Humanning in an inhumane world

Note: A friend suggested that this essay is challenging to digest, and that I could break it down into a minimum of two articles for easier reading. I’d fully intended to do so, but then realized that I’d used up all of my energy just writing this in the first place. So. Instead, after some obsessive rereading, I edited it a few hours after hitting “save and publish.”

If you’re still having trouble getting through this, please feel free to rewrite/respond to/riff on/deconstruct this article with a piece of your own. And let me know if you do, I’d love to see it!

Now. Onward.

Our front yard, during a lull in Typhoon Rolly (international name Goni), in November of 2020. The water was knee deep.

The Global Climate Emergency doesn’t seem to be changing course. Biodiversity loss continues apace. COVID-19 has become endemic. The worst and most powerful of us are forcing the majority of humanity to consume itself (and the rest of the planet) into extinction.

I’m having a bit of a crisis.

I feel powerless.

I don’t know what to do.

What can I do?

Or perhaps, it would be better to ask, what am I doing?

I am a human.

I am humanning.

But I am humanning in a very particular type of way. See, as a human, I am a sort that was not, until shockingly recently, considered particularly fully human at all.

I am a brown-skinned, female-bodied human. I grew up in a city three hundred kilometers away from the capital metropolis of an archipelago nation in the Global South (a place once considered “savage,” for “Here there be Dragons”).

My perspective is very different from that of a light-skinned, male-bodied human who grew up in a metropolis somewhere in Western Europe, North America, Australia, or New Zealand.

But I am also the product of over three hundred years of very thorough Spanish colonization and erasure, fifty years of American occupation (and erasure), and around as many years of ongoing neoliberal capitalist globalization (and more erasure).

I have drank the proverbial Kool-Aid, and I continue to swim in the waters and breathe the smog.

My brain defaults to “reason and logic are the highest forms of intelligence,” where “‘intelligence,’ as it is thus defined, is the be-all-end-all of my humanity,” and as a part of humanity, “I am separate from and independent of (and therefore superior to) my community and my environment.”

Corollary to that, certain ideas of what reason and logic are inform the groundwork of those default patterns. They are shaped by the stories behind what reason and logic can only be. “Aristotle said that tragedy is superior to comedy.” “Pythagoras said that the hypotenuse of a triangle is the square root of its remaining sides,” and “Sir Isaac Newton discovered the theory of gravity.” The history of Western thought.

See where I’m going here? Drop me a line if you’re having trouble. I generally don’t bite. Much.

Anyway. I have what is considered a “Superior” IQ. I have the test scores to prove them. If I could just “apply myself” and “work hard,” I could “maximize my potential.” But alas, I have not. My Specialness goes Uncelebrated, except for the fact that I am quite educated. I have two degrees, an Arts Bachelor’s in Literature (English, of course), and a Master of Arts in Anthropology. The default patterns that I circle through tell me that this makes me more intelligent — and therefore more worthy- than others who have not attained similar achievements; that it could thus, by the same reasoning, be deduced that I am less worthy than someone who, for instance, has a PhD. Or an eight-figure bank account. Or a prestigious, C-suite job title.

I am writing in English right now. I am more comfortable thinking, writing, and speaking in English, even though I claim a different language as my mother tongue, and another one as my national language. But see, English is the language very very many people can understand. If I’m good at speaking and writing in it, I’m good at speaking and writing, right? This makes me smarter, right?

I am aware that the patterns I’d described above are illusory, that they are part of the Kool-Aid mix I continue to glug like a thirsty eight-year-old after a rousing game of cops-and-robbers.

I know that English being my default language is a colonial imposition, and that it makes me neither better, nor worse, than someone who comfortably and eloquently thinks and speaks in Hiligaynon. Or Higaonon. Or Kalinga. Or Sinhala. (Thank you, “Rule Brittannia” and American “Manifest Destiny.”)

I also know that my “Superior IQ” is derived from a concept that is inherently colonial, racist, and ableist. The very concept of an “intelligence quotient” assumes that “intelligence,” — that is, the capacity to think and know- is concrete, measurable, and can be expressed as a number. That assumption further implies that that number can somehow indicate your inherent capacities (and therefore your value to society).

