Abandonded: The Necessity of Humanism

Part of the reason I started this blog was to have a place to put up some pieces I wrote years ago. I have since decided that only one of them deserves it, but it doesn’t make any sense unless you’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (and to a lesser extent his sequel Lila, though I wouldn’t wish that on anyone). It also references ideas laid down in the other pieces. I’m sure everyone reading this is now jumping to read Zen etc., so I will briefly talk about the other ideas, which I had intended to develop for an essay contest for The Humanist magazine and which I called “The Necessity of Humanism.”

It basically boils down to the connection between caring and understanding and how they would solve everything. (I was in college; don’t people always solve the world’s problems in college?) If people cared about themselves enough to understand themselves, even love themselves, that would allow them to care for others and at least attempt to understand others. Understanding others is the real crux. On some level it’s obvious: if people understood each other, they would be better able to solve their problems and resolve their differences. So many problems are brought about by a simple lack of understanding. (BTW there is a good TED talk about Empathy that is relevant here.) 

But the other problem is that people don’t want to understand each other. They might end up being wrong! (Also a good TED talk.) It is so much easier to tear down a caricature of what someone else believes, and there you have modern political discourse. There is no philosophical fallacy that angers me more than the straw man. It is like saying, “I am going to ignore you and willfully misrepresent everything you believe in order to have the appearance of being right.” And it works most of the time because straw men are hard to recognize, especially to laymen, and even sometimes, the person attacking the straw man really believes the straw man is the real thing… because they don’t understand! Because empathy is hard, or uncomfortable, and takes effort, and because people don’t care. 

The lack of caring is the problem behind the problem, and why this utopian ideal of everyone understanding each other doesn’t happen. I think there are perhaps biological, or sociological, reasons why people don’t care about the Other, i.e. people that believe in different religions, look different, talk different, or live in the other valley. Survival might have once depended on killing those people, and demonizing the Other might make it easier to kill them, but humanity needs to grow up. And the only way for this to happen is for individuals to grow up.

But they won’t, and don’t, and it’s all very frustrating! I want to scream at everyone to wake up!! Care Bear Stare! (I totally had the ice cream one btw…)

Instead, all I can do is drink some wine and write this blog. For the good of humanity.