What is “Relearning Humanity” About?
When we speak of treating animals “humanely,” we’re speaking of a few different things. We’re talking about keeping animals free of pain and fear. We’re talking about making sure they have sufficient food, water, shelter, warmth, shade, and whatever other environmental controls are necessary for life and an acceptable level of comfort. But we also go a step further. We talk of letting the animal express its true nature. Farmer and author Joel Salatin calls this “letting a chicken express its ‘chicken-ness.'”
What does this mean? It means we let the animal do what it feels biologically or instinctively compelled to do. A chicken can live in a cage, but it prefers to forage and scratch in the dirt. A duck doesn’t need to splash around in water to survive, but it’s a lot happier if it can. A monkey can be properly nourished and free from injury even if it’s not permitted to climb and swing in the treetops, but what kind of life is that?
Imagine for a moment that you’re a scientist from another planet studying the inhabitants of Earth. You’ve captured some humans, and you want to treat them “humanely.” What kind of space would you design for them? What features would it have? What activities would you provide for them? If you wanted to study them in a state of maximum happiness, what kind of life would you have to create for them?
I don’t claim to have the answers to these questions, but I believe that the answers do exist. Perhaps there are wide ranges, and each individual (and each culture, etc.) has different requirements and tolerances. But whatever the specifics are, I believe there are conditions that will make people happier than other conditions. A Polynesian fisherman is probably going to feel out of his element in an environment that simulates a call center in Toronto, for example.
Furthermore, I believe that there is a definite range of conditions that apply to us all. There may be outliers who are happiest in prison, or in water up to their necks for weeks at a time, or in freezing weather–or even in a call center in Toronto–but I think the majority of us wouldn’t be. We may acclimate. We might be able to tolerate it and even learn to find some level of contentedness under such conditions. We’re an adaptable species. But I think that for us to be genuinely happy, certain conditions have to be met, and that, within certain ranges, there exist such preferences that are common to us all. There is something finite that we can pin down and call the “human-ness” that a humane caretaker would have to let us express.
I think, then, that we should strive to understand as well as we can what human-ness entails, to live as humanly as possible, and to help create a world where others can also fully express their human-ness. That is, I think we should treat ourselves and each other humanely. To do that, we first have to know what it means to treat a human humanely, and then we have to commit to doing it.
We evolved over millions of years to become something specific and to fill a unique role in our environment. I believe that we derive our greatest satisfaction from most fully being that “something specific” and fulfilling that role. Further, I believe that if we are all living self-actualized lives–if we’re all being our full selves and feeling happy–the world would be a better place overall. Not Utopia. Desires can come into conflict; indeed, encountering and resolving such conflicts may be one of the things we need to do to feel fulfilled. But still, I think we’d all be a lot safer and happier and generally better off if we aren’t surrounded by people experiencing dysfunction–and that dysfunction could largely be eliminated by seeing that everyone’s needs are met.
I think such a world would look very different than the one we’ve created for ourselves.
If we lived in a world where everyone was committed to making this planet a humane habitat for humans…
…we wouldn’t have hundreds of workers in China threatening to kill themselves by jumping off the top of the Foxconn factory together. I doubt there’d even be a Foxconn factory to jump off of.
…we wouldn’t have class wars, because classes would be obsolete. When everyone has enough of everything they need, ambition means something different.
…agriculture wouldn’t be destroying the Earth. Feeding ourselves would have no more impact on the environment than would any other species feeding itself.
…depriving others wouldn’t make us feel richer.
…profit would not motivate people to endanger others. We’d see social connections as our greatest resources; a reputation for benevolence as our greatest capital.
I believe that if we can find what we were meant to be, we can use this understanding to shape our governments, our work, and our lives. This isn’t a new idea. For millennia, religions and political movements have pushed back against all the wrongness they see in the world. Typically, though, they’ve built themselves around intellectual abstractions. Whether they’ve drawn on religious scriptures, logic, or other systems of philosophy, few have looked to nature for guidance. None that I’m aware of have trusted the wisdom of human instinct.
To be sure, there have been those who looked to nature after the fact to find evidence to lend credibility to what would otherwise be a weak or shady assertion. Social Darwinism comes most readily to mind. People who were already greedy and exploitative heard in Darwin’s theory of evolution ideas that sounded like they justified their pre-existing vices, vices they expressed in the wholly unnatural institutions of industrialism and venture capitalism. Such philosophies fail because they cherry pick supporting evidence and discard all the rest. Too often they exist simply to be apologists for our failings. Evidence from the natural world is, to them, a means to an end alone, not an actual teacher. An honest approach would accept Nature on her own terms, and use the lessons learned to build systems that respect our basic humanity.
And here’s the good news! The world we’ve created–the world of global empire and industrialism–is crumbling. Many of the things that have prevented us from being fully human are starting to slip away. The ceiling is evaporating into mist. As government and corporate despots find their power dwindling (and if they’re not yet, they will be soon enough) people will be free to stand straight up and live as Nature spent millions of years building us to live.
As I said before, though, this isn’t Utopia. While abundance (and those who have it) may cease to oppress us, scarcity no doubt will. It used to be that most people were farmers. Before that, nearly ALL humans were hunters or gatherers or trappers or fishermen. Today, particularly in the industrialized world, most people are far more cut off from the origins of their food. They don’t know how to procure food outside a system where they work for money and trade it at a grocery store that they drive to in a car. They don’t know how to build homes or make clothes or even how to get the materials and tools to do so…again, outside of our present economic system. Our technology has blinded us to the basic knowledge of how to take care of ourselves.
As the cheap fuel runs out, as economies and nations collapse, as stock markets and banks and the industrial food system and our entire manufacturing and distribution system for consumer goods crumbles over the coming decades, many will be hungry. Many will suffer. Many will die. Who today knows how to make medicines from the plants around their home to relieve pain and cure disease? Who knows how to build a wagon, let alone how to get animals to pull it where you want it to go? And who’s around to teach us?
There are some. Scattered here among us, like dandelion seeds in a well-manicured lawn, just waiting for the right moment to spring forth in all their dazzling, code-defying glory, are people who’ve embraced parts of their human-ness that most have rejected or suppressed. These geeks–the historical re-creationists, the sustainable ag students, the spinners and knitters, the alternative energy engineers, the herbalists and survivalists and dowsers that are all pretty weird but nonetheless seem happy doing their own thing–these are the people who will carry us through. These are our Noahs, our Moseses, our Jesuses and Mohammads. They will teach us how to live well in this new world.
This blog will largely be about drawing on the wisdom of these people and presenting it to an audience hungry to learn. But more than that, it will be about creating a world that is humane toward humans. It’s about learning how to live without the systems that oppress us, and using this knowledge to make those systems disappear.
relearninghumanity 