Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  It took one hundred years, the entire nineteenth century, in fact, for that feisty creature, the human being, to finally give up its ghost and pass out of existence. By the time of the first edition of the complete Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1933, that supreme arbiter of the English language contains no separate entry for human being. The idea of such a vibrant creature had already long passed into semantic obsolescence. The dictionary comments on just that circumstance in a number of ways. It provides, first, an entry on the use of the word human coupled with a series of adjectives that together denote a unique combination of qualities. As examples, it offers its readers strange-sounding compounds, such as human-angelic (“of the nature of a human ‘angel’”), human-hearted, human-headed, human-sized, and human-bounded (“No human-bounded mind can comprehend love unconfined”—a use which dates from the year 1711). Then, at the end of the entry, as if an afterthought, the dictionary mentions the possible but admittedly far-fetched combination human being, without a hyphen, and defines the phrase, in words of one syllable, as simply “a man.”

  Finally, the dictionary offers the kicker, the real surprise. Mustering all the high seriousness they possibly can, the editors warn, in a parenthetical but amazingly shocking sentence, that the phrase human being “was formerly much used; now chiefly humorous or affected.” In the list of citations that follows the entry, the Oxford English Dictionary offers not a single occurrence, over the entire course of the written language, of the phrase human being. The dictionary clearly holds a terrifically strong bias against the use of that phrase, and has no hesitation in revealing that bizarre stance to its readers: Do not use “human being,” it says in so many words, and certainly never in polite company.

  The warning, in its insistence, makes one wonder just exactly what anyone could find funny or even amusing about the use of “human being”; why would someone smile at that phrase? The editors imply, with an obvious earnest tone, that people who insist on employing the locution “human being” should know that they could be engaging in improper grammar, and most certainly in violating the protocols of received standard English. The Oxford English Dictionary implies that uttering that utterly anachronistic phrase, “human being,” will turn an otherwise serious speaker of the English language into an object of ridicule and outright laughter. Therefore, the editors advise their readers, in their less than subtle manner, to settle on a different phrase, to replace such an outdated locution with a modern one, without pointing out, however, exactly what word the reader should choose.

  In the revised edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published more than fifty years later, in 1989, the editors seem to have relented a bit. While they continue to avoid listing historical citations of the phrase human being, the editors do seem to have buffed off their hard edge just a bit by eliminating the reference to obsolescence and laughter. They capitulate even more by deigning to expand their definition, even though it seems truly laughable, for human being: “a member of the human race”—a definition so broad (and so nearly redundant) as to hardly serve as a definition at all.

  What word would be appropriate in place of human being? The Oxford English Dictionary seems to think that just the simple human would do. So what does it mean to remove that verb masquerading as a noun, being? The being part of the phrase conveys the idea of liveliness, of spirit, of ongoing activity and attention.

  The nineteenth century seems to have had no problem with using it. Henry Adams and Henry David Thoreau both use human being with great frequency. Twain uses human being in almost every one of his books and short stories. I count some sixty occurrences in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays of the word human being, which makes absolute sense, for that’s precisely his main subject—the sentient, spiritual, and vibrant human being. One can locate his passion for the sheer power and deep divinity of human beings in almost every prose piece and poem. In an essay entitled “Power,” for example, Emerson asks about creation’s most transcendent creature, “Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?” And in “Idealism,” a section from a long essay entitled “Nature,” Emerson explores how human beings, so small in the grand scheme of things, have managed to exert such a powerful and pervasive influence: “[A] spiritual life has been imparted to nature; . . . the seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; . . . this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law.” Yes, of course, he says, human beings have the capacity for doing what every other creature finds impossible: divining the divine.

  About the century’s erosion of humanness, Emerson would have none of it. To the contrary, he aimed to rescue human beings at the level of feeling. He faced an almost impossible task. In 1828, the year before Emerson’s ordination into the Second Church, in Boston, Noah Webster published his new and definitive American Dictionary of the English Language. Read it and you feel as if human beings never existed. For instance, the dictionary contains no entry for one of Emerson’s pet themes, a favorite of the twentieth century, individualism. For the far less controversial individual, the dictionary offers the most desultory definition: “[a] single person or human being.” And it defines individuality as “separate or distinct existence; a state of oneness.” Emerson’s favorite phrase, self-reliance, had not yet made it into the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary lists as the first instance of self-reliance 1837, in a work from Harriet Martineau, during her visit to America.

  Some deep cultural shift must have occurred for “human being,” the phrase that people use with such frequency in both written and spoken English, to not only fall so mightily into disfavor. How could such an authority as the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary argue that by using that outmoded and archaic phrase, a person would evoke laughter and ridicule? The editors go out of their way to make their point about that basic phrase. But more than all the linguistic speculation, we must ask what happened to the reality that the phrase pointed to—the flesh and blood creatures that went by the name human beings. Did the phrase disappear because it no longer pointed to a flesh and blood reality?

