Morning Open Thread: What Makes Us HUMAN?

This author, who is on Pacific Coast Time, may sometimes show up later than when the post is published. That is a feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.

So grab your cuppa, and join in!

When I am sad, my dog recognizes it, and tries to comfort me. She doesn’t know why I am sad, only that something is wrong. So Sympathy can transcend the barriers between species.

Animals feel anger, fear, lust, love, loyalty, hunger, happiness, sadness, loneliness, pleasure, contentment — even a sense of their individuality, which means they can be embarrassed (watch a cat take an unexpected tumble). Animals can learn behavior, especially skills and choices which will mean survival or perpetuation of their species — cranes dance, birds sing, ants and bees build homes, wolves hunt together so there is more food for all, elephants remember past events and mourn their dead, horses have a sense of humor, whales and dolphins have their own languages and rival us in intelligence.

So what defines Human?  I think it is Empathy and Imagination.

Empathy is Sympathy combined with Imagination. When we see another person experiencing a strong emotion, the first step to Empathy is thinking: “How would I feel if this were happening to me?” Then we search for memories of events in our lives which have made us feel that emotion. What we remember may be totally unrelated to what is happening to this other person, but it’s not the event that matters, it’s how that event made us feel. This connection goes much deeper than sympathy. It allows us, at least to some extent, to see ourselves in the other person. At that moment, it transcends all differences, beyond Culture, Language, Religion, Race or Gender.

And it is our Imagination, for both better and worse, which has created Civilization.

Much of what is happening now in America has been caused by a massive loss of Empathy and Imagination. Because, while these are inherent parts of being Human, we can be trained to ignore them, or battered into suppressing them. This has been going on in public education for almost five generations now, because the best way to encourage these traits is through The ARTS, which have been systematically stripped out of the public education curriculum as “unnecessary” and “too expensive.”

Study after study shows the high value of Music skills which transfer directly to better cognition in mathematics, the value of the Visual Arts in improving the mind’s ability to think and perceive, the discipline of Dance in training our bodies and giving us a safe outlet for our emotions, and Theatre Arts in teaching us empathy for people who are unlike ourselves, and helping us understand our own thoughts and feelings.

Learning these skills makes us better people.

The rudimentary “Reading, ‘Riting and ‘Rithmetic,” so touted by the Right as all that students need to be taught, do nothing to improve people, they only make us  employable as minimally skilled, and easily disposable, Labor.

The constant mantra that political parties on the Right and Left are “the same” has caused many Americans to opt out of voting. Only Far Right fanatics seem  unaffected by this — they vote in every election, while the Left is far more fickle, and this has shifted the balance of power more and more to the Right, meaning more slashes to public education, fewer people exposed to the Arts, and more and more people with less and less Empathy and Imagination.

Our movies, computer games, and television programs are increasingly brutal bloodbaths — or “real life” sexual fantasies, that pander to voyeurism passed off as romance — which further blunt our sensibilities. It’s not any single version of these kinds of films, games and programs that’s a problem, it’s their overwhelming number, and the paucity of any other types of entertainment. One piece of ‘Death-By-Chocolate’ Cake isn’t really harmful, but a steady diet of only processed foods and high-sugar soft drinks is injurious to our health, just as an endless stream of only Violence and Lust dulls our feelings of connection with other people, especially anyone we’ve been taught to think of as Those People, who are not only different from us, but somehow Less Human.

It then becomes so much easier to scream invective at a woman wearing hijab; to vote for deporting people who have crossed our borders seeking a better life; to carry signs demanding we turn away refugees, even small children, as “threats to national security.”  So much easier to put a flag on your vehicle from a “nation” which hasn’t existed since 1865 that came into existence to only defend and expand slavery; to demand a “whites only” country where men rule over women, “like it says in the Bible” which you haven’t really read because it’s hard for you to understand all those old words that nobody uses anymore. So much easier to vilify all “Rednecks” and Fundamentalists as thugs and mindless idiots, to ridicule people whose ignorance is no fault of their own, but caused by the dumbing down of public education. To see only evil in people who are not “enlightened” like Us.

Each of us has played some part in fracturing our country into Us and Them. This I see in myself just as I see it in the Teapublicans I detest.

Too many people are terrified of everyone around them, regardless of whether we lean Left or Right politically, and some of us on both sides have real cause to be frightened. Negative experiences also blunt our ability to feel Empathy. 

The Golden Rule can slip so easily from “Do unto to others as you would have them do unto to you” to “Do unto to others as they have done to you” and then tumbles into the deep dark of “Do unto to others before they do it to you.” 

America desperately needs a Rebirth of Empathy and Imagination. Time to be fully Human together.

I have no grand plan to get us there, I only believe with all my being that this is where we must go. 

G’Morning MOTlies!