earth.

• Our own wellbeing is complexly interwoven with the well-being of the rest of humanity, as well as the rest of the natural world.

• We should strive to conduct ourselves with empathy, compassion, consideration, and ethical behavior, doing our best to maximize the good and minimize harm.

• Humans have extraordinary potential for positive change and are worth fighting for.

• We should avoid eating other people.

  
  

A few of these principles can be somewhat more challenging to consistently hold as truths than others. And no I don't mean the not eating people one. I'll have you know that's almost never be an issue.

Actually, I'd say it all feels pretty true to me most of the time. There's really only one lobster in the ball pit (It's a new idiom I'm trying out. Like "fly in the ointment" makes any more sense?) And that lobster is humans. So to speak.

If you have any fondness for humans, you have to harbor at least a little ill will toward humans. We humans are, after all, our own worst enemy.

The only animal deadlier to humans than humans is the mosquito, and that hardly seems like a fair comparison because, technically, mosquitos don't do the actual killing. It's all the viruses and parasites mosquitos transmit that kill people. Plus. only female mosquitos bite people and animals and they do it because they need the blood to produce their offspring. Awww! That makes it kind of heartwarming. Literally, if you happen to contract Dengue from the mosquito and are racked by a heart-damaging fever. At worst, the mosquito is only a super-annoying accessory to murder. When you parcel out the blame to the proper culprits like Dengue, malaria, yellow fever, West Nile, Zika, and Chikungunya, humans reemerge as the clear frontrunner in the murder Olympics.

And it's not just all the murder; it's the other bad stuff, too. We do a lot of terrible things to our fellow human beings and to the planet upon which we all depend. I don't know if you've heard about any of this, but humans are responsible for high levels of invading, razing, pillaging, colonizing, subjugating, marginalizing, enslaving, raping, torturing, terrorizing, brutalizing, persecuting, exploiting, habitat ravaging, polluting, wasting, overconsuming, dehumanizing, coercing, manipulating, fussing, and fighting, my friend. Yes, and there's some cannibalizing sprinkled in there, too, unconnected to humanists, I would like to stress.

Human history often seems an endless (perhaps eternally looping) litany of horrors and stupidity. And that is to say nothing of the present day where we've created a whole new set of set of serious problems. Our species is responsible for an entire ticking clockwork of interrelated global crises, including climate change, a 6th mass extinction, a rising tide of authoritarian populism, and widespread denial about the reality and/or urgency of these issues.

(Fed) Up with People

Given the evidence, it's easy to see how someone could conclude that everything is terrible and that humans are the worst. You failed us, humanity. We're disappointed and mad. We expected better from you.

So, maybe humans are just bad. I get it. I can relate to that feeling, but misanthropy as an actual moral conviction has always struck me as self-contradictory. Like arguing the only way to solve a rat problem is to burn down the building.

But we take just a moment to acknowledge how remarkable it is that this subject is even something we think about?

In the roughly 3.5 billion years life has existed on Earth, we are, as far as we know, the only species to develop the ability to really consider itself, the universe, and its place in the universe. We are hardly the only animal to display self-awareness, but we seem to be the only ones with a complex capacity to imagine and self-reflect. (Well, some of us anyway. Don't ask me to explain Piers Morgan.) That we can even entertain the idea of being better seems kind of astonishing to me.

This is not an argument for human exceptionalism, the view that humans are fundamentally superior to the other species. Anyone who has seen a Japanese or Siberian flying squirrel knows this isn't true.

Look upon the Japanese flying squirrel, ye Mighty, and despair! Image credit: Pop Shiretoko

But I don't believe it's human exceptionalism to say it's pretty extraordinary that life should have developed the capacity to self-interrogate, render judgements on itself, and to aspire for something more.

But okay, so, we're an aspirational species, maybe the only one, but so what? What's the point of standards if we consistently fail to meet them?

But do we, though?

The whole idea of human "progress" is a tricky and wildly subjective one, particularly when we try to apply it to morality. What we can say with reasonable confidence is we live in an age that is on the whole healthier, better educated, and with a higher standard of living than any other period in history. Arguably, too, the world is significantly less violent (although there's actually considerably more debate about how to accurately compare our levels of murderiness throughout history than you might think.)

Of course, it's not as if any of these advantages are enjoyed anywhere close to fairly and equitably around the world. We haven't eradicated needless manmade suffering and death. War, genocide, and atrocities still exist. Even in the most livable places, our society is rife with systemic injustice. And our current moment in history feels especially fraught, as if there are giant cultural forces actively trying to undo many of the gains of civilization.

