Human Self-Obsession
We rarely escape our human categories, and it keeps our minds narrow
We often hear about the “human condition” in literature and philosophy, as I perceive it mostly in the sense that to capture this fleeting concept is the highest form of art1. Fiction becomes literature when it makes profound points about what it means to be human. Some of the most celebrated pieces of art critique human society, and thus describe the state of, and prescribe changes to, the human condition.
This so deeply anchored into how we make art that it would be quite difficult indeed to find a work of literature without any humans in it. Relatable characters, i.e., insights into our own lives, are what make a book good. It should not surprise us that we are the protagonists of our own books: of course we would only buy books that are relevant to us. Art is human culture, is human emotion. We don’t know any art made for another intelligent species, so that is all that art is.
Thus it is only logical, maybe according to the market, that our culture developed this way. Still I find this state of affairs lacking. It seems to be selfish to associate so important a concept as art exclusively with our feelings. Even many works that shift the focus away from humanity, like the movie Avatar, are about humanity in the end: the aliens in Avatar are basically tribal humans, and then the whole point of the movie is only to critique humanity, or those parts of it that engage or did engage in colonialism.
Why should “human” be the foremost category, a concept almost synonymous with “moral”? Even the crudest megalomaniacs, like those leading in Silicon Valley, often frame their conquests in terms of “advancing humanity”. Not without reason is the end goal of artificial intelligence development of a human-level intelligence2. Why limit such a great tool in terms of emotions dictated by natural selection? Even now do we limit our “AI” in human language—quite selfishly assuming that anything that can replicate our ramblings semi-coherently must be intelligent.
The competitiveness necessitated by evolution steers our thinking into narrow roads littered with images of other people, other humans. The most positive things which could happen in our lives—marriage, children, winning the lottery (receiving a bunch of paper with human faces on it that one can use to make other humans do what you want) or a sports competition—are defined by convincing another human to tolerate you, creating a new human, or eclipsing other humans in some realm. The negatives—losing your job or a leg, or becoming an outcast in your social circle—are defined by how others see you; except for losing the leg, which is only concerned with your own human body.
But why should all this be important? Think about it: if you were an alien, looking at Earth from above, what would you think about what we call politics and geopolitics? What are they but a more sophisticated version of wolves pissing in the woods to mark their territory? Why should there be a transcendent value in a love song? What is love if not evolution wiring your brain to reward reproduction? I should hope that there is truth beyond a human perspective. Going from there, is there universal art?
Maybe there could be art that we and a race from another planet could agree on. If our minds are shaped by evolution, and evolution is to be found wherever there is life, maybe intelligent life is to some extent always accompanied by a sense for art. If that were case, we might find that our definition of art could be agreed upon universally. That is a purely academic consideration without any aliens to ask, of course.
But let’s imagine an alien race we cannot explain ourselves to. Maybe there is a species that functions more like our computers than like us. Maybe natural selection led them to jettison the strong emotionality which is useful in a hunter-gatherer context in favor of a cold calculating mind more suited to interaction with other intelligent beings. Another species could be imagined where the parents always die in childbirth. Motherhood, fatherhood, parenthood are central parts of the “human condition”, and we could not perfectly communicate our concepts to them. If there are millions of alien races, the lowest common denominator would be vanishingly small, the intergalactic lingua franca’s dictionary nothing more than a small booklet.
In a smaller context, that of our home planet, we already live through this: we cannot explain our “human condition” to dogs and horses. Most people seem to assign to animals less rights than humans—not without reasons is one of the most foundational charters on Earth the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most people seem not to have a problem with this; it is enough to be good, to be bad in the eyes of others (meaning other humans—the word “humane” shares etymological roots with “human”); it is enough to be better, to be worse than other men and women, not necessarily in galactic terms.
Neither am I an exception. When I read non-fiction, it is mostly history, i.e., accounts of wildly imperfect humans leading us from disaster to terrible disaster without it ever seeming to get better. When I read fiction, it’s the same human fiction everybody else reads. When I shave in the morning, I do it to appear well-groomed, in the eyes of others. I don’t think this is really that hypocritical; I am only thinking out loud here about the curios nature of our arrogant and supremacist attitude held by almost our entire species—that doesn’t make me any less human.
What leads me to think like this is my individualism. I am not defined by my “nationality”, my skin or eye color, or my last name. To ascribe any deeper meaning to such broad categories (nationalists who think a people are as a whole the protagonists in a dime-store novel; leftists who think it’s the working classes) is a foolish disrespect to one’s own intellect. From those beliefs, it is easy to make the next step: humanity, human-ness, too, is a collectivist category existing separately from the self as an intellectual being. In other words, humanity is not a prerequisite to rationality, but the other way around—and there could be other rational actors who are not human, and I cannot assert that human categories like “beautiful” and “tragic” would carry any value in a conversation with them.
Unfortunately I cannot decouple my intellect from my brain which more often than not controls my intellectual facilities through hormones and illusions. Unfortunately I cannot help but think of human suffering as the biggest tragedy there is. Unfortunately the most beautiful pieces of art I know have humanity as their focal points. This is unfortunate, though, only insofar as it is irrational and leads me to assign value to objectively irrelevant things. Being human, I, of course, enjoy being a prisoner of these categories. I, too, like it when the Avengers win against Thanos. Being an individualist I can say that intellectual consistency does not have to be first and foremost in my thinking—I can choose to be a narrow-minded human and be fine with it. But I would like others to think a little more about this.
When you do think about this a bit, political parties and states become farcical. Groups of humans are they, running a scam with elaborate abstract symbols to appear like just another part of the environment. Agreements become holy text, job titles become identities, murder of individuals becomes righteous, when these human groupings are made in our minds the gods of our world.