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Print Edition What is the human condition?

The greatest of all paradoxes is the riddle of human nature. Humans are capable of immense love and sensitivity, but we have also been capable of greed, hatred, brutality, rape, murder and war. This raises the question, are humans essentially good and if so what is the cause of this evil, destructive, insensitive and cruel side? The eternal question has been why ‘evil’? In metaphysical religious terms, what is ‘the origin of sin’?

More generally, if the universally accepted ideals are to be cooperative, loving and selfless—they are the ideals accepted by modern civilisations as the basis for their constitutions and laws and by the founders of all the great religions as the basis of their teachings—why then are humans competitive, aggressive and selfish? What is the reason for humans’ divisive nature? Does this inconsistency with the ideals mean that humans are essentially bad? Are we a flawed species, a mistake—or are we possibly divine beings?

The agony of being unable to answer this question of why humans are the way they are, divisively instead of cooperatively behaved, has been the particular burden of human life. It has been our species’ particular affliction or condition, the ‘human condition’.

In fact the fundamental issue of human life, the issue of humans’ divisive nature, has been so troubling and ultimately depressing that humans eventually learnt that the only practical way of coping was to stop thinking about it, block the whole issue from their minds. So depressing was the subject of the human condition that humans learnt to avoid even acknowledging its existence, despite the fact that it was the real issue before us as a species. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point in his now-famous line, ‘About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent’ (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ch.7, 1921).

If we call the embodiment of the ideals that sustain our society ‘God’, then humans have been a ‘God-fearing’ species—people living in fear and insecurity, made to feel guilty as a result of their inconsistency with the cooperative, loving, selfless ideals. The human predicament, or condition, is that humans have had to live with a sense of guilt—although, as is explained in my earlier books Free: The End Of The Human Condition (1988) (note that this is a different book to my 2016 book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition) and Beyond The Human Condition (1991), a sense of guilt that was undeserved. (Note also that these books will be Page 26 of
Print Edition referred to as Free and Beyond throughout this book, and that they are both freely available at <www.humancondition.com/publications>.) Whenever humans tried to understand why there was such divisiveness and, in the extreme, ‘evil’ in the world, and indeed in themselves, they couldn’t find an answer and were eventually forced to put the question out of their minds. Humans coped with their sense of guilt by blocking it out, sensibly avoiding the whole depressing issue. T.S. Eliot recognised our species’ particular frailty, which was having to live psychologically in denial of the issue of the human condition, when he said that ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality’ (Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, 1936).

It is a measure of how accomplished humans have become at overlooking the hypocrisy of human life and blocking out the question it raises of their guilt or otherwise that, although they are surrounded by that hypocrisy, they fail to recognise it or the question it raises. Revealingly, while adults now fail to recognise the paradox of human behaviour, children in their naivety still do. They ask, ‘Mum why do you and Dad shout at each other?’; ‘why are we going to a lavish party when that family down the road is poor?’; ‘why is everyone so lonely, unhappy and preoccupied?’; ‘why are people so artificial and false?’; ‘why do men kill one another?’; and ‘why did those people fly that plane into that building?’ The truth is that these are the real questions about human life, as this quote, attributed to George Wald, points out, ‘The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking’ (mentioned in Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine, p.197 of 384). The reason children ‘stopped asking’ the real questions—stopped trying to point out the ‘elephant’, the issue of the human condition—was because they eventually realised that adults couldn’t answer their questions, and, in fact, were made distinctly uncomfortable by them.

The truth is, the hypocrisy of human behaviour is all around us. Two-thirds of the people in the world are starving while the rest bathe in material security and continually seek more wealth and luxury. Everywhere there is extreme inequality between individuals, sexes, races and even generations. When a woman pointed out on a radio talk-back program that, ‘we can get a man on the moon, but a woman is still not safe walking down the street at night on her own’, she was acknowledging the hypocrisy of human life.

Humans can be heartbroken when they lose a loved one but are also capable of shooting one of their own family. We will dive into Page 27 of
Print Edition raging torrents to help others without thought of self but are also capable of molesting children. We torture one another but are also so loving we will give our life for another. A community will pool its efforts to save a kitten stranded up a tree and yet humans will also ‘eat elaborately prepared dishes featuring endangered animals’ (Time mag. 8 Apr. 1991). We have been sensitive enough to create the beauty of the Sistine Chapel, yet so insensitive as to pollute our planet to the point of threatening our own existence.

Good or bad, loving or hateful, angels or devils, constructive or destructive, sensitive or insensitive, what are we? Throughout our history, we have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradictions of the human condition. Neither philosophy nor science has, until now, been able to give a clarifying explanation. For their part, religious assurances such as ‘God loves you’ may offer comfort but do not explain why we are lovable.

The real problem on Earth is humans’ predicament or condition of being insecure, unable to confront, make sense of and deal with the dark side of human nature. The real struggle for humans has been a psychological one.