By now you may have detected a pattern of me veering wildly between optimistic and pessimistic takes and probably won't be surprised by my next swerve into the sunny lane.

Take a step back to view the long arc of history and we can see indications of a moral progress, fragile and non-linear though it may be.

I've written a little bit elsewhere about the cumulative nature of human culture and how we transmit a body of collective knowledge down over generations. Civilization is a shockingly complex example of cooperative behavior. Our species has a collective mind, a kind of distributed intelligence that shows signs of edging toward a greater and greater awareness of the commonality and interconnection of life.

Although this collective mind probably wouldn't satisfy the standards of tangibility demanded by the type of people who argue a social contract can't exist because they "never signed any piece of paper", this shared intelligence exists, even if many people (see earlier in this sentence) seem to actively resist sharing it. I don't know if there can be said to be a moral order embedded in the universe, but the more we understand of the world, the more our inclusive our sense of a common good tends to become. On the whole anyway.

It's hard to prove empirically that life and humans are more good than bad. Beyond just the nebulous subjectivity of these terms, how would you even go about measuring such a thing? Are we talking volume, weight, or mass? And what about all the stuff in the middle that doesn't qualify as good or bad?

Since we can't prove there's more good, for the sake of not having an argument, let's say life is more good. Or if you prefer, there is more good and neutral together than bad. This, I think, is highly plausible. But we're wired to think otherwise.

Humans suffer from a persistent negativity bias. In open defiance of the advice of the song, we have a tendency to ac-cent-tchu-ate the negative. The bad not only takes up more real estate in our brains, it makes a greater impression on our grey matter. It makes sense evolutionarily. Sure, it's great it's great that everybody in your clan is temporarily healthy and happy, but you need be worrying about not getting eaten by a cave lion and what that clan on the other side of the hill is up to.

The bad often demands immediate attention. Because it endangers the good. The bad is a threat, but what it's threatening tends to recede into the background.

When we feel moral outrage or distress at terrible human behavior, its founded on the implicit understanding that we have something to lose.

The fact that we rage and grieve and fret is a testament not only to what we value in the world, but also to the human capacity to care, to want better. It's not a feeling that is unique to you or me or even a handful of us.

I can't help but feel that most misanthropy is a defensive posture, a way to put ourselves outside the fray, to fortify ourselves from hurt and disappointment, to numb ourselves with indifference and contempt.

When we condemn humanity as irredeemable, we're just taking human exceptionalism and pushing it to the opposite end of the scale: humans are an exception, the bad kind. It's a view that treats humans as the other, outside of the rest of life, rather than a part of it. The more likely truth that we're both bad and good (and a lot of stuff in between) can be a harder thing to hold in our heads and hearts. The idea that we're a relatively young species swept along by a wave of cultural and technological change, struggling to grow up, is in many ways more terrifying.

We're an animal that unlocked the power of the atom and ventured beyond the boundaries of our own planet.

And yet we are still wrestling with outdated evolutionary programming—tribalism, emotional reactivity, a propensity for violence, the desire to dominate—at odds with our current circumstances. It seems like a condition worthy of empathy and perspective.

There's a reason why we fuck up, and we actually don't fuck up all the time.

None of this is to say that humanity doesn't desperately need to get its act together. We have far too much power and influence at our fingertips to keep indulging in our worst and most irrational impulses. Any calls for empathy towards the human condition should not be mistaken as apologia for terrible people doing terrible things.

Right now, small groups of powerful individuals, largely insulated from the consequences of their own actions, have been emboldened to follow their greediest, dumbest, most malicious whims at the expense of so many. They're cheered on by people who are angry and terrified that the world is moving in ways they don't understand, people who reject the idea of an expanding common good the way a body rejects a kidney that's trying to save it. If we were to go ahead destroy ourselves, it would be a remarkably stupid tragedy, mainly because we had the potential to do so much better. Because so many of us are doing good.

Humans are a mess, because life itself is a mess. (There are a lot of gross fluids and stuff.) We are complex, contradictory, collaborative, competitive, and imperfect beings, always reaching for something more. That reaching has yielded both creation and destruction on a mass scale. We have the capacity to rescue or ruin ourselves, to rescue or ruin the planet. We are deserving of empathy but not of being let off the hook.

It's not always easy to believe in us. And yet I do. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some delicious human flesh not to eat.