Whither Our Common Humanity
The more fractured we become, the more we must appeal to our common humanity. But if someone is shooting at us, when do we shoot back?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—W. B. Yeats, from The Second Coming
Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a university town full of people you wouldn't think of as having many racists. But all that changed one day in 1996 when the Ku Klux Klan came to town. Keshia Thomas was among the protesters who turned out to express her disapproval. Thomas, an eighteen-year-old black high schooler, had had her own experiences with racism. So she wanted to join the protest.
According to reports, local police had organized the scene to keep the peace, so they kept protestors and marchers separated. All parties had stayed in control despite tensions running high. A procession of men in white robes and coned hoods walked along the thoroughfare. Far enough away, protestors aired their resentment. Then, events took an unfortunate turn.
"There's a Klansman in the crowd," said a woman with a megaphone.
Thomas and her friends, black and white, had been standing next to a fence designed to separate the groups. They turned around to see a middle-aged white man wearing a shirt emblazoned with a Confederate flag. His arms bore tattoos with neo-Nazi symbols. The man tried to walk away from the group, but the protesters, including Thomas, pursued him.
A mob mentality took over.
"Kill the Nazi!" someone cried out. When the man tried to run away, the crowd gave chase. A group surrounded him. They began kicking him and beating him with their placard poles.
Keshia Thomas jumped into the fray, using her own body as a shield to protect a man who hated her by all outward appearances. She wept and cried out for the protestors to cease their violence as if to say this isn't who we are.
And cease they did.
A student photographer managed to capture images of the scene. In revisiting this story and the photos, now decades old, they prompt us to ask a series of essential questions. Foremost is: what would possess Keshia Thomas to risk injury or worse to protect someone like this?
When she recounts it, she credits her religious faith. And who knows? When everyone around her was caught up in a flash of anger, maybe Thomas was guided by a divine hand. Still, had something else motivated Thomas?
We find clues in her own words:
For the most part, people who hurt... they come from hurt. It is a cycle. Let's say they had killed him or hurt him really bad. How does the son feel? Does he carry on the violence?
One rarely hears such wisdom in the words of teenagers. And yet, it had come forth from deep within her in an instant.
Fast forward a quarter-century.
Whatever forces led Keshia Thomas to act bravely, lovingly, and utterly without judgment, there is decidedly less of it today.
Our Common Humanity
Whenever there is conflict in the world, you'll hear someone make a plea to recognize our common humanity. That person is usually roundly ignored, either because the appeal gets lost in the heat of friction and faction or because it interferes with a collective desire for revenge. But in this refrain, however platitudinous, lies an important truth. Our common humanity forms the basis of our creation stories and secular humanisms. It is how we say We are not so different, you and I.
It is a call to civility.
Today, we are again witnessing the breakdown of civility and civil order. I say again because it's never really left us. It would be dishonest to claim there has ever been an era in which civility was a mainstay. War is uncivil, but our own Civil War was fought over that most horrific form of disrespect for one human being by another. Slavery was instituted well before America became a nation. Despite the stirring words of the Declaration, its very fact adulterated the Constitution.
What, then, does the Declaration mean in the twenty-first century?
"It’s 244 years of effort by Americans — sometimes halting, but often heroic — to live up to our greatest ideal," writes conservative columnist Bret Stephens. "That’s a struggle that has been waged by people of every race and creed. And it’s an ideal that continues to inspire millions of people at home and abroad."
Even after the bloody mess of 1860, almost a century passed before federal troops escorted the Little Rock Nine into their Arkansas high school. Before that day, there had been chain gangs, lynchings, and countless other indignities. Troubles remained well after a Memphis shooter made Dr. King a martyr for the cause of civil rights.
Still, little by little, things got better. Not perfect, but better.
If we think of our common humanity as the trunk of a Great Tree, we know that a few limbs must grow from the trunk, each finding its direction as it pushes outward or upward. Maybe these are broad ethnicities. From the limbs, large branches grow and hold the world's major cultures. But the large branches divide into medium-sized branches, which are subcultures, and so on into small branches, which are even more distinct. These, in turn, divide into twigs of linguistic or regional variation on which you'll find the buds, leaves, and blossoms of wild diversity and local color. It can be easy to forget a Siberian Inuit has anything to do with a tuba player from New Orleans.
Yet everyone knows what happens to a branch if you saw it off.
“Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment," wrote Mohandas K. Gandhi. But this is a lesson that must be retaught and relearned with each generation.”
The foregoing is an excerpt from After Collapse (2021), written while much of America was burning from a so-called racial reckoning. I honestly don’t know what I think about that excerpt today. With recent events, I sense myself getting pulled back into nihilism, which includes the “cold logic of tit for tat and the blazing fires of ideology.” I want to hold onto the hopes reflected in the passage. But sometimes, our adversaries boldly exclude themselves from our hopes. Even in our best efforts to be Switzerland about distant affairs, there are those closer to home who would line us up for a firing squad, given the chance. Yet I know that people who hurt … they come from hurt. So it is and will be. At a time when terrorists are understood as freedom fighters and zombie hordes on campuses are chanting “from the river to the sea,” what can be said about our common humanity? I wish I knew.
