Humanity Aspires

A pitch for retaining faith in humankind, even in the dark times we are living through.

My sister (I don’t think she would mind me sharing such a notorious fact with the public) is a huge fan of the Korean pop group, BTS. The band has split up for now, but its seven members are still pursuing solo careers; and some of the global fandom that grew up around their music remains obsessively devoted.

I’ll never forget one story that my sister told me from the band’s heyday. A few years back, my sister was in touch with a fellow BTS fan in another hemisphere: Venezuela, to be specific. This fan told her that her country was in the midst of one of the rolling power blackouts they have experienced intermittently for years.

She said it was a really scary time in her country. The government was arresting people. Everything was dark at night. People were looting. Yet—she managed to bond with my sister over their shared loved of a K-pop group, despite living thousands of miles apart, and under such radically different circumstances.

I think back to that episode now, when Venezuela is everywhere in our headlines—but for terrible reasons: namely, because our government rounded up innocent people from that country, jailed them, lied about them, and illegally deported them to a black-site dungeon in El Salvador. All because they dared to ask for asylum from persecution.

Faced with the abject evil of what our government is doing to these refugees—it’s easy to succumb to a kind of misanthropic despair. “Man is the greatest enemy of man,” as the philosopher David Hume once wrote. “Oppression, injustice, contempt […] calumny, treachery, fraud; by these they torment each other.”

But then I think back to that story my sister told. That too, I realize, is part of human nature. The same species that is capable of such monstrous cruelty is likewise able, at times, to bring the light of friendship, across distant borders, into the heart of a rolling blackout, merely through a shared love of pop music.

And I realize all over again that the wonder of human life is not that we are capable of evil. After all, that is no surprise. It’s what we’d expect of an animal species, conceived in darkness, ignorant of the vast universe that surrounds it, and weighed down with all the crude drives of its evolutionary inheritance.

The astonishing fact about human beings is that we ever thought of doing anything better than that. It’s not that we “torment each other”—as Hume phrased it—that should give us pause; but that—living under such precarious conditions as we do; isolated as we appear to be in the universe—we ever conceived of the idea of doing good to each other.

As a modern French novelist wrote of our paradoxical species:

“This vile, unhappy race, barely different from apes, which nevertheless carried within it such noble aspirations. Tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome and infinitely selfish, it was sometimes capable of extraordinary explosions of violence, but never quite abandoned its belief in love." (Wynne trans.)

Or, as the English poet Stevie Smith once expressed it, when she was writing in a similar vein:

Man aspires

To good,

To Love

Sighs;

Beaten, corrupted, dying

In his own blood lying

Yet heaves up an eye above

Cries, Love, love.

It is his virtue needs explaining,

Not his failing.

The human animal may be but a “feeble tenant of an hour/ Debased by slavery or corrupt by power” as Lord Byron once put it. We may put people in jails and gulags without trial; inflict insensate, meaningless violence upon the innocent; populate our cosmos with demons of our own invention; and all around “realize in this world the imaginary hell of the other,” as a French philosopher once put it. (Volney; Eckler trans.)

It may be that human beings are capable of the most extraordinary forms of gratuitous cruelty—cruelty that no animal in nature would ever inflict, for—as Voltaire observes in the Treatise on Tolerance: “wild animals kill only to eat, whereas we [humans] have exterminated one another over a parcel of words.” (Masters trans.)

It may well be that “man is the greatest enemy of man,” as Hume said; that “Man hands on misery to man,” as the poet Philip Larkin once echoed; it may be, in short, that all the misanthropic wisdom of the ages is true; the charge has been read; the indictment is valid; our species stands convicted.

But why should that astonish us? The miracle is that we ever became something more than that—that we ever aspired to better. “It is [our] virtue needs explaining,” as Smith said above—“not [our] failing.”

Nature—the “war of all against all”—the battle for survival in the jungle—could surely have taught us Hate without our help. The fact that we taught ourselves Love, in spite of it, is what should surprise us.

As one of the Enlightenment thinkers referenced above elsewhere put it (Volney; Eckler trans.) (in the unfortunately gendered language of the time—for which I encourage you to substitute collective pronouns of your choice):

Yes, man is made the architect of his own destiny; he, himself, hath been the cause of the successes or reverses of his own fortune; and if, on a review of all the pains with which he has tormented his own life, he finds reason to weep over his own weakness or imprudence, yet, considering the beginnings from which he sat out, and the height attained, he has, perhaps, still reason to presume on his strength, and to pride himself on his genius.