I had some interesting and thought-provoking comments about my 23^rd May Being Human post. As a result, I have had a re-think, and now propose the following framework upon which to add further ideas:

There are two changes: “Compassion” replaces “Empathy” and a fourth characteristic: “Conscience” has been added. Some explanations follow…

Compassion

I originally wrestled between this and “empathy”. It was pointed out that empathy is morally neutral and can be used for good or evil. On the one hand, empathy can lead to compassion and altruism; on the other hand, psychopaths and sexual predators groom their victims by exploiting their well-developed empathic skills. Compassion better represents the point I am trying to make.

Conscience

The suggested addition of “conscience” is, I think, an excellent one. It appears to me to be uniquely human and follows from our ability to place ourselves in time. We recall the experiences and lessons from our past lives and reflect on these in developing a moral framework for our future actions. It’s a kind of “moral matrix”, or prism, if you like. Although Shakespeare’s most acclaimed character remarks “conscience doth make cowards of us all”, I do believe that a conscience, consistently but responsively applied over time, earns a person greater respect. So, “conscience” makes it four, not three.

I’ve nothing new to add to my earlier remarks about “curiosity” and “competition” as such. But I do want to talk about the interrelation between these four human characteristics.

I placed conscience and curiosity at the base of my new diagram as I believe are, in some sense, “causes” and compassion and competition “effects”. Another way of putting it is that the bottom two are inward, almost mechanistic, components of the way we think and the upper two are the contrasting outward appearances of our actions. In practice, all four interact, but the left / right choice is also deliberate. Conscience and compassion are natural bedfellows, as are curiosity and competition.

An academic in, say, psychology or philosophy could say this is simplistic: it is, deliberately so. But my firm conviction is that an awful lot of fruitless argument and debate arises because the two parties haven’t agreed the basic assumptions from which they’re arguing. This is my attempt at establishing some ground rules!

Of course, it’s the actions that matter, and future posts will return to the balance and conflict between compassion and competition. But curiosity and, especially, conscience might get a look in too!

Normally, I’m not one for over-simplification. When I see TV and radio* programmes, journalists and politicians reducing a discussion to simplistic, black-and-white terms, I want to cry out: “But it’s not as simple as that….!”

Today, I’m going to break that rule completely and boil down the answer to the question:

“What does it really mean to be human?”

to some very basic concepts – three, in fact.

Let me first put this into some kind of context. Roughly speaking, human beings, our species homo sapiens, have been around for 200,000 years, with proto-humans for roughly 2 million. Over that time, we have spread from Africa over the whole planet (if you count the base station at the South Pole). And in that time, we have clearly become the “top” species in terms of our impact on life on Earth.

What is it that makes us so special? Well, clearly the development of language and “higher order” reasoning are often mentioned. Also, it’s often said that we are the only species to be aware of our mortality, but how we can know this I’m not sure!

This is all very well, but what, at its most basic, do we mean when we say someone “is only human”? Think of it in terms of a simple triangular diagram: Let’s explore each of these in turn.

Curiosity

Curiosity, or inquisitiveness, seems the most obvious human characteristic, so much so that it hardly needs explaining. Think of the look of wonder in a small baby’s eyes at it looks at a brightly coloured toy or rattle. Or, perhaps, think of the constant stream of questions from a back-seat four year old when you’re trying to navigate heavy traffic in a strange town!

All too often as we get older, that sense of joy and wonder in discovering new things seems to fade away. Some of us slide slowly into a safe world of fixed views and prejudices, with our ideas confirmed by a narrow group of friends and an equally narrow range of other sources of information. And yet, others manage to keep that child-like sense of questioning and searching for something new, right up to the day they die.

To me, curiosity is a kind of “umbrella” characteristic which informs and energizes the other two (which is why I put it at the top of the triangle).

Competition

Moving clockwise, we come to competition, perhaps better described as our competitive spirit. It’s the drive that makes us want to be winners, to make life better for ourselves and our loved ones. From our hunter-gatherer ancestors, competitiveness is associated with masculinity, and echoes of the role division between men and women from our earlier times persist today. Competition is much loved by politicians on the right.

For me, without competition, human beings, fewer in number, would still be contentedly eating nuts and berries in East Africa and what we call civilization would never have developed.

Empathy

Last, and by no means least, we come to empathy: the ability to imagine something from another person’s point of view. It’s the more compassionate, nurturing side of humanity, leading to ideas of fair play, altruism and group solidarity. Again, from primitive times, we tend to see empathy as feminine, not least because of the child-rearing role of women in traditional societies. Empathy and its derivatives tend to be the concern of politicians of the left.

Without empathy, I believe, we simply wouldn’t be here to discuss this – sometime over the past quarter of a million years, our unrestrained, aggressive selves would have wiped us off the face of the planet!

So there you have it: humanity summed up in just three words. I plan to use this framework to discuss some future topics: watch this space!

* Yes, I know you can’t see a radio programme!

What does it mean to be human? Much of the public debate in politics and other areas of life seem to cover the same narrow range of views about how we run a modern, prosperous western country like 21st century Britain. Too often it seems that human beings are reduced to the status of consumers, or economic units in an impersonalized world. People are increasingly defined by what they earn, what they consume and what economic value  – or burden – they are to society. Inequalities of wealth and income are increasing here and over the world, as capital flows freely and the free movement of people is increasingly confined to “the skilled”.

I want to use this blog to explore the underlying values behind this world view – and to challenge them. We need to reconsider some very basic assumptions about the way we view each other – or at least encouraged to do so.

My posts will be a mixture of serious and less so, some just downright silly, for fun. Life’s too short to be serious all the time.

My immediately next post is a spoof news item from 2019, reviewing four years of achievements of the Cameron Government. I wrote it as self-therapy two days after the election result was known. I hope it will bring some wry amusement.

Planned future posts include a look at the most basic elements of being human, a critique on free market economics, education, religion and humanism. Some views will no doubt be controversial, others perhaps more universally understood.

The bare bones only of this site exist so far: a short page about the site and the Rightspeak Dictionary – check it out! – which I hope will amuse and prompt lots of suggestions for additional words and definitions.

My thanks, dear reader, for getting this far. I will aim to make this blog a meandering journey around 21st century Britain. I plan to have some fun doing it – I hope you will come along and enjoy the ride!