We Are Humans. We Come From the Planet Earth.
We Need an Owner's Manual
Know Thyself - Polly Young-Eisendrath on Substack
Screenshot from Still Face Experiment, Dr. Ed Tronick’s research
I have been watching Kaos, the Netflix tragicomedy about gods and humans. While it’s good at making fun of how humans are toyed with by the gods, thus far (I have seen only three episodes) it doesn’t fully tap into how humans outshine the gods in self-awareness and love. The series gets right the meaning of being a god: a god’s existence is about having power and figuring out how to get smarter at getting more power. Gods don’t develop in their relationships or learn how to cherish each other.
I have spent my entire career studying and writing about how human beings develop through relationships. Start to finish, we look into another’s eyes to see who we are. Humans are “dyadic” or paired beings because we are born inside a woman and are dependent on her (or a worthy substitute for her) for care and sustenance for several years at the beginning of life.
Our primary emotions (e.g. curiosity, joy, sadness, irritation and disgust, shared with other mammals) equip us to relate to our “special other” even from birth. Then, when we are adolescents or adults, we go out into the world to find a new special other (in whose eyes we try to find ourselves anew) or we grieve for not finding that person. Special others affirm that we see/hear/feel in the human ways they do, reflecting us so that we become aware of ourselves and can then reflect on our own thoughts and actions.
Many people have never heard of our secondary emotions, called “self-conscious emotions” (e.g shame, guilt, envy and jealousy). For a comprehensive review of how these emotions emerge and develop, have a look at The Rise of Consciousness and the Development of Emotional Life by Michael Lewis, a psychologist from Rutgers University in New Jersey who devoted his 65-year career to studying emotional development in children.
Our uniquely human emotions — the self-conscious emotions — motivate us to go beyond simply having experiences to becoming aware of what we see, hear, feel, think and know. Through our biological and social development, we humans become aware that we are experiencing things, either in the moment or afterwards. Our self-awareness gives us a great deal more freedom and potential than other mammals have. For instance, our self-awareness means we can remove ourselves in our imagination from our immediate context, abstract ourselves, and guide ourselves by forecasting a future or reviewing a past. Self-consciousness also compels us to compare ourselves to others and to believe in distinctions we observe, as individuals.
These uniquely human emotions enter our lives when we are 18 – 24 months old, no matter our culture or language, as long as we are developing “normally” both cognitively and relationally. Around 24 months, the human child, without being taught, develops personal pronouns (such as I, me, mine, or the equivalent, given their culture and language), the capacity to identify their own image in a mirror, and the ability to pretend or to abstract themselves from literal reality (for instance, to pretend a pencil is a helicopter while still knowing it’s a pencil). This is the beginning of self-awareness in a human life.
Our self-awareness persuades us that we have a unique “self” that seems to be “in here” (inside the body) while the “world” is “out there.” Self-consciousness and self-awareness develop into autonomy (self-governance) and agency as we can gradually decide and act on our own. We can change our minds and our behaviors on a moment’s notice — as well as through disciplined actions (e.g. training for a sport) — and manipulate our identities or create a life we have never had before.
This same self-awareness lies close to potential self-deception. For example, well-educated adults can be convinced they are “too fat” when they are at a healthy weight, that they are in the “wrong body” because they feel socially or physically alienated, or that they are “not rich enough” when they are millionaires. Humans promote and protect themselves in relationships and in groups, and are often confused about why they need someone else to validate self-worth. Why are they not “empowered enough” to validate themselves?
In this column, I am working on creating an “owner’s manual” for Homo Sapiens to “Know Thyself” -- gain knowledge and insight into what it means to be human which can be handily mapped as not a god or an animal (categories of being that overlap with but are distinct from being human). I want to develop this owner’s manual with your help, hearing what confuses or inspires you in being human.
I have already written in this column how the fires and the floods that we succumb to repeatedly illustrate that we cannot master the forces of nature. Our mortality and fallibility disqualify us. Our human “super powers” (strengths and insights we can reliably develop) come from being pair-bonded and self-aware, knowing our own thoughts, feelings and perceptions, and being able to share them with each other. Gods do not have self-awareness, cannot learn from their mistakes, and do not know how to love. They use each other to gain power and have pleasure. They are governed by fixed identities and rigid hierarchies and are wholly identified only with their roles; they don’t have inner conflicts. In other words, gods have no flexibility to change their minds or behaviors. Perhaps you know some humans who seem to operate this way?
Seriously, we have evolved to have short lives, know that we will die, and still desire to love and be loved. Being human is so different from being gods and yet, some post-modern philosophers seem confused about the difference. They interpret the world in terms only of power and domination, as though everything is a zero-sum game.
On the other hand, aren’t we just animals? Isn’t that the point of evolutionary biology? From my perspective, I believe we are very different from other mammals, although we are mammals. Most other mammals I am familiar with are content to live through their instincts in ways I envy. My pet dog knows what to do in the present moment, both in terms of seeking comfort and fighting to survive. But my emotions interfere with my instincts, and when I am irritable, I often don’t know if I need to eat lunch or take a walk or have a conversation with a friend.
Our human emotions — and individual self-awareness — confuse us and make us vulnerable to being wrong frequently about what we see/hear/feel. If you don’t believe me about frequent mistakes, have a look at Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz. Then, take an inventory of your own memory, confusion and cognitive flaws in the last 24 hours. We make mistakes all the time. Different from gods and animals, we can learn from our mistakes and that’s why we make hypotheses and then test them. We know we are often wrong and need to proceed with caution when we are making a serious inquiry into our experiences.
It’s notable how little our instincts guide us. Even when we are privileged in our life style or knowledgeable in our career, we readily feel insecure in our evolutionary niche. Animals confidently follow their instincts and act accordingly. Our instincts (e.g. when and what to eat or when and how long to sleep) are clouded by our preferences and emotions, more clouded as we mature across the life span.Both our day-to-day decisions and larger life choices are confused by the ways we feel about ourselves.
Take, for instance, well-meaning human parents who are confused about what to do when their children behave badly. Check out animals for comparison. Ever seen a mother duck with her ducklings or a mother pig with her piglets? Those mothers are fierce and brutal in bringing young ones into line. They follow their instincts. For a great example of a close-up on animal instincts, watch the 2020 farm-animal documentary Gunda in which you will see a mother pig kill one of her piglets because it’s weak and cannot survive. You will also see that she feels grief and fear, but she is guided by her instincts, not her emotions.
Gunda, Darcy Heusel/Courtesy of NEON
In this column, I will be writing about the guiding principles for embracing being human and becoming more skillful and insightful about the limits, potentials, and necessities of being human, mortal, imperfect, and self-aware.
The following four principles are the foundation for the work we do at the Center for Real Dialogue (www.realdialogue.org):
1. Know Thyself: Gain knowledge and insight into what it means specifically to be human, not god or animal.
2. Take Responsibility for Speaking and Listening: Speak and listen responsibly, recognizing that you have only your first-person experience (how you see, hear, feel and cognize) and your interpretations which are always limited and often flawed; be modest in what you say and believe you understand from what others say.
3. End Dehumanization: Don’t confuse yourself or other people with gods (power beings) or animals (instinctual beings). Dehumanizing people in these ways comes from your own self-deceptions. Welcome disagreement, remain curious, and engage in healthy conflict as a human being who is not one-sided or rigidly convinced of your own intellectual or moral superiority.
4. Learn from Defeat and Failure: Learn to thrive in both winning and losing because your human existence is a combination of life and death, health and illness, right and wrong, and success and failure. You will learn from your mistakes, failures, illnesses and death as much as you learn from success or getting what you want.
