What is it to be “human”? A most basic question.
The answers—bullseyes on dartboards, all hanging from kites. 1) Humus is topsoil, rich with nutrients, formed of bodies of dead things, all eaten digested pooped and composted by beetles, worms, bacteria, fungus, etc. who themselves, on the species’ level, are reincarnated through ecological re-cycling.
Human derives from humus, as do the words/character traits humble, humility, humiliation. And since humus doesn’t create itself, humans are created by beetles, worms, bacteria, fungus, etc. Humus, moreover, forms in moist, warm, shady places, so “human” is formed by a certain kind of climate and environment that trees like. Note: Adam means red clay. That character was not born of humus. Its destiny results from the quality of its source material and the way it was handled. From a horticultural perspective, monotheism results from a nutritionless medium.
2) Humus is a vast living-and-dead body that humans are born of, a la the polytheist/animist metanym of mother earth.
The intelligence of humus is something we can’t access through words, though we can construct structures of what we think humus thinks through words. The intelligence of humus is accessed through gardening, basically, and gardening is a physical activity that is a kind of dialogue.
Humus does not speak to us through burning bushes. It speaks to us through all the creatures that arise from it like poison ivy and daisies and etc. And none of these creatures use words;: instead they express themselves physically through form, color, scent, chemicals, motion.
This predicament puts us at a great disadvantage, largely because—counter to all I’ve just presented—human as we commonly know it, is created and constituted by words, not soil.
The medium we use to create ourselves (or "self-fashion") is not shared by other creatures, which leaves us alienated from them. Ask anybody if they are different from other creatures and you’ll be feted with hundreds of examples; ask anybody if we are the same and you’ll surely hear a few examples—but ask anybody if they can talk to the animals and maybe they’ll tell you they saw Dr. Doolittle.
3) I'm privileged and so, perhaps, are you; for this very life is a gift that is unexpected and more or less delightful especially when we consider that when a person says “life sucks!” we might just ask “compared to what?”
When life sucks it is usually our environment, and our place in it, that sucks—not life. And since we live in the Anthropocene, we live in human-created environments; which in this context means that life doesn’t suck; we, and the environments we’ve created, suck. Our environments suck—if we look at them—because they lack humus. What I’ve just jotted seems absurd, I guess, especially because the environments we value the most economically are urban. Urban environments are prized precisely because they are totally humanly-constructed and by definition exclude the living-dead body/ies that is/are humus. And yet as Thoreau said somewhere in Walden, urbanites crave the wild and will import it at any expense: so the many “farm to fork” restaurants in NYC, the juice bars, the ayurvedic oils and ointments etc. The city as Weber observed reaches out and claws in from all parts of the globe the nutrients it lacks. It is a thief, and always has been, taking that which it does not garden from the gardeners; the city is a banker who attends Met galas, the garden an illegal migrant worker. The great danger in defining human, at least to defining it accurately, is by accepting the definition broadcast by thieves who imagine themselves noble and expect you do the same. 4) Our present prevailing definition of human is urbanic. This is not good, or correct. An urban self is originally and always constituted by humus (hence the desperation in importing the fruits of the soil to the place where there is none), but it is also constituted by what Mumford called the megamachine: the vast and complicated infrastructures and mechanical processes that we call industrial.
In short, what is commonly considered human is actually cyborg, a mix of human and machine.
All too often, almost always, when we think of humanism (and prize our own humanity) we do not add the machine element.
The machine in our selves is invisible to us. We have not been taught to notice it, and as a result on the scales of individual and mass populations we do not govern, or govern very poorly, this major aspect of ourselves. In our industrial worlds, the machine is natural, as natural all the creatures we don’t communicate with, and are alienated from. 5) Again, the way we define human puts us at a great disadvantage, particularly as we must a) adapt to global climate change and b) end the planetary biocide caused by industrialism. Failing this adaptation means extinction, and succeeding in it means we must embrace humility—which is to say we must get over the myth of Adam, and that is such a serious challenge that large portions of our global population would prefer the easier solution of religiously embracing our species’ extinction, calling it “the Apocalypse”. It's odd when we extol our human selves by claiming we are made in the image of a deity that molded us of a nutritionless medium—and at the same time accept that because of that extolling it’s ok that we are members of a suicide cult.
Are we made in the image of a god that kills itself?
6) Religion is a cultural phenomena and action that binds us to other things (religare means that which binds). Monotheism binds us to secondary, not primal, sources of being—to words, not humus. “City of God” is the title of Augustine’s opus, not “garden of bios”. The monotheist spirit he extols is pure, and refuses to be contaminated by the source of its word-god. 7) In closing, let's consider the cell phone that is an essential part of our “humanity” now.
It promises to liberate us, but binds us—we can’t stop looking at it, and are tracked and monitored through it by invisible ungoverned entities, so they can export our nutrients into their data collection centers, which are our pyramids, our zeniths of “human” intelligence and achievement. (What happens when the power goes off?)
I have an Apple phone and am writing this on an Apple computer and they are made by Chinese wage-slaves and they are sold by fabulously rich slave masters who cherish their democracy that is founded on the natural law of human equality. (The “garden” and “knowledge of good and of evil”—apple! Apple chooses ... evil? ) ) In the beginning was the word, and it will end this world.
Humus will remain.
Species that survive the end of the industrial era will be reincarnated through it.
8) The word that began this industrial culture doesn’t communicate with anything aside from itself. It can't. In the same way we are (imaginarily) cast in the word-god’s image (bc that god can't exist if we don't create it through words), the word is god: totally-self-referential, perfect only in its alienation, its solecism, its certainty that it is alone the only thing that is, and that matters. Nothing except this god, it says!
For a word to mean anything, it can’t be entangled by any other meaning than what it exclusively expresses.
It is invented by us to serve its exclusive service of being a tool we use to construct worlds we imagine. It can’t be mixed up with (killed, eaten, digested, and pooped by) other words, because if it was, it would lose its meaning. And because it is not alive, it is invisible, supernatural, eternal.
9) If the selfie did not exist, it would have to be invented.
10) (What will happen to all the selfies?)
Kommentarer