On Humanity and Life

We identify ourselves as humans, and identify our place in the world, by the traits most readily perceived by our five senses – humans are discrete bipedal fleshy organisms with easily identifiable features and physical boundaries. A person wearing a plant is not a single entity – the plant is separate and the human is separate and these are things we can say with certainty and confidence because to our senses and definitions of autonomy, they are defined as distinct. This understanding transcends the history of scientific thought, yet has been honed over centuries through the application of science. The two primary sciences relating to this, biology and ecology, are most commonly conceived of as fields in pursuit of quantifying the living world, of taking the ephemeral characteristics of life and giving them names and places and assigning purpose so that we may more easily comprehend those dimensions of existence.

Humans, in this context, are the things we have the greatest scientific understanding of – the entities that we are most certain we can name and place and identify. Humans are single discrete beings that exist both as part of, and at odds with, the rest of the natural world.

Yet at the frontiers of biology and ecology - where those most attuned to the structures and habits of life reflect on the experience of existence as part of a greater whole and where indigenous wisdom is ten steps ahead of scientific wisdom - there is a growing awareness that what we call humans may not, in fact, truly exist at all – that humans can no more be called a single clearly defined entity than a forest. That our species cannot, in fact, be so abruptly and confidently named and placed as our senses and cultural heritage might suggest.

What we call humanity is, perhaps, only the immediately distinct and observable characteristics of the species we identify as. What we call humanity is, perhaps, only the shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave - our true existence so much richer, layered, and interconnected that anything we can surmise from what little we see through the lens of modernity.

As our scientific understanding of the human body grows, those of us entrenched in the world of science begin to see and understand something others not bound to the myth of progress have known for millennia – that the human form is but one expression of the biosphere to which all life belongs and that it, in itself, constitutes less a sovereign entity than an entire ecosystem made conscious.

The microbes and bacteria that live inside and on us number in the trillions, their existence not superfluous to our own, but intrinsic to the thing we call a human being. These life forms, as complex and diverse as any expression of life, comprise and maintain our form, they allow us to live just as we provide them habitat for their own mercurial pursuits. Our guts alone house tens of trillions of microorganisms comprised of over 1,000 different species with more than 150 times greater gene diversity than the human body alone. The microbes that live within and on us are us, as much as any of the traits we put so much emphasis on as being our own – our face, our exterior bodies, our minds.

We are an ecosystem, our daily routines and habits affecting the lives and existences of trillions, our sense of self mistakenly attributed to a lone entity when our truest existence is an almost endlessly complex and awe-inspiring flourishing landscape of thousands of types of life, a galaxy of rhythms and motions and births and deaths greater in scale and beauty than anything that could so easily reduced to a single nameable entity called “human”.

And yet, we are also that – a single nameable entity. For all our inner and outer diversity and complexity, for all the life we house and all the life we represent, our existence and perception thereof can also be made so small and simple if we so choose.

There are those who since time immemorial have preserved an inner Knowing about the interconnectedness of not just life, but all existence. Their sense of time of space of life bound not to their immediate senses but to a deeper awareness that comes from truly listening and being present to the ways existence makes itself known. It’s a way of experiencing and perceiving existence informed by whispers and threads to truths beyond anything tangible to our biological forms but no less real for it.

The majority of us, however, have learned to live and perceive the world in ways compromised for the sake of other complexities. We sacrifice a clear connection to ourselves and the world in exchange for greater complexity and utility in the ways our beings can bend the world and its resources to our needs and wants. We gain buildings and cities and electricity and travel and in exchange our minds become clouded by a need to make sense of existence in terms that are congruent with our new manufactured environment.

We make distinctions between ourselves and nature because the context of our lives, surrounded by the unrecognizable artifices of modernity, seem to follow a different logic than the limited way we perceive nature. We see ourselves as humans as distinct entities because our lives - besieged by stimulus foreign to our biological heritage – seem isolated from the intuitive interactions we witness in what we call nature. We fail to understand that our cities, our homes, our bodies, are still a part of the natural world, that we cannot remove ourselves from nature, we can only obscure out perception of it.

The “human” world is just as interconnected and entangled as any part of “nature” but these connections – sometimes deliberately, sometimes incidentally – are made invisible to most of us. We don’t see our receiving a bill in the mail as being connected to the health of forests or the strength of the breeze or the minerals brought up from under the surface of the Earth that we shaped into the materials necessary for constructing the printer that drew in ink on the paper born from the trees that told us to pay our energy bill that goes to fund the dismantling of those same ecosystems for the use of our electricity that grants us the ability to learn about the ways these things are all entwined.

Our world, the modern world, seems to be made up of discrete systems and materials and devices and consumables and places and objects. We are taught to navigate it by memorizing what these things are and what purpose they serve and our told that to survive we must learn to make ourselves useful in service of progressing toward more complex structures and materials and devices and consumables and places and objects. Our way of understanding and knowing is born from this environment, one where everything must be measured and quantified in ways amenable to progress, where a way of knowing or understanding that cannot be de-contextualized and homogenized is not seen as efficacious or legitimate.

Our sense of time, too, is bound by these imposed structures and ways of being that have come to feel so natural and innate, but our just as manufactured and fragile as anything of human creation. We perceive time as linear not because it is or because that is the only thing humans are capable of perceiving, but because the linearity of time is a concept that is necessary to impose if we are to evaluate ourselves and our communities based on the speed and efficiency of their progression toward greater civilizational complexity and production. Science tells us with increasing surprise yet equal confidence that all time happens both concurrently and progressively, that the past and present and future all exist at once but also are changing and appearing and evaporating constantly. This is not a new way of understanding time, but it is new to those of us held captive by the impositions of modernity.

In the parts of the world caught up in industrialization, this way of understanding and knowing - that indigenous communities and peoples across the planet came to as a result of listening and being present to the places they inhabited and that allowed them to conceive of deeper truths about the interconnectedness of existence and the nature of time itself - is treated as fantastical and speculative because it cannot be accessed through the production-centric and progressive lenses that our societies have been shaped by. Science, the well meaning and sincere pursuit of knowledge through a particular approach to study, has both brought us closer to, and further from, re-discovering what so many others have known all along.

At its best, the scientific process of measuring and quantifying enables us to approach this understanding from a different perspective, to marvel at these truths as we uncover all the dimensions from which to know them.

At its worst, the scientific process of measuring and quantifying declares that that which cannot be measured and quantified, that which cannot be uncovered or proven through the limited and intrinsically anthropocentric lens of scientific inquiry, cannot and should be not treated as true or acted upon as though it were.

And so it is that even as we begin to find - through the methods and practices most compatible with a human-centered conception of progress - that our existence and perception of life is more ambiguous and undefinable than previously thought, the conclusions we are left with still reinforce the larger narratives that with each passing day are transparently built on a narrowly utilitarian conception of existence founded upon a presumed universal necessity for greater material comfort and wealth.

Humanity is no more conceptually useful for speaking about our role in life and the world at large than when we describe an area of land as an acre. It’s a unit of measure that is only useful for the purposes of building a world centered around human material and consumptive expansion.

We, as beings, can never be separated from nature and nature, as a thread of existence, can never be separated from our environment. We are all always present, always connected, always smaller and greater than anything we can conceive of. We are both greater than the sum or our parts and so much less, as the trillions of lifeforms that comprise our lives are simultaneously more majestic in their diversity and form than the beings they support and yet also somehow pale in comparison to what they achieve together as part of the ecosystem we name as Human.

Existence, in all its splendor and mystery, could only be as simple as, and never be as simple as, a single truth.

So, too, goes humanity.