Humanity

Humanity is a great story to be told. We must learn to listen if we are ever going to learn how to tell it, if we are ever going to learn who we are, what we are, where we have come from, where we are heading, what will become of us, might become of us, could, would and should become of us. The telling of humanity’s story is something inclusive of history, but must remain categorically greater than the history of humanity, of human life, of human societies, of human anything we can add to the modifier, ‘human.’. This humanity I speak of here is larger than our anthropology, our sociology, our multiplication of Studies programs without discipline, although plenty of undisciplined disciples. There are questions to be asked and answered. What is humanity? I could ask, but could this be the question, the foremost one, the first and the last in questions to be posed about all of us, every one of us, this one simple separate person here writing and everyone else?

Humanity is a great history to be recorded. Humanity is all the stories never heard, all the stories that have been forgotten, that have been erased. What then is memory, or remembering, or recollecting? What then is historiography? History and historiography; I have always understood history to be more than what was recorded, other than what has ben written or told,  which is why we investigate, why we examine and re-examine the texts from the past, searching for unfound texts, perhaps even if searching for a proof of put contemporary convictions. We do search and re-search, we do dig as archaeologists do. There is something of archaeology about history, and I do not mean how archaeology aids in historical investigation. How so collectively over time from one place to another do we or they remember?

Humanity is a higher election. It must be chosen; it does not happen passively. We are not human simply because we are born, thus invested with humanity at birth, no.

Humanity is objectivity. Humanity is an infinite subjectivity. Humanity is perpetual subjectivity in interplay with its collective objectivities. Humanity is singular and plural; each separately; both mutually. Humanity is a faith to garner belief. Humanity is a calamity. In face of its calamitous nature, Humanity is love. In support of its penchant for calamity, Humanity is hatred, violence and prejudice. Humanity must be human humane for it to be the Humanity asserted herein as a higher election; yes, it must be humane as the latter has been defined by me in another essay: humanity is, yes, again, as aforementioned, love; love is compassionate, is tolerant, is kind, gentle, generous. The human–or should I say, the Homo-Sapiens–to be human must be humane; only by being humane can we be said to have humanity. Humanity is the perpetuation of the humane?

Humanity is a trial; humanity is on trial. Humanity must be essayed. How many essays could we write in defense of humanity, in critique of humanity; the apologetics of humanity. Humanity cannot be contained by the narrow spheres of our being, of its being, of time and space in indissoluble unity, how then could it be contained by our writing. Humanity demands a new and larger Humanology; is there a humanography? It is not enough simply to be Homo-Sapiens to qualify as a humane being, what we must reserve for calling someone, anyone, human. Homo-Sapiens and Human do not share complete synonymy, mutually interchangeable in all contexts of use.

If humanity were simply the total number of all the someones here on earth, then arithmetic would be the primary arbiter of our ethics.  I would be human by simply having been born, by my membership in the species, homo-sapiens. The problem with this ethics is that it is arithmetic and not ethics. We have witnessed historically.  We witness it again and again  around the world decade after decade, just as we will again here at home where freedom wanes more increasingly year by year. I can still hear me saying what I said when I said it whatever it was I had said.

To say or not to say must weigh heavily on the human who needs to tell, who wants to tell; telling is what humans do, have done, will do again and again. The need to tell must have no censor. The prescriptions for democracy, for a fullt democratic society are pretty much the guidelines for how to manage this humanity that needs more telling, or perpetual telling and/or re-telling. No censor for all ideas comepting for acceptance in our historiography. What more is there to tell about this thing, this entity, this being we call humanity–humanity does have being. How to adjust our thinking with respect to and for this idea of humanity, a pan humanity, something not only valid for how the image of it in a contained space for a restricted time can be manipulated by the media in the cause of Zionist hegemony, but can be valid for how people are and are seen or present themselves or get to talk about themselves independent of the types and stereotypes created in and presented through the media in America, all serving a particular hegemony that has nothing but the perpetuation of its own power through influence, authority through power garnered through influence managed by each medium it controls itself being the message that informs us–and all informing is putting into and keeping in form; information is always in . . . formation.

What if I were to say that Humanity is woman, or that humanity is man–not quite the same as saying that humanity is a woman–yes, a woman here, a woman now, a woman with me, a woman to love, to be in love with, to be loved by. A woman is humanity not solely because she is human, which she only could be if she were to choose human. Ah! There it is again, as I have said before and will say again (whether it earns a . . . gain or not is not the question).

Yes, Humanity is therefore a choice. Now, one cannot avoid choosing because it is impossible not to choose. Not selecting is a choice. In effect, it is a choice complete with a set of consequences, and not only for the individual who is trying to play hop-scotch with his choices, his options laid out before him, but for humanity, as when the word can be applied to the sum of all the humans or Homo Sapiens on earth.

Once more, as I have said elsewhere, to be human is not something one is or becomes at birth, by having been born, no matter how humane one mother’s and father is or was. Humanity for some is defined as the sum of all the humans on earth. I don’t know about that. What then is inhumanity? How do we speak of inhumanity and not allow this to set the limits and terms for our definition of humanity? If by humanity we are pointing to the great human-humane, then arithmetic cannot be our arbiter.

People everywhere have experienced the historical outcomes when ethics are allowed to become a numerical evaluation, the sum-totaling of book keeping, the ledger, America’s moral code. When we seek to make ethics quantifiable–or simple end up turning them into a quantification rather than a qulification–society is in trouble.

The quantifications of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis, of dictators like Pol Pot,  of the bureaucracies of super states like the United States, or other bourgeois capitalist democracies have weighed heavily on the experience of the human. Inhumanity is a sport bigger than soccer. How many times, how many places, now and then, then and now, I wander every time I wonder. They are related, you know. How could they not be?

If we wanted to expand our notion of humanity in the above fashion, one that leads us away from the ironic outcome of constricting our definition of humanity (by limiting humanity to that which is humane because only the humane has the right to be called human) then we would have to include all the humans who have ever lived on earth.  This subsequent tally of humanity would include every ‘human’ in our evolutionary past; everything relevant to the estimation of the homo-sapiens nature would be valid in an estimation of our human nature.

By the above expansion of our definition, Pithecanthropus Erectus would be as human as you or I, and you may not yet have reason to dispute this. Of course, what that means is that we have spent the greater part of the last one hundred and fifty years avoiding a definition of our humanity in such a way that has led us to over simplify just what the ethical or moral nature of the human is or could be–perish the thought of someone saying should, I have heard others say with the tip of my tongue firmly placed into the soft fleshy spot at the center of a circle I might be able to draw on the inside of my cheek. What then must we do about this thing we call humanity in a world that debases the idea of humanity as it undermines its own notion of the humane, of what we could or should call natural and what we should call civilized, another word undefined by sound bites disseminated in more grotesque forms over social media. The Internet has the potential to be one of the greatest tools for greater democratization or Orwellian control.

There is one should after another in perpetuity for cultivating the humane–here is not where this will be delineated; each should will have to be determined and thus followed by us in common or community, but not without the necessary literacy, I say in complete prejudice for all things written well–something our current pedagogy of failure has mismanaged, almost on purpose.

There is validity for the objective and the subjective views, positions, arguments; each is separate from the other, distinct in its own right, yet mutual and even reciprocal with the other.

There is even validity for a collective understanding of this new or re-newed sense of Humanity.