History and Human Equality

Every person has been nourished by particular linguistic and cultural traditions, shaped by living in definite locales, and feels most at home in a specific social milieu (or set of milieus).

But every person is also a member of the community of all humans: everywhere, past, present, and future. Each is a participant in world history, and belongs to “universal humanity.”

If one accepts this, and comes to desire—in addition to the wellbeing of oneself, one’s family, one’s milieu, and one’s nation—the wellbeing of universal humanity, there follows a dedication to the fulfillment of human beings as such. Attention much be paid, then, to those who are unfortunate, as well as to those who have been abused—economically, politically, militarily, or physically.

Social oppression; economic exploitation; racism, sexism, and xenophobic nationalism; gangsterism; marauding warfare—none of these is new under the sun, or coming to an end. When we pay attention, each of them recalls our moral obligation to empathize with and assist the needy, the outcasts, the thrust-down and kept-down, the expelled, the wounded.

The wellspring of this obligation to look out for our neighbor is not pity; it is respect for equal basic human dignity. And the question of “who my neighbor is” has long been settled, the clarity provided by the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) being unsurpassable on principle.

Those in need have always been with us. World history has always been comprised in part by human misery and misfortune, a large amount of it the result of moral and spiritual evil. Inhumanity drives the spear in again and again. Scenes from just the last few centuries—slave trades; the Congo under the administration of Leopold II of Belgium (a tour of which inspired the phrase “crimes against humanity”); pogroms against Jews, each of them a step toward the Holocaust; the fates of indigenous American and Australian peoples; the Soviet Gulag and the Holodomor; the Rape of Nanjing—renders sensible Hegel’s reference to the “slaughter-bench of history,” as well as Stephen Dedalus’s comment in Ulysses that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Where, or in what, lies a solution to the inequities and sufferings caused by human evils (including ideological blindness)?

Some would assert that there is no “cure” other than the self-destruction of humanity, which is a real possibility through nuclear war. (Bioweapons, too, are making strides. The effects of even the most severe climate change, however, are unlikely to cause mass extinction.) Rid the world of human beings and let world and nature go their regenerative way.

If we do manage, though, to avoid a Dr. Strangelove scenario of “atomic annihilation in a fit of fitness” (Voegelin), and history keeps providing us with opportunities to advance respect for human dignity and equality, then the basic orientation we are called on to adopt is (to repeat) one that desires and seeds our small contribution to the wellbeing of “universal humanity.”

Is there some practical advice on how to do this?

One might begin by rehearsing (daily) the remembrance that one is not only an actor capable of some degree of self-determination, like every other person with effective freedom, but at the same time an upwelling of the ground of consciousness that is in search of attunement with itself.

It is true that this kind of remembrance can lead some people to relax into complacency. For if human history is essentially (for example) the transcendence of Brahman effervescing through space-time in uncountable individual destinies; or a “God-invention” (to borrow Thomas Mann’s phrase) in which all individual and social stories perform largely unwitting parts in a drama whose full design and finale no one can know with certainty; then why struggle? Why not adopt an “easy-going mysticism”?

Because such historical complacency is abdication.

Like it or not, the modern emergence of acutely “historical consciousness,” as it has been called—think, in the philosophical realm, of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Toynbee, and in the practical realm of the ongoing work of anthropologists, archaeologists, comparative religionists, and philologists—has settled a certain responsibility for history on human shoulders. Humans may not have (speaking ontologically) created ourselves; but it is clear we have been created with the capacity to reflect on our own beings, on the dynamism of emergent probability at work in the universe, on human history and on what is going forward in history, and to nudge human designs and human actions toward cosmopolis: toward “world community.”

 “Nudging,” of course, is not coercion. Historical coercion is a feature of the programmes of those who claim perfect knowledge of where to take history in order for its true goal to be reached. Any such programme sketches out a plan, and the inception of that plan is always the dream of an ideological dreamer who would, if allowed, impose his personal dream on a recalcitrant society.

It is difficult to dramatize in language the combustion of forcefulness, spiritual stuntedness, and projective fervor in the historical ideologist.  “In order to bring him to life,” Voegelin suggests, “you will have to reflect on the man who wants to transform the world in his image. If you try that, you may find that there are men who cannot grow with themselves.” That is: such persons happen upon some exhilarating ideas about, say, the origins of social structures, or the deep design of history, and afterwards refuse to let disharmonious actualities of society and history inform their perceiving, thinking, evaluating, and deciding. Their solutions to the quotidian problems of everyday life keep maturing, but their intellectual horizons and their spirits do not.

This has consequences. Voegelin continues: “When they stop [growing], an event that frequently occurs around twenty, the tension between the status at which they have arrived spiritually and intellectually and the relentless process of time in themselves and the world surrounding them will cause anxiety, and from the anxiety is born hatred. From such hatred may then arise an infinite variety of attempts at stopping the flux of time—childish things like the professor for whom science must stop at the point that he has reached with so much labor at the time of his Ph.D.; terrible things like the political leader who wants to freeze history at some ridiculous point of order that he has picked up somewhere in his youth.”

The embrace of an ideology temporarily soothes existential unrest by giving the illusion of mastery over difficult meanings, but in the long run exacerbates anxiety. By granting the individual permission to stop growing, it ensures an ever-worsening existential friction—which leads often enough, as a person ages, to mounting rhetorical vehemence.

It also grants permission to forget all the data—both of sense and of consciousness—that reveal the “beyond” of meaning and real anthropological, historical, and ontological mysteries.

By contrast: what would it mean to “grow with oneself”?

Most fundamentally, it would consist of remaining faithful to the unrestricted desire to know and love that underlies and propels human consciousness: to allow inquiry its full scope. The consequence is continual new insights, which in turn require a perpetual readjustment of judgments about what is true and valuable.

Sometimes this process of growth even requires a major horizon shift (or “paradigm shift,” to use Thomas Kuhn’s famous phrase).

The most significant horizon shifts entail a “turning-around” (conversio). One of these is a moral conversio, when one turns from assuming pleasure and pain to be the proper criteria of good and bad. One of them is an epistemological conversio, when one turns from assuming that materiality is the proper criterion of “real-ness.” And one of them is a spiritual conversio, when one turns from assuming that the dynamically emergent universe contains within itself (so to speak) the ground of being.

Each of these is the fruit of pursuing, in existential openness, the further relevant questions raised by significant new insights.

But so much else follows too!

The world remains ever-fresh, as practical, aesthetic, and scientific insights accumulate.

Human history becomes more and more vivid (and one discovers—how disorienting—that people were no less intelligent 2,000 years ago, or 4,000 years ago, than they are now. Rather: knowledge is cumulative.)

The boundary of the humanly knowable is revealed to be not a line in space and time but a mystery of transcendent meaning—which is, one discovers, the real ground of value.

And at last, one finds that each person’s revelatory participation in this transcendent value is what constitutes basic human dignity.

Our acute modern historical consciousness, meanwhile, is not going to evaporate, but only deepen. So we must try to live responsibly in history. What does this require?

Above all, resisting the allure of ideologies, while working as one can to advance the wellbeing of all persons, while at the same time loving their transcendent ground. What a balancing act!

No one who knows a grasshopper from a howitzer, though, could have claimed that striving for the balance of existence is easy.

Happily, culture offers many examples and teachings, symbols and lessons, for our existential guidance.

And ideologists supply all the counter-examples we need.

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