But the way it is measured makes assumptions based on “facts” that are very particular to one way of being in the world. In acting as a form of definition and a measure of value, it actively oppresses and erases the thinkings and knowings of those whose worlds are different from ours. Of the worlds inside ourselves that are different from what we have been raised and educated to believe is the only world that can exist.

(English-as-a-default-language [a language of power] erases other languages by making them less-than. [Which is not to say that English is a bad and evil language, not at all, it’s beautiful and chaotic, and I love it so so much. But. But.] Languages are one of the many ways that humans shape and understand our worlds. When we speak [or sign, or write, or think] in a language, we speak our cultures, our histories, and our very selves into existence.

English is its own world. Tagalog is its own world. Hiligaynon is its own world. I have a minimum of three worlds inside of me, and every time the colonized, default patterns in my brain tell me that one is superior to the others, those others are diminished inside of me. The same can be said of other ways of knowing, other ways of thinking, other ways of being. So. In my throat, a universe dims.

This is what the default patterns of colonialism teaches us to do. It teaches us to dim the starlight beneath our sternums and silence the rhythms in the soles of our feet. Because in a colonized world [self] only one star is allowed to shine, and only one beat is allowed to play.)

Oh, and speaking of education, my educational achievements took effort and tears and growth, yes. I am proud of them, just like I am proud of myself for having worked hard to attain those degrees. But institutional education (with its grade levels and its classrooms and its mandatory extracurricular activities) is also a form of cultural indoctrination. Yes,we are also taught skills that are essential to surviving in this society, but we are also taught to reproduce this society through the skills that we have been taught.

But what if “this society” isn’t the only way forward?

(We have universes in our bellies, whirling galaxies and supernovae beneath our skin)

A wise woman once said that “The Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house” (Audre Lorde). That is to say: If we continue to think in the narrow frames that we have long been conditioned to think in (that oppress us), we will continue to reproduce the narrow world that we continue to live in (that continues to oppress us).

And it is a narrow world that is narrowing ever deeper. Extreme weather patterns generated by the rapid warming of a fragile and interconnected planet batter our landmasses. New zoonotic diseases threaten to emerge and trap us in our homes — if we have the luxury of homes- once again. And the existential dread of having to work ourselves to the bone (or depend on others who must work themselves to the bone) simply to “earn” the right to survive consumes what is altruistic and imaginative and playful within us with each passing day.

It is not a humane world.

So what can we do to create a world that is more humane?

If not for us, then for our children’s children? For the generations after them?

What is “humane”?

What is “human”?

The “intelligent” answer would be, Homo sapiens sapiens, the “Wise, Wise Man.” the Naked Ape. Man. Master of the Universe. Steward of the Earth.

Pause.

Take a breath.

Now consider how small and self-serving those definitions are.

If you ascribe to them, that’s alright.

Just understand that they are not the end-all-be-all of humanity.

There are other definitions. There are as many other definitions of “human” as there are humans.

For instance, I, this human, prefers to understand “human” as a type of animal. One that is very very good at changing themself so that they can thrive in different environments. And sometimes, in so doing, change those environments.

And now we’ve gotten so good at changing our environments rather than ourselves, that we have forgotten how to change ourselves. Or rather, many of the ones who have the most power among us have forgotten (i.e., refuse) to change. Instead, we (they) reshape the histories that we tell ourselves, so that we can convince ourselves of the inevitability of the present moment. We lash out at those of us who question what a different humanity could look like. We burn our own homes to the ground to keep the worst and most oppressive of our selves warm.

And so, pulled along by those of us who arrogate upon our selves the power to change the planet around us— as if we weren’t a part of this very planet- we careen onward into an ecological and existential abyss. And we take other ecosystems along with us.

What can we do, then?

I don’t know.

All I know, is that we can’t do nothing.

So what is “not nothing”?

I also don’t know.

Being human is the task of the individual human. But also the individual human-in-community-with-others. We’re a social sort of animal. We can’t help but create bonds, even with the things that many would consider dead or inert.

So. Look around. Ask questions. Demand truthfulness. Demand accountability. Give back the same.

Allow it to change you. Us.

We can’t survive otherwise.