(6 minute read)

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Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Viktor E. Frankl

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.

Dalai Lama

The greatness of humanity is not in being human, but in being humane.

Mahatma Gandhi

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

George Orwell

Umm, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

I’ve been told that asking …what does it mean to be human? is a big question.

I have spent a lifetime trying to find the answer and have clocked more days living than I have left.

The problem is time is running out and there has been more written about it than I can ever know.

What does it truly mean to be human? has plagued a few of us since the beginning of time.

Given the time we are living in, is there a more valid question?

What does it mean to be human is really asking what kind of human should we be?

I have also heard the question …what does it mean to be fully human? Fully? As if one decides to fill the tank or just put enough in to get to work and back?

The answer to the question has varied over time.

For example, at one time in a “Christian nation” like early America, owning slaves, condemning homosexuality, participating in American apartheid, or not dancing on the Sabbath was considered to be what it meant to be “fully human.”

Today, the majority of the American people reject these beliefs.

If you are a follower of Confucius, being fully human means adhering to the Five Constant Relationships, where one commits to the “development of the internal self” that eventually extends to family, community, nation, and all humanity.

On the other hand, Hinduism believes that to be fully human is to believe that we are many layers. Body, consciousness, subconscious, and Being. “Smaller than the atom, greater than the greatest, an individual but the universe, nothing, and yet, Divine Being,”

The Human Experience

Well, here comes the academic part.

The human experience is made up of a systematic collection of activities, knowledge, skills, and wisdom that start from our very first breath til the last.

We “grow” within the human experience via families, neighbors, communities, institutions, and cultural, interest, or political groups by creating collective, grounding, and growing knowledge as we go.

If we are fortunate enough in life we are introduced to the “humanities,” like art, music, literature. All of which are meant to introduce and inform us of the “human condition.”

Romance, betrayal, passion, hatred, relationships, war, peace, life, death, success, failure, everything a human being is expected to experience in a lifetime.

The humanities aren’t scary if you realize that they are meant to convey meaning through the telling of stories.

Engaging with blobs of paint, musical notes, or words arranged on a page we are given the opportunity to learn about each other, the world, cultures, traditions, and history.

We call them “the humanities” because they expose us to the ideas of what it means to be fully human.

Those who have no appreciation for that experience are truly missing out.

But I understand that there are those who refuse to even consider the humanities merit.

They have the right not to consider the experience and I have the right to say they are missing out.

So just what is the criteria of what it means to be human?

What do we use to aid in our definition? Religious convictions, ethical considerations, philosophical, political, economic, social status, etc.?

In the pervious series of columns I introduced the idea that video game enthusiasts find they would rather spend more time in their cyber worlds than in “reality.”

For gaming enthusiasts, “reality is broken.”

Compared to the exciting cyber world of online gaming, people (parents, teachers, government, religious officials etc.) and the institutions they represent (families, communities, schools, mayors, governors, senators, etc.) leave a lot to be desired for the gamer.

That “stuff” is just not as exciting enough.

Of course it is not only gamers that think reality is broken.

The surge of social media, arguably the “new social disease,” has left us little more than thinking the country is ready to tear itself apart.

The label “social disease” comes from someone that has been a champion/user of new media since the early 90s.

This country has always had many groups with divergent viewpoints.

Politically, there are two major but very different ideologies on what these United States should look like.

By default those ideologies define what we think it means to be human.

There are those that think democracy is “of the people, for the people, and by the people.”

Then there are those that think democracy is made up of an elite class that has the right to enslave others with their ideals.

We have been here before and can draw reference from those prior experiences.

That division has a long and storied history in the states.

To be sure, it dates back to a time when Colonials refused to no longer recognize the English monarchy.

But we only need to go back a century-and-a-half earlier in relating to recent divisions.

On April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor.

Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that ‘all men are created equal,’ but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors.

In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.

Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American, Nov. 27, 2024

[Thomas] Mann [a] Nobel Prize winner in exile …emerged as the preeminent German spokesman against Hitler. [Mann] warned Americans of the rising threat to democracy, which for him was inseparable from humanism. ‘We must define democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.’

[Today in] driving our democracy into hatred, chaos, and violence …we succumb to the impulse to escape our humanness …

[A] decent society has to be built on a foundation deeper than politics: the belief that …we human beings …share a common destiny.

George Packer, The Atlantic, The Magic Mountain Saved My Life, Pg. 86, Dec. 2024

“You see? There’s just not enough kindness in the world.”

Mr. Peters, played by Sidney Greenstreet, The Mask of Dimitrios, 1944, Warner Brothers Studios

Read Part 2 of The Human Experience