humanity

In Metamorphoses, Ovid wrote of a sculptor named Pygmalion, who fell so in love with his statue that it came to life. Researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson borrowed his namesake to describe a psychological phenomenon in education. When teachers are led to expect that certain students have immense potential for growth, those students perform better. Towards such students, teachers gave "more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval." The students internalized the labels, leading to a mutually reinforcing external-internal drive to succeed. As you'd expect, low expectations led to low performance. Both are examples of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Our material and social realities depend on belief. Confidence in yourself is a) a prerequisite to an attempt at something and b) empirically proven to boost your odds of success. As William James writes in "The Sentiment of Rationality," "Faith in a fact can help create the fact." Trust in strangers, in the knowledge and ability of others, undergirds society's functioning. Every civic good "is a result of the pre-existence of trust." It is no surprise that our oligarchs seek to dismantle community and sow seeds of doubt and hatred. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, argues that tyranny depends on a population stripped of the social bonds that foster trust. An atomized populace with dismal expectations of fellow humanity prophesies their reality. Thus, belief in the human race is not a passive observation but a contribution to the outcome.

Czech dissident and then President Václav Havel defines hope in Disturbing the Peace: "not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." Hope is the orientation of the spirit. In "Power of the Powerless", Havel tells a parable of a local greengrocer, who displays a pro-government sign in his window. He does it not because he believes it, but because he doesn't want trouble. Yet if one day he stops putting up the sign, he "lives in truth." He acts on his own dignity and convictions, even when every visible incentive says otherwise. This single refusal is threatening because it exposes the fragility of a regime built on collective pretense.

Belief in humanity 1) is a self-fulfilling prophecy and 2) must be maintained even within systems designed to destroy it.

The two certainties of life are birth and death. Is our fundamental essence one of beginnings or of ends, or both?

Let's first consider a mortality-facing politics. Figures like Heidegger cast humans as "beings-toward-death," whose inevitable demise frames existence. Death is as individual an event as there is. You must face it alone, and it is an absolute limit that cannot be outrun. While recognition of mortality can lead us to live authentic and bold lives, it can equally pull us away from active, worldly, public affairs. Death is the realm of the contemplator, the pessimist.

Or, there are politics that glorify death and martyrdom. Fascism and totalitarianism treat individual humans as superfluous and so destroy our agency, plurality, and dignity. The Hobbesian tradition organizes itself around the fear of violent death. Downstream is selfishness, nativism, patriarchy, and carceral logics.

But what of a birth-facing politics? Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, argues that our world is perpetually inundated with newcomers. Each birth is the beginning of someone unpredictable. In contrast to labor (biological processes) and work (the creation of things), action is the interdependent engagement among people. We use action to plunge into an uncertain future with boundless and irreversible consequences. We act in a web of relationships among equals, plagued by risk, spontaneity, and serendipity. Politics requires a durable, shared space for living people to speak, act, and build institutions together. We are unique not just in the sense of otherness or distinction, but because of our capacity to begin things. Arendt sees our world as the appearance and departure of "single individuals, unique, unexchangeable, and unrepeatable entities." Birth is the realm of the actor, the optimist.

Two social technologies make the complex and unpredictable dance of action bearable. The first is forgiveness. The past is the past, and it cannot be rewritten. The act of forgiveness frees the transgressor and the victim both from the endless chain reaction of past acts. Vengeance is its inverse, a blind and violent reaction that maintains the status quo. The second technology is the promise, throwing "islands of predictability" into the "ocean of uncertainty." They spawn a new assurance and build collective power.

Forgiveness is faith in another's future self. A promise is faith in your future self offered to another. Both are tools to remedy disappointment, to fortify belief in fellow humans.

I will end with a famous anecdote from the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl:

An elderly doctor was afflicted by severe depression after losing his wife of many years. He could not overcome the grief he felt, for she was everything to him. Frankl asked him, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” To which he said: "Oh, for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Frankl replied: “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering.” The doctor said nothing but shook his hand and calmly left.

The primary use of this story is to prove humanity's tolerance for meaningful suffering. Yet I also see a change in the man's perspective from a death-facing to a beginnings-facing outlook. In the former, the widower's life has already ended, and he is mournfully lingering in the world without purpose. In the latter, his life has begun anew, having brought meaning to tragedy and by doing so, closing that chapter and transforming your view of the past. By only staring ahead at doom, the many and varied threads of your life merge into one, converging on terminus. Yet looking back towards your own birth and the many beginnings and ends you've lived and weathered since, you can find comfort in your own plurality, your own unrepeatability.

