Page 14 of
PDF Version 2. What is the Human Condition?

Here on Earth some of the most complex arrangements of matter in the known universe have come into existence. Life, with its incredible diversity and richness, developed.

By virtue of our mind, the human species must surely be the culmination of this grand experiment of nature we call life. As far as we can detect, we are the first organism to have developed the fully conscious ability to sufficiently understand and thus manage the relationship between cause and effect to wrest management of our lives from our instincts, and even to reflect upon our existence. With all our preoccupations it is easy to lose sight of the utter magnificence of what we are. The human mind must be nature’s most astonishing creation.

One of the greatest demonstrations of our intellectual brilliance was sending three of our kind, in a machine of our own invention, to the Moon and back.

How far we have come.

But what a state our world is now in.

Despite our magnificent capabilities, levels of personal and environmental wellbeing are at unprecedented lows—and hurtling towards greater depths at an equally unprecedented rate. Every day brings with it startling evidence of the turmoil of the human situation. There is conflict between individuals, races, cultures and countries. There is genocide, terrorism, mass displacement of peoples, starvation, runaway diseases, environmental devastation, gross inequality, racial and gender oppression, crime, drug abuse, family breakdown and epidemic levels of depression and loneliness.

While humans do have a capacity for immense love and sensitivity, the fact is we also have an unspeakable history of greed, hatred, brutality, rape, murder and war. Try as we might to deny it, behind every wondrous scientific discovery, artistic expression and compassionate act lies the shadow of humanity’s darker accomplishment as undoubtedly the most ferocious and destructive force that has ever lived on Earth.

This duality of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, which is the essence of the ‘human condition’, has puzzled scientists and thinkers since time immemorial: are humans essentially ‘good’ and if so, what is the cause of our ‘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—as has been 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—then why are humans competitive, aggressive and selfish? Does our inconsistency with the ideals mean we 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 we are the way we are, divisively instead of cooperatively behaved, has been the particular burden of human life. It has been our species’ particular affliction or condition—our ‘human condition’.