The Human Condition
Although writers as diverse as André Malraux and Hannah Arendt deployed the phrase in titles of books, to say that modern times wished to abrogate any static sense of the human condition would be fair. Malraux’s novel is about revolutionaries who are intent on changing society, mostly through violence. Arendt’s book, in large part, describes the devolution of slave labor into modern labor. Neither book is concerned with humanity’s spiritual condition. However ardent they are, Malraux’s characters have little foundation beyond Communist slogans. Arendt evokes a Greece that is foreign to the modern world, an age in which some men were able to enjoy the articulate fruits of debate while their slaves labored and their women stayed at home. Understandably, neither book is concerned with what does not change.
To say that the human condition is a limited affair, bordered as it is by birth, mortality, and the unknown, is to acknowledge its less than noble pedigree. On the one side of this taut formlessness is abasement. Human beings are benighted creatures who do not know what they are about or why they are here, who have neither the pure instincts of wild animals nor the cavalier awareness of the pagan gods. They are inextricably caught between consciousness and unconsciousness. Their fluidity is little better than lurching. The situation is good for spinning yarns about how the yin and yang do and do not get together, but those yarns are spun in a jail cell of sorts. The pacific rumble of eternity can be heard somewhere far down the corridor. In the past, paradise beckoned. That was before the years began and the sentence that every human being must serve.
On the other side is grandiosity, the epic imaginative nature of human beings. Though we may focus, understandably, on Mozart and Matisse, this imagination includes murderous ideologies, hatreds, rationalizations, lies, conceits, and other suppositions that are based on nothing more than vehement confusion and that issue in grief that echoes to every proverbial corner of the planet. The wails of the bereaved never die. Meanwhile, new plans are hatched to create more wails.
Such is the nature of things which someone in a coffee shop or at a desk or on a telephone is averring at this very moment, spitting a husk of hope down the fathomless well of human duplicity. This is discouraging since one form of cruelty replaces another: mentally ill people are no longer chained to logs for the course of their lives but new chemical inventions create new depredations and new expectations. Those expectations, whether great or small, lend human beings a natural pathos. They are always looking over the next hill and will make up the hill if it is not there.
Modern times seemed to actualize the expectations. The rapid rate of invention made people feel that something actually was over the next hill. Whatever it was would speak to their situation: turn on the radio and there will be music. In this sense, the human condition as something unchangeable did change. The world seemed to respond in a way it had not hitherto responded. Invention seemed to abolish moral categories—no more sin. What, after all, could be so bad if there were so many marvelous inventions? God did not create radios; people did. People merely manipulated dials and buttons and switches. They were blameless.
Reports over the course of time about the human condition have been bleak, understandably so. Every college sophomore used to be able to quote Hobbes. What is particularly unsettling is that while nothing changed about human behavior in the sense of people falling in love, getting in arguments, and worrying about their children, the externals changed enormously and seemed to bode well. In the sense of women not dying routinely in childbirth or measles not killing people, they did bode well. The modern ambiance, concocted of medical progress and myriad entertainments, seemed to provide a new rationale for life, one based on security and amusement rather than the anxiety that goes automatically with being a vulnerable animal that doesn’t know from one moment to another what is going to happen.
Given the aura of betterment, there seemed to be no intractable human condition. In academe, the notion was attacked as one more instance of cultural oppression. Meanwhile, people could be re-engineered, either by pharmaceuticals or medical procedures or more sinisterly by governments that stripped each person of his or her private dignity and substituted, as with Orwell’s Big Brother, a spurious public domain for that intrusion. To speak of the human condition as something that anchored human beings in the deep cycles of the physical world was to be a party-pooper, an old fogy set in one’s traditional ways, or to use the phrase favored by the communists, a “counter-revolutionary.” One brave new world or another continually beckoned. Nothing had to be.
Various crucial figures in modern times such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi, realized very well that nothing had to be, that centuries of exclusion were tinder for a noble fire. For them the human condition was an opportunity not an excuse. Their eyes were wide open as to how stuck the human race could seem. They had heard plenty of time-honored wisdom about the prerogatives of loathing. They chose not to honor time, however. They chose to believe in the human condition as something rooted but capable of fresh growth. If there was something truly remarkable in modern times, it was this insight rather than the claptrap of inevitable progress or the bitter grip of reaction. The human condition did not sanction hatred; it merely gave way to it. People needed to be reminded of that daily and the marches, fasts, and protests did that. What was new in the spiritual proclamations was eternal—the granting of humanity to the supposed enemy, the similarity of everyone, the forgiving empathy the great prophets preached.
That King and Gandhi were murdered for their efforts only makes their case stronger. Some willful hand will always be there to strike down dignity. That too is part of the human condition.
“They chose not to honor time…” How noble, how imaginative, how rare.
A wonderful essay. Thank you.
"Something rooted but capable of fresh growth" is the power of the essay, as you, a 21rst century poet of the porous self, demonstrate again so well, focusing our attention this morning on "the human condition" in the same spirit that the 16th Century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne addressed perennial questions concerning human imagination, education, friendship and so much more . . . Thank you!