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Some Thoughts On Being Human
Nov. 2nd, 2013 06:09 pmI think we Homo sapiens have been discussing what being human is and means since we developed abstract language and probably before that. At first, the driving motivation was undoubtedly how to tell what is us and not-us. This is certainly a biological imperative at the cellular level; our immune systems must tackle the question every day, attacking foreign substances like viruses, bacteria, and allergenic proteins, and it’s also why cancer is so insidious (cells with the right molecular passwords that nonetheless behave like ravening barbarians). The same distinctions hold true at the level of the individual, family/clan, and larger, political units. Whether we’re talking about communities or nations, “us” = “human” = friendly, safe, cooperative, reliable, and “them” = “something else” = dangerous, untrustworthy, competitors for limited resources. In this way, “human” tends to be exclusionary and frictions tend to narrow the scope even further.
In science fiction and fantasy, however, we tend to use the term in a inclusionary way. Often the words “human” and “person” are interchangeable. Sf/f writers and readers pioneered the suggestions that all sapient races think of themselves as people and therefore, “human,” whatever the biological differences from Homo sapiens. I had a lot of fun with a race of giant slugs in Jaydium, who insisted that mammals were incapable of “personness.” The television series Star Trek often portrayed what Earth-humans and alien-humans have in common, rather than their unbridgeable differences. (The similarities were undoubtedly caused in part by the relatively primitive makeup and special effects, leading to the joke about aliens being actors with funny foreheads.) The creators of the series also exploited the romantic appeal of the exotic to generate love stories between members of different species, a phenomenon highly unlikely to occur in nature but one that had the effect of demonstrating the shared values of sapient beings. This is an example of broadening of the use of “human” as a term to include any beings of similar intelligence and culture that we can understand and sympathize with.( Read more... )
In science fiction and fantasy, however, we tend to use the term in a inclusionary way. Often the words “human” and “person” are interchangeable. Sf/f writers and readers pioneered the suggestions that all sapient races think of themselves as people and therefore, “human,” whatever the biological differences from Homo sapiens. I had a lot of fun with a race of giant slugs in Jaydium, who insisted that mammals were incapable of “personness.” The television series Star Trek often portrayed what Earth-humans and alien-humans have in common, rather than their unbridgeable differences. (The similarities were undoubtedly caused in part by the relatively primitive makeup and special effects, leading to the joke about aliens being actors with funny foreheads.) The creators of the series also exploited the romantic appeal of the exotic to generate love stories between members of different species, a phenomenon highly unlikely to occur in nature but one that had the effect of demonstrating the shared values of sapient beings. This is an example of broadening of the use of “human” as a term to include any beings of similar intelligence and culture that we can understand and sympathize with.( Read more... )
