In 2002 Winston Churchill was voted ‘the Greatest Briton who ever lived’, a choice many vocally disagreed with. Churchill’s critics sighted racism, warmongering and anti-Semitism as reasons he was unworthy of the title of ‘greatest’ Briton. Of course, opinions would be divided as to who was most worthy of the number one position — choosing just one person seems a foolish act to begin with. Each nominee was notable for one or more significant contributions over a wide range of areas, from the political to the scientific, from art to literature, from medical to social. They were all great and their achievements incomparable beyond the fact that they all changed the world.
But then, the nominees were also products of their time. They were alive in times when racism was justified by what is now recognised as pseudo-science, when the use of force to gain power was never questioned, and when women were still considered property.
The examples of this through history are numerous: The Famous Five, Canadian suffragettes Emily Murphy, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney and Henrietta Edwards got women the vote in Canada. Many of them didn’t want to extend said rights to non-white women, or women who weren’t married, and Emily Murphy campaigned for eugenics legislation. Nelson Mandela is known for his advocacy for peace and the abolition of apartheid — but in his youth was affiliated with social activist groups known for being violent, resulting in speculation