Being Human
What is involved in being human?
Awareness, care, kindness, foresight, justice, compassion, consciousness of mortality.And a cleverness that enables us to devise systems that confine us and have us acting against our better natures and against the sources of life. We are a very advanced species, we create and live by symbols, and we kill not out of natural necessity, but out of loyalty to those symbols: we kill for principles. But that would be to be inhumane, wouldn’t it? We can do better. And we know we can. As long as we remain on nodding terms with our capacity to respond to suffering, cruelty and injustice, then we will be possessed with the concern to identify and overcome the sources of error and seek truth, goodness and beauty in our relationships to each other and to other species and to the Earth. Now that would be to be human, wouldn’t it? Call it not so much being human as becoming human. Probably everyone who addresses the question of being human recognises the principle of interrelationship, with respect to human and natural communities. The time has come to live it. It's actually in acting that we change the odds that reason and logic say are against us. One of my favourite writers is Lewis Mumford and I sometimes quote him in this respect: ‘the difficult we do immediately; the impossible will take a little longer’. “The impossible missions are the only ones that succeed.”