  The phrase “human being” does show up on a Google search, on the website Wikipedia, for instance, offering only the most abstracted and pseudoscientific of definitions: “a bipedal primate belonging to the mammalian species.” That definition borders on the ludicrous and laughable, not unlike Plato’s tongue-in-cheek definition of human beings as “featherless bipeds.” In the very conservative scheme of the Oxford English Dictionary—the linguistic authority on which I have relied in this chapter—the word human situates itself merely as an adjective modifying the noun being (being is actually a verb functioning as a noun—an ongoing action rendered totally static). Human being thus refers only to a certain kind of being, distinct from, say, a nonbeing—an inanimate rock or block of wood. The human being passed out of existence as the social construction of “a life” came to the fore.

  The idea of “life” or of “a life” has a short history. It simply does not exist, for instance, in the ancient world. Some words come close: Bios, as in biology, means a range of things in Greek, including a “mode of life,” “a manner of living,” a “livelihood,” or “means of living”; and zoe, as in words like “zoo” and “zoological,” refers to something that we try to capture in English with the word “aliveness.” In the Hebraic tradition, hai, which usually translates as “life,” along with ruach and neshama, really refers to “breath” or “soul,” which gets passed on to us humans through God’s own breath. This idea of something called “life” or “a life” is a fabrication, a social construct, the beginnings of this idea one can start to see immediately at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at about the same time that Charles White delivered his Account, which predicted the demise of the Great Chain of Being and pointed to the subsequent dislocation of the human being in the created order of the natural world.

 
Around the year 1802 or 1803, a Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published a work in which he used the word biology, and in so doing helped to bring into being a new field of study, biology, or “the science of life.” Lamarck posited the existence of life as a way of distinguishing all living beings from all inorganic matter. He meant the new field of study to subsume the work of the prevailing botanists and zoologists, whose purely descriptive work reduced observable nature to a taxonomy, a series of more and more narrowly defining classifications. Lamarck argued for something more, something deeper and more complex than description, choosing to distinguish living beings from inorganic matter not through their visible structure, but through their underlying principles of organization.

  Lamarck also wanted his science of life to lead the new biologists beyond the competing descriptive studies of those essentialists who insisted on reducing the complexity of the human down to a single, defining characteristic, as the mechanists, vitalists, and materialists hoped to do. Digging beneath the skin of things, the implications raised by this new discipline of biology have reverberated down to our own time. As Ivan Illich points out, what followed from the emergence of biology was that “as morphological, physiological and genetic studies became more precise toward the middle of the nineteenth century, life and its evolution become the hazy and unintended by-products reflecting in ordinary discourse an increasingly abstract and formal kind of scientific terminology.”3

  Biology now searches for its organizing principles in tissues, cells, and the enormously complex and highly individualized genetic code. Illich points out that the reigning question, “What is life?” is not a probing question that philosophers have asked from, say, the ancient world down to ours, but arises as “the pop-science counterfoil to scientific research reports on a mixed bag of phenomena such as reproduction, physiology, heredity, organization, evolution and, more recently, feedback and morphogenesis.”4 Today, we have to understand just what those “pop scientists” mean when they raise the question, “What is life?” That deep-seated and broad question actually engenders very narrow and limited responses.

  The major idea that makes up the concept of “a life” is that people are born with myriad needs, and that everything they require to satisfy those needs exists in the world as scarce commodities, which take great skill and knowledge to get hold of. As human beings gradually lost their sense of humanness, they also lost the feeling that they were autonomous beings who could make free and unencumbered decisions. Economists in the late nineteenth century, in reaction in part to John Stuart Mill, began to reinscribe these new creatures—creatures who now possessed their lives; who now owned their lives—as homo economicus, “economic man”: rational beings operating out of self-interest in a most singleminded way—to maximize their own satisfaction and wealth. The market economy set the priorities, and offered full-blown descriptions of what the satisfied and successful life should look like.

  Such desperate creatures, out of necessity, placed themselves at the mercy of a whole raft of professionals, who stood ready to provide just the right kind of management and control, and who could satisfy their needs by dint of commanding key places in the marketplace. And so life under these new conditions depicted human existence as a struggle against one’s neighbors, and even friends, for limited and scarce goods. Which meant that, in order to stay alive—actually, to thrive—people had to engage in a nasty and daily Darwinian scramble for those limited goods and services. The driving force behind the entire human enterprise was one thing only—competition. Under these redrawn conditions, any sense of a communitarian spirit splinters and falls apart. It’s all for one, and one for oneself. Those already marginalized—the poor, the people of color—must remain at the edges forever.

  Bioethicists insist that a vast difference separates “being alive”—what the law has recognized up to now—from the more familiar and possessive “having a life.” “The proven ability to exercise this act of possession or appropriation,” to quote Illich again, “is turned into the criterion for personhood and for the existence of a legal subject.”5 What we watch, then, is the slow and steady progress of the sacralizing of this new possession called “a life” as it replaces the notion of the human being or the more familiar term, “a person.” The end result is a newly crafted creature who comes into the world trailing a long list of rights—a legal and social construction.6

  This new idea of possessing a life makes for odd locutions like “What do you plan to do with your life?” or “I hate my life,” or even “He received life in prison.” All of which gives the feeling of life existing as something external to and slightly remote from our very own selves—as if we were not alive but rather making our lives by standing outside all the activity and observing the passing parade as a process, an activity seeming to take place at a slight distance from our own beings.

  This redefinition of the human being has resulted in terrible and sometimes horrifying fallout. Having a life, for one thing, can at times turn the act of living into a dangerous and frightening undertaking. For, as Illich has pointed out in various essays and books, the entity called “a life” falls easy prey to management and improvement, and, perhaps most frightening, “to evaluation [that] is unthinkable when we speak of ‘a person.’ The transmogrification of a person into ‘a life’ is a lethal operation, as dangerous as reaching out for the tree of life in the time of Adam and Eve.”7 The move is a dangerous one because once scientists and social scientists have completely emptied out those creatures we once knew as human beings, a band of professionals stands ready to fill those empty vessels back up, not just with goods and services but with new desires that, in turn, can only be satisfied by yet another band of even more specialized professionals.

  In the end, these new creatures are left feeling that they know virtually nothing about their own needs, and thus throw themselves on the mercy of a huge range of trained professionals who determine, for a price—sometimes a fairly steep price—what they need and then promise to deliver it all. Thus, with the assistance of various kinds of self-help, the new human being survives. And thus, as Thoreau so eloquently puts it in Walden, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

  Once we understand the notion that we have been accorded “a life,” we then have to recognize what follows from that oddity—which is that almost every aspect of our lives comes under the direction, control, and management of some agency or professional or of some corporation. A key example is the regime of what politicians call managed care. While we all want to feel healthy and well, most of us have been made to feel totally inadequate in judging the state of our own well-being, and totally incompetent in assessing and addressing our own illnesses. At the slightest sign of disease, we turn ourselves over to medical professionals without thinking, without questioning: After all, those doctors know so much more than we.

  Such a lopsided, mostly commercial transaction many times turns the healing process into a counterproductive experience, with nothing but disastrous results. People visit a physician for a specific illness, receive myriad medications, and find themselves worse off than before their medical intervention. Critics of the medical profession have coined a word for such blowback—iatrogenesis. Iatros is the Greek word for doctor, and genesis refers to something’s origin, and so the word refers to illnesses that have been generated by physicians themselves. The American Iatrogenic Association reported, in 2008, that in-hospital deaths from medical errors occur at the rate of almost 195,000 a year.

  Let me return for a moment to the question “What is life?” While that seems like a fairly weird question now, in the context of the redefining that human being underwent in the nineteenth century, a variation on that question that we ask in our own times seems even stranger, and that is “When is life?” Opponents of abortion argue over the exact nanosecond when the embryo or fetus acquires—possesses—that special something called “life.” At no other time in our history could we ask such a question,
as if, in some scene out of Frankenstein, we could point to a split second when sentience actually commenced, as if such a thing suddenly came into being with the flip of some central switch.

  Again, this idea has little if any history. One cannot find a trace of this kind of thinking in the ancient world. Instead, the ancients recognize a quickening in the womb signaling the onset of life, and an eventual ending underground signaled by the onset of agony, “the personal struggle to die.”8 But the ancient world never mentions that mysterious state, or rather status, we call “life,” or the even more bizarre “a life.”

  So then what does it mean to ask, “When does life actually begin?” The Twentieth Ecumenical Council, convened in 1869 by Pope Pius IX just to rule on such contemporary and knotty issues, declared that life begins at conception. The Roman Catholics have maintained that position ever since. Pre-Reformation Christian consensus placed the onset of life at the embryo’s fortieth day. In a more secular sense, the question asks, “When, in the course of pregnancy, does life actually begin?” Anthony Kenny, in an essay entitled “The Beginning of Individual Human Life,” reframes the “crucial moment” this way: “Is it the point of formation (when the foetus has acquired distinct organs), or is it the point of quickening (when the movements of the foetus are perceptible to the mother)? Can we identify the moment by specifying a number of days from the beginning of pregnancy?” Such an accounting, one day more or less, does on its face make a mockery of human life. The calendar does not seem to be the appropriate place to find an answer to the beginning of life.