This sentiment - of shared humanity, of the looming nihilism - is a familiar one to me. There is a horrible truth that reality sometimes forces us to face. We, in the "civilized world," have gone for well over a century not having to face many horrible truths, thanks to technological advances, scientific discoveries, relative political stability, and in some cases the willful censorship of that which was commonly public witness (i.e. the public execution).
As an amateur urban "farmer" (more of a gardener, with bents into high-intensity aquaculture and hydroponics), I find myself facing some challenges that then cause me to wonder about the glorified greenhouse that humanity itself lives in. Sometimes the wastes overwhelms the system, and there is a need to intensely clean and purge. Sometimes the pests take over, feasting with predation and in spite of whatever other biological controls I can throw at the situation. The complex interacting systems thrown into disarray, their balance lost and opportunistic upswelling of ultimately self-destructive elements leads to one inevitable course of action, again and again: tear it down and start over.
Nature will rebalance itself, once given the chance. When we plant what does not naturally thrive without human intervention, and induce it thrive, we throw it out of balance (admittedly to our selfish benefit). With such action, we must recognize the eventualities we will face. There are many, not all will come to fruition, but they are there nonetheless, waiting. A crop of producing plants that is kept too long invites illness, decline, opportunistic invasion. Clinging to them out of sentiment, in hopes of getting one last good batch of beans, means we pay another price when the stems are covered with larvae and we must now work to interrupt a different set of life-cycles - namely, those which will be waiting to feast on new plants, new crops, sooner than they otherwise would.
We face in our sociopolitical world the growing threat of pestilence. It is of a mental kind, and therefore more difficult to find and mitigate. The pestilence isn't one of strange, new ideas, but of the adoption of closed-mindedness, of a selection of ideas to the utter exclusion of all others. But can people really afford to enjoy a variety of ideas? Ideas in the mind are all well and good, until they're put into action. Then they, and their consequences, become very real.
I had once read a quote that only the rich could afford to be atheists. It struck me as strange, but as I've watched the world devolve around us, it makes more sense to me now - albeit in a pessimistic, ennui-inducing way: to evaluate various ideas with the care and skill necessary to successfully identify the risks and benefits of each idea - to sift out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak - requires a state of mind and a level of intellect that I'd have thought would not be uncommon. I must wonder at this now, and it fills me with dread.
Suppose we take as an axiom that thought-leaders are generally dangerous, because those who follow them will follow generally uncritically, and such power most often (or eventually) tends toward evil. Then ideally the majority of the population would not follow thought-leaders, but would form their own opinions and beliefs based on careful analysis, experience, a wide breadth of varied knowledge, and good tenets that align with what we would find in good science. Is this too idealistic? Is this too fantastic to hope for?
The reality may be that human society itself does not scale well. The additional reality may be that this is not necessarily a bad thing. In our smaller enclaves, there may be homogeneity of ideas and beliefs. Amongst them, however, can live a vast variety. This was, I believe, the intent of the Founders (whether they realized it or not, but certain insofar as their decision to NOT assign a state religion). This is, for lack of any better term, true freedom. However, such freedom as what works for the individual requires that the state itself not be free to dictate how the individual should live. How do we handle the "evil" of society, then?
The delicate balance is one that, like all other systems of ideas, requires a care and wisdom that seems rapidly diminishing from the general populace. The best we may be able to do, is to select a line beyond which our lawmaking and controls no longer occur, such that we retain as much individual freedom as possible while ensuring enclaves of values can blossom in their own localities. Again, this may be foolishly idealistic.
Where any individual one of us is concerned, and myself among them, I try to keep in mind that I should try to live in the world that I would want to live in, and act accordingly where possible. It's a world where skin color is but another physical attribute (and nothing more); that culture is something a person grows up with, embraces, leaves behind, explores, chooses; that how we treat one another is important; that we ourselves are undeserving of another's attention or kindness, so we should be thankful when we receive it; that respect is a spectrum, and should start at a modicum and vary from there; that communication is foundational to all relationships, and therefore the greatest effort and concern should be taken when partaking in it; that we are all human.
Not knowing who else shares these values means having a guard up, carrying a firearm, locking doors, being wary. Yet if given the chance, I'd like to hope that should I encounter someone of similar values, we will get along just fine; and if I don't, at least my values will inform how I respond to whatever they may submit to our interactions - that I will not sink to their level if they are beneath me, or that I may learn from them if they are above me. If there is nothing else I can do in the world, I know at least I can do this; I know I can teach this to my children; I know that maybe, just maybe, I can inspire others to do the same.
Where the alternative is tearing everything down and starting over, with no guarantee of coming out the way we'd like, I think this is certainly one way forward. It is strange for an atheist to refer to faith, but it's probably the only word that applies to this kind of belief. I still can't bring myself to use it, yet I am determined to soldier on. I hope there are others who will as well.
Good piece.