One of the most read novels in high school classrooms is William Golding's Lord of the Flies. It begins with a plane crash that maroons a group of British schoolboys on a deserted island during a war. The young lads attempt self-governance before descending into violence and savagery. One boy is beaten and stabbed to death by a frenzied mob, and another boy's head is crushed with a boulder. The tragedy only ends when a naval officer comes to shore. He says, “I should have thought that a pack of British boys–you’re all British, aren’t you–would have been able to put up a better show than that.”

The book portrays human nature as selfish and primal. The boys might be more obvious with their savagery—covered in dirt, painted clay, and blood—than the prim and proper naval officer, but he, too, is fighting an unnamed war presumably filled with suffering and barbarism. It reinforces what Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal derisively calls "veneer theory." In his 2005 book Our Inner Ape, he criticizes the characterization of morality as "a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding an otherwise selfish and brutish nature." The proponents of veneer theory argue that there are no genetic ties between human morals and animalistic tendencies. Sometime in prehistory, we suddenly decided to be moral, rather than morality being an evolved attribute. On those grounds, as Hobbes argued, all human political organizations are artificial, covenants born of convenience or coercion. When removed from the confines of society, we return to our vicious state of nature.

This is not to mention the racist undertones of the naval officer's line above. Not even the civilized, Protestant lads of England could stop themselves from their primitive behavior.

Two bodies of evidence are crucial to consider before taking Golding's story to heart. First, let us examine the author himself. A chronic alcoholic all his life, Golding taught as a teacher at a grammar school in Salisbury, where he reportedly "divided pupils into gangs, with one attacking a prehistoric camp and the other defending it." Golding often expressed deep self-loathing. He wrote in his journals that he "enjoyed hurting people" and viewed himself as a monster. He attempted to rape a 15-year-old girl named Dora when he was 18 and at Oxford University. He privately excused his behavior because she was "depraved by nature" and, at 14, "already sexy as an ape". He was disgusting, reckless, and crude, and so perhaps not the moral paragon of human nature. I do not mean to equate the validity of his observation with his own personal failings, but is it not more than plausible to say that his depravity bled into his bleak worldview?

Now for the more interesting refutation of Lord of the Flies: a real-life example of its premise that played out very differently. In 1965, six indigenous Tongan teenage boys between the ages of 13 and 19 fled their Anglican boarding school. They stole a boat, a storm wrecked it, and they swam ashore to the abandoned, remote island of ʻAta. They dug a cave by hand and hunted seabirds for meat, eggs, and blood. They found an abandoned village in a volcanic crater and lived in its remnants. Surviving on feral chickens, wild taro, and bananas, the boys collected rainwater using hollowed logs. They equally divided the labor of gardening, guard, and kitchen duties among them. One of the boys started a fire, which they kept alive for more than a year. They made a ramshackle guitar and sang and wrote songs. They were found (15 months later!) by an Australian seafarer, completely healthy and in high spirits. All of this was retold by journalist Rutger Bregman when he tracked down the survivors decades later for his 2019 book Humankind.

In addition to this story, I could summon hundreds of examples of disasters bringing people together, of spontaneous cooperation and reciprocity emerging under the most dire circumstances. As disaster sociologists have found, it is often society's elites that do the panicking, while looting and rioting remain rare. My point is not that human nature is good, but that the presumption of savagery is empirically weak. Beyond that, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cynical expectations of fellow humans lead us to become cynical actors ourselves.

Asked whether he was an optimist or a pessimist, James Baldwin said:

“I can't be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.”

I remember the night of the 2024 election. I had worked from 5 AM until 1 AM. I was one of the few white, cis volunteers, and I remember sitting with the other canvassers at the end of the night. Trump's looming victory made me predict and worry about what was next for America. I thought of NATO, of the dollar, of ecology, of housing, of the S&P 500. It was a form of pessimism, an abstract and depersonalized pessimism. The other volunteers—overwhelmingly LGBTQ+, women, and/or of color—were confronting a much more intimate and harrowing reality. They were imagining a future where their passport's gender is denied, their federal-funded research is killed, their undocumented parent is deported. Yet it was their deep material, familial, and spiritual involvement that revealed a kind of optimism. Though tired and wracked with anxiety, they were already preparing for the next fight. I have found that those with seemingly the least evidence for belief in humanity are the ones most filled with hope and conviction.

That is because belief can either be a compliment in the existing form of something or a demand for a future version of that thing. Those satiated with the status quo believe because they benefit. But those locked out of power and privilege believe out of grace and aspiration. Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time that we "can make America what America must become."

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was both an ardent Calvinist and a committed socialist and pacifist. His insights on democracy and human nature best encapsulate what this pillar stands for: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." Belief in humanity must budget for the failings of humanity. Democracy cannot exist without checks and balances, as well as education. An agency multiplier, education teaches us that we are responsible for shaping the world rather than passively receiving it. In that way, optimism is born not out of blind faith but active and passionate participation in future-building.

I want to begin by acknowledging the biases of my authorship. I am a cisgender man with Eastern European, Jewish, and British heritage; I grew up in the middle class. I have had it easy, and that has undoubtedly skewed my belief in humanity towards goodness and decency.

Misanthropy, the hatred or distrust of humans and human nature, is a shallow and deconstructive worldview. Yet it is often leveled not at the human species but at what "man" has come to represent. Sylvia Wynter argues that "Man" has historically meant a specific Western bourgeois genre of the human, "overrepresenting" itself as the human as such. Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism speaks of a "pseudo-humanism..." that the rights of man have always been "narrow and fragmentary" in their application. He argues that colonization requires the "thing-ification" of the colonized, thereby removing them from the human community. Outrage only manifests after the brutal treatment of colonized peoples abroad is turned against whites at home. Franz Fanon closed in The Wretched of the Earth by calling not for humanism's abolition but for "a new humanism," to "set afoot a new man." Commensurate with Césaire, true humanism cannot coexist with system domination, forced labor, and cultural erasure.

The human category's fragility goes beyond race. Posthumanists like Donna Haraway argue that the borders between human/animal/machine are political fictions. The boundaries are policed to quash plurality and enforce homogeneity. Yet a belief in the human race spills over into the other wondrous life on Earth. In the grand scheme, "man" is an extremely new invention. As Foucault concludes The Order of Things, man is erasable "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." Misanthropy is an abandonment of the hard work of reshaping the human community. Recognizing its ephemerality and plasticity is empowering.

Other humans are fucking annoying. They crowd my space, they test my patience, they disrupt my comfort, they have bad opinions. But why then do I believe in justice? Fairness? Equity? The progressive capital gains tax or Medicare For All? Why is it so easy to fight for and aspire to universal human dignity while individual humans so often piss me off?

In the dense The Brothers Karamazov, the elder Zosima recalls a doctor's confession: "The more I love humanity in general, the less I love men in particular." He dreams of serving humanity, yet cannot stand being in a room with other humans. Zosima differentiates a "love in dreams," the craving of quick and admirable deeds, from the "labor and perseverance" of "active love." Later in the book, the Grand Inquisitor loves humanity so much that he robs them of their freedom. Humanity, to him, is so depraved that it must be kept in control through the dictatorial enforcement of Christian values. In contrast, Jesus kisses him after his long and cynical lecture, an act of radical, unconditional, and irrational love. Jonathan Swift wrote in a letter that he hates "that animal called man," but heartily loves John, Peter, and Thomas. Abstract love that curdles in proximity to the love-object is not love but delusion and vanity.

Camus famously said, "I rebel, therefore we exist." Of use to unpack this phrase is Robert Pirsig. He divides the contents of the Universe into Dynamic and Static Quality. The former is the ever-changing cutting edge of reality. It is pure, undefined, spontaneous freedom that drives the universe forward. The latter is left behind when Dynamic Quality becomes habituated. Static patterns provide order and familiarity and allow life to preserve what it has learned. Think of a moment when you touched a hot stove or fell off your bike or were in a car accident. There was a moment where you had no thoughts, opinions, or ideas—you were on the pre-conceptual edge of experience. Perhaps it felt like you were in slow motion. When forced from the Static to the Dynamic mode, things become strange, foreign, and uncomfortable. We constantly use thoughts and concepts (including "I") to defend ourselves against the cruel, random, and Absurd universe around us. They are our havens. And so we fall in love with concepts. We become comfortable feeding the real and messy to the clean and abstract. To Camus, our rebellion is one against inertia, to preconceived ways of living. His criticisms of total revolution—the dogmatic fight for a future utopia running ramshod over life and dignity—cost him the Parisian left-wing. We cannot sacrifice the flesh-and-blood humanity of the present to the yet-to-materialize humanity of the future.

The Utopian is thus someone with a sanitized view of humanity and creation. Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being defines kitsch as this aesthetic. It is the "absolute denial of shit," of daily bodily functions that remind us how messy and unpleasant being a human is. Kitsch is the attempt to pretend that such flaws don't exist. He imagines a person, watching children running on the grass, shedding two tears. The first tear arises from the thought, "How nice, children running on the grass." The second, from the thought, "How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass." It is the shared, collective emotional response—pure concept—that defines kitsch. He applies this to totalitarianism, kitsch's political form, for it demands a neat and tidy view of humans and human progress. Instead, recognize the shit and blood and guts of real political oppression and historical failure. See and appreciate the messiness and mortality and disability and queerness and plurality of our species. Believe in humanity, not despite but because of how fucking annoying it can be.