Warning, Theological Anthropology Ahead
I’ve held varying opinions on what it means to be human throughout the years. There were the high school debates brought on by Lord of the Flies about our inherent goodness or evil.
There was the time that total depravity dominated the landscape of my anthropology.
It stands in contrast to the positive psychology phase that I think every therapist goes through, whether brief or long-term.
Then there was the doctoral phase of my life when people became persons in context. They were a long-winded product of evolution and environment.
Nowadays, I live in a hybrid space about humanity. Are we deeply impacted by our environments? Yes. Do our genetics play a role in our capacities to react and respond? Sure. Do our inherited epigenetics influence us in historical ways passing down trauma, grief, depression, anxiety, which color and shape our interpretations and capacities in the world? Damn skippy they do.
We are, simply put, complex. We are prone to protective responses to the world, and we dream, imagine, and co-create novel ways of moving through the world. Are we good, are we evil, is it inherent or learned, is it passed down or created through experience? Yes, to all of those.
There is probability and possibility in all of us; there is certainty and creativity; there is reaction, response, reason, and reflection. We all have great potential, and we’ve set up systems that lack the kind of equity needed for all of us to embrace that potential.
There is an ideal world where we’re all seen with the clarity of our potential and best moments in mind, and there’s the reality of yesterday and today, which shape our tomorrows.
In a vacuum, there’s absolutely nothing scientific, theological, cultural, or ethical that points to a significant difference between human beings. The differences we share contribute to the co-creativity of the world.
In reality, we choose to make difference the center point of our antagonism. We seem to prefer settling for creating hierarchies that separate, categorize, and demonize difference.
Theologically, we like to make declarations based on biased readings of sacred texts. Texts, mind you, that were written by historically and culturally conditioned human beings who were trying to answer the same questions we are today. What are human beings, and why should God give a shit about us?
Do I have an answer for you? Of course. Do I have the answer? No.
So, here’s the data that feeds my response. Human beings evolved, throughout the years, to conserve certain capacities. In more recent times, environmental conditions have impacted the human genome (epigenetics).
We are shaped by the experiences of our mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and their relatives. These are small changes that influence our response to the world around us. All of us are impacted by the genetics of our parents, there is no neutral birth, no blank slate. Yet, there is.
Shaped by, influenced by does not always mean determined. If environmental conditions changed their genetics, it can change ours as well. So, some things can be overcome, some things can be reimagined, retold, and reworked to increase our capacities to navigate a sometimes hostile world.
There is trauma, and there is post-traumatic growth. Humanity has the capacity to experience and navigate both under certain conditions. We are people with a context, predisposed to certain evolutionary reactions, limited at times by our genetic history, and creative as hell.
This means that we can be overcome by our most basic instincts, and we can overcome them as well. It means we aren’t fixed beings, drawn into binaries of evil or good, but complex entities that are doing the best we can given our limitations for navigating the world.
It’s those limited perspectives that often get us into trouble. Taking a limited perspective makes us generalize our experiences. This often has the effect of limiting the co-creative choices others can make. It pigeonholes and others people to the point of causing trauma and harm (othering is the psychological definition of evil in my book, othering turns people into objects rather than allowing them to be themselves).
Often, this othering is done with the intent of protecting an individual’s identity and ego. We can’t take being wrong, accepting the pain of the moment, or doing the hard work of change. Instead, we push against difference in order to make ourselves seem stronger. We hold up our views of the world as absolute in order to protect against views that challenge us to be and become more.
This is humanity. A complex mix of trauma, grief, wonder, and imagination. A creative bundle of muscle, bone, and neurons trying to find their place and their people in the world. We’re an evolving unfinished amalgamation of who we were, how we act, and who we long to be. We’re compassionate and hard. We’re like everyone, even more like some others, and unlike anyone before us.
A lot of the decisions we make come down to whether we protect and preserve or persevere and claim our potential. Likewise, we have the choice of whether we can offer these spaces to others as well. It’s not just about us and the possibilities we see. Humanity is not about individuals, try as we might to make it about me.
Humanity is about we. I fall into this trap as much as anyone. I believe that when we talk about humanity, we’re talking about the individual me, rather than the collective we.
Time and again we’ve learned that humanity is built on social networks and community. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the individual is the primary unit of measurement for humanity. It doesn’t make sense.
We are social creatures. If you look back at this writing, you’ll see that woven throughout it are the threads of relationship. There is no creativity or imagination without a relationship to the world and our experience of it. Likewise for trauma and grief. Without relationships these do not exist.
Any sense of why I matter has to be reframed to why we matter. There is no me without you. We form in concert and in reaction to our experiences of the world. We set up and tear down systems based on relationships to people and resources.
These questions of whether we’re inherently good or evil seem superfluous in the context of relationships (it’s the act and intent rather than the internal quality). We’re attributing to someone’s character what may be inherent in the systems they’ve experienced. If the system changed, would the “character flaw” abate?
So, what does all this mean? For me, it means we’re not fixed. We’re malleable creatures with certain capacities and even more capacity for change. It means that personalities and proclivities and ideas and dreams and faults change with time.
It means there is no normal, no ideal to compare ourselves to. The myriad ways we form over time ensure that our reaction to an experience is ours, and it’s distinct. Without a true normal, difference is the primary lens through which we should see others. Our goal ought to be curiosity in the face of difference, not protection as we often seek.
It means that sometimes our propensity to protect harms others. For those times we need to be held accountable and responsible for the harm we’ve done. It means that whatever you do, you do in community, because whatever you do, impacts communities.