A Common Humanity

It’s always interesting when four authors, coming from separate disciplines and writing with unrelated perspectives on differing topics, converge in their conclusions on the same larger issue. It gives one the urge to stand upon his soap box and philosophize about wise men and elephants. You remember: several blind wise men each touch a different part of an elephant and arrive at entirely contrary conclusions about its nature.  Joseph Stiglitz, economist, writes in The Price of Inequality about how we are evolving to a Plutocracy through the constant heaping up of small inequalities until they become one great inequality. The villain is unregulated focus on market efficiency. Thereby, he writes, we endanger the socioeconomic future of our entire society.  Michael Sandel, ethicist, writes in The Moral Limits of Markets about how we are “commodifying” everything so that anything can be traded on one or another kind of market, and thus are corroding our morality and losing sight of the fact that markets are simply a tool for our prosperity and not the determinant of our existence.  We have lost sight of the fact that some "goods" are intrinsically not economic ones.  Charles Murray, sociologist, writes in Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960 – 2010 that we are fragmenting as a society into socioeconomic bubbles, between which lifestyles vary so drastically that understanding and communication are impossible.  Our perks and luxury goods divide us in a way no guarded fences could.  And J.D. Trout, cognitive scientist, writes in The Empathy Gap of how, in American society, our culture causes decent people to ignore indecent degrees of inequality and suffering.  He advocates the development of psychologically sensitive social policies that correct for the deficiencies of human nature.

The larger issue they all nibble at the edges of is, “what does it mean to share a common humanity?”  That’s the elephant in the room.  For the answer we give to that question shapes our social policies, the forms and purposes of our governments, and how we treat each other in a crowd at the shopping mall.  Science fiction authors have been dabbling with the question for the last 100 years, since H.G. Wells posited a “War of the Worlds” that caused us first to think, what if others really different from us are out there: what would the differences be? They soon concluded, in sagas like Asimov’s Foundation Series, that the fundamental nature of being human has nothing to do with color or shape, and is not even defined by whether one is born or manufactured.  The ultimate hero of the Asimov series is a robot.  Nor is it defined by one’s place on the socioeconomic scale.

That issue was already being worked on, well before the science fiction writers got hold of it.  In the 19^th century, the response of de Tocqueville to Marx’s Das Kapital was, “I detest those great theories, which by relegating human history to the progress of one great idea, remove Man from the history of Mankind.”  In the 18^th century, the great religious reformer John Wesley wrote, “One great reason why the rich in general have so little sympathy for the poor is because they so seldom visit them. Hence it is that . . . one part of the world does not know what the other suffers.”  Both Wesley and de Tocqueville, along with Marx, were reflecting the recognition of a common humanity that rose above social systems and our individual places in them. That idea had begun its emergence ever since the Age of Exploration had brought us into contact with peoples and cultures so unlike us that at first we doubted that we shared the same family tree. 

Now in our own confused times, we are learning new lessons.  Apart from our day-to-day dealings with potential horrors and catastrophes like global climate change and a Middle East-wide civil war (for that is what it is), in this still-new 21^st century we must face and conquer two great human challenges.  We must learn to recognize that our true humanity is not only a set of inborn traits, it is a learned characteristic, shaped by our culture as much as by our genes: that is the insight we gained from the ruminations of 20^th century science fiction, and from 20^th century science.  We are what we teach ourselves and each other to be.  Second, we must learn how to reshape our politics and social institutions, including our economics, to enable the practice of a common humanity.  We can no longer ignore others who are different, and seek to shape society to fit only our own needs.  Simply the presence of global epidemics will prevent that.  Resolutions will include day-to-day matters like appropriate business regulation and global issues like the massive human migrations that will be a characteristic of our century.  They will also involve resolving questions about whether stratified human societies, separated between great wealth and abject poverty will be a wave of the future or a relic of the past.  We humans have come as far as we can as isolated individuals, buffered by weapons and prosperity from the sufferings of others.  Our future will be either a shared one, or a return to the Dark Ages of the past.  The French have an old saying, that the primary task of each generation is to save civilization from the barbarians of the next generation.  We need to get to work.