My father made an admission to me the other day that I am only beginning to try to appreciate. He said I've already become a better person than he. Do we struggle to be good people, to be human?
Powerful words to recon with as I encounter challenges in relationships in particularly with one that's failing. I don't know what it is to be truly human and I fear what happens to men in Hobbes' state of nature, where it is (if it is) a "war of all against all".
There are the monsters in us that allow for the release of arrows and ignition of TNT. Tragic events are oft the trajectory of bruising and anger. Why do we yell when we feel pain? It seems a natural response and the well adjusted temper their reactions with civility and - what - is it humility?
Why do we cry when we feel anguish? Why the flight from the undesirable?
I don't know. My uncle told me the story of USAmericans in Argentina who stuck to their own kind. He noticed that the locals who he became part of were very willing to agree to do things, to sign on to a collective idea or activity, unlike the US culture he was used to where everyone's individual needs would need to be accommodated somehow. He remembered how this was too much for many of the USAmericans who banded together in their ghetto.
He likened the resistance to cultural difference and new ideas to an acceptance of humanity, or what I might extend to include the greater constituency. That is, the living world around us. “I wonder if THOSE people are like us?”
I shared with my uncle my thinking that it could be a difference in individual v. community focus. That we have become very much focused on the individual, the ethic of ourselves, as apposed or coincidental to an ethic of the greater constituency. It is the core of advertising that works at the sense of self in pursuit of personal preferenced consumers. It is encouraging to me to see those who treat their actions as if volumes.
I don't know where this leaves the question but I have to share that I see a need for a diversity of approaches to being human, that one species and only one species may be disadvantageous.
