Why the World is Being Dehumanized
How the Forces of Dehumanization are Prevailing Across the Globe — And Destroying Our Societies
When you consider what our grandkids and their grandkids will say about this age, this era, what comes surging to your mind? I’d say that the wise amongst them might say something like this: “Wow. They were in profound, terrible pain. They were being dehumanized, over and over again. They had to dehumanize one another, just to live. But that’s a deeply traumatic experience — to have your personhood, your selfhood, your dignity, purpose, truth, capacity for love, empathy, care, nurturing, taken away from you.
To be reduced to either predator or prey. That’s anguish — the real thing. Being annihilated, over and over again, as a thing of inherent worth, beauty, grace, meaning, feeling. My God! They were in such, such pain. And while they might have felt it — did they really know it?”
Let me explain, with a little story.
From the day I was born, more or less, I always thought of myself as someone who didn’t like labels. “Labels,” of course, equal ideologies. And for someone like me, the skinny, sickly kid who was much more interested in disco, fashion, art, and books — ideologies were a kind of tired refrain of people who seemed to miss the point of everything. Wasn’t any label, any “ism,” too small to contain a person?
And yet there was one label that I grudgingly accepted — because most of the minds I admired had been described that way, or described themselves that way. From Camus to Sartre to De Beauvoir to Durkheim. Humanist. What does that word mean? Many things, which I think are still taboo, still a little shameful, still undesirable to think, know, feel, understand.
It means someone who thinks our vulnerability, littleness, loneliness, fragility is an achingly beautiful thing, not a bad and shameful one. That there are foolish things in us, but also noble and beautiful ones — grace, empathy, wisdom, courage, defiance, truth. It means that even our suffering and our grief and sorrow hold a kind of impossible beauty, in a universe that throbs with a silent emptiness. It means someone to whom the terrible suffering and despair of every life — just for existing at all, in the jaws…
