On Being Human

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by Kimberly D. S. Reiter, Ph.D.

We often question what makes a human. There are social, spiritual and biological ways to answer the question, some of them more limiting than others.

At one end of the spectrum, traditional societies claim that humanity is distinguished by the possession of a soul or spirit or breath that gives us existence beyond the meaningless physicality of a created world. Such societies see gradations in the value of those souls, attributing some with reason and intellect and others with natural servility.

At the other end, scientists point to the biological divide that has endowed a creature badly designed for either fight or flight with the opposable thumb for holding a pointy rock we sharpened ourselves. Mother Nature also gave us a means for reproduction that forces us to accept help and community. Natural selection also gave us the tiny throat bones that let us chatter out complex vocalized survival information through whopper hunting stories to our children. Plus, it gave us the brain capacity to think out how to tell these stories around a planned campfire.

But others have suggested that what makes a human truly unique from all the other animals is our ability to understand or at least imagine the irrational, the abstract, the fictional. We imagine a future, we create paradigms, we question a higher mind. As children, we ask, “Why?” All too often, we learn to accept “because it just is.”

But then we also ask another of the oldest questions known in human literature: Is that all there is?

Ford assembly line, Stetson UniversityGilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian king and hero, asked it 5,000 years ago as he watched his friend die and a snake rob him of the plant of immortality. The Hebrews suggested as much in the divine pronouncement of endless toil and inevitable death after Adam and Eve learned the lesson of “because you just cannot.”

Most ancient religions offered the vaguest idea of an afterlife with consciousness and awareness dependent on the living world’s preservation of memory. The dead only lived as long as the living remembered them.

Destiny and fate had already determined existence. Philosophy was created in part from the Greeks’ discontent with such a lack of meaning. There had to be more. There had to be a reason for the cosmos.

Mystery religions from the Eleusinian through Mithraism, Judaism and Christianity all proposed to bring meaning to existence, giving answers for why the world is as it is.

Even so, we continue to seek meaning. We climb the mountain to the old man in the hills, we go on a walkabout to find meaning in ourselves, we pay exorbitant sums for a not-so-old man in an Armani suit to motivate us with the jargon of meaning, we eagerly await the trailer for another Star Wars movie to affirm that the Force lives to give us a reason to fight.

Why?

Because we cannot, will not accept that this is all there is. We have to have a reason, a purpose. We are determined to seek the next bend in the path, the next signpost, the next reason to take the quest. Without meaning, we become automatons, questioning nothing, seeking nothing beyond the immediate product of our actions.

A lot of people seem to like that idea. There is pressure in legislatures to eliminate liberal arts programs and advocate practitioner education to create the workers of the future.

Tools on Ford assembly lineEver since the later 19th century, when Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line, the trend has been toward replacing meaning with functionality. “Taylorism,” as it came to be called, replaced the older, slower and far more expensive craftsman with the function-specific worker. In the popular musical Ragtime, Henry Ford put it succinctly, “… here’s my theory of what this country is moving toward. Every worker a cog in motion? Well, that’s the notion of Henry Ford! One man tightens and one man ratchets and one man reaches to pull one cord … Even people who ain’t too clever can learn to tighten a nut forever, attach one pedal or pull one lever.”

And that’s all there is. No one human has a meaning, but each has a function. And as we ratchet and tighten, we do not waste time in abstract imagination or look beyond the here and now. We do our jobs, make money for somebody, and accept “because it just is.”

Practitioner education is an important aspect of the Stetson experience. We are proud to be sending students off with skills. But we are not sending out cogs.

Liberal arts education does not create useless elites in philosophy, anthropology, history, literature and other “impractical” studies.

Liberal arts education teaches us to question, to accept the abstract and irrational, to imagine a future and new paradigms. It gives us the vision to shape possibilities and, yes, to find meaning.

It gives us the freedom to ask “why” and the freedom to reject the “because.” It convinces us that there must be more than what we have been told. Without the incentive or encouragement to seek meaning, we might make great workers. We will not, however, be fully human.

Kimberly D. S. Reiter, Ph.D., associate professor of history, is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Enduring Questions grant.

Read more answers to big questions in the June 2015 issue of Stetson Magazine.