Human Nature

HUMAN NATURE: AN ETHICAL CULTURE QUEST

What is the Ethical Culture view of human nature? What is the Ethical Culture definition of human being? Do human beings have worth?

It is human to ask questions about one's human being and to spin a narrative web of questions, answers, and more questions.

Ethical Culture has no singular explanation to these profound queries, although it does have an approach: it enters the stream, is the stream, of humanness, ethically reflecting. As the stream broadens, new visions present themselves. As the stream refines its path, potentialities become tendencies, impinging on the more certain:

We live, we breathe, we think, we die. We define ourselves in the context of others. We plan, we anticipate. We choose our behaviors before we act.

Our human journey began as two-legged, sentient, upright beings with mostly two opposed thumbs, ten fingers and ten toes. Yet this picture is as incomplete as a spider without its web. Clothes of both body and spirit also make us what we are. Beyond cotton and concepts, the clothing of our atmosphere is critical as well: On Jupiter every bone in our bodies would be crushed. We are earth-dwellers, and must carry a patch of earth wherever we travel.

We plan to travel far. We are star-gazers filled with longing. It is, after all, "human nature" to fly and to do all sorts of "unnatural" things that our brains conjure up out of protoplasm, hope, and jelly. What transmutations will occur along the way that push us past who we presently are? In the gray fuzziness of actuality, will some beings, looking backward, define themselves apart?: Beings who have perhaps joined symbiotically with artificial intelligences, gaining the ability to calculate as fast as machines? -- Beings who have somehow managed to defy the presently understood limits of time and space? -- What future androids and angels, if any, will categorize themselves as "post-human"? It is human to invent imaginary partners and to speculate.

In the meantime, as we explore our roots we see we have sprung from a place of triple lineage: Halfway between the ethereal realm of gasses and the fixed world of crystals, we stand in a middle place inhabited also by the amoeba and rose. And though neither amoeba nor rose is haunted by ambition and the endless craving for meanings, still, we share a joint journey: Neither chaos nor complete order is our destination, but rather, the dynamic spiraling space between.

As we evolve we ask ourselves: What cannot be changed? What can be changed, and, — should we? Who am I? Who are you? Where have we come from? Where are we going? Our answers often lead to better questions. We are the Keepers of Questions. It is our ethically sacred task.

The questions keep coming: Philosophically, we ask: Is any one thing any one self-called human does human nature? What is the lowest common denominator? That may depend on our intentions. Are we looking for a common base, or are we searching for what at least some humans are capable of becoming? What are our highest aspirations? Given, say, a goal of "continuance of eternal play", what should we discourage? What should we enhance? How can we create holding environments that liberate rather than incarcerate? How might "attributing worth to ourselves and others" help make this happen?

Ethically, we ask: Is it human nature to do good things . . . bad things? How do we define good and bad? What is it to be greedy, selfish., altruistic, cooperative. ? How do we differentiate between a masochist and a martyr? Is intensity or balance our goal?

Culturally, we ask: What are the behaviors common to all cultures? (It would be strange to find a culture that emphasized the creation of hermits.) Should a more ethical culture go for or against what is "wired in"? ("Because you can, it would be best you could." Or, alternately, "You may not even though you can.") Is it possible to distinguish between repressed and non-existent behavior without resorting to anecdotal evidence? ("My culture doesn't allow me my sister.") Ought Jack ever marry Sister Jill or Brother John?

People arguing along different lines will come up with different answers. This is desirable. Profound questions are always too broad to be fully and succinctly answered. They are designed to lead us past pat solutions to that vast domain of silence, where, in still places, listening is born. In time, refreshed, we return, with ever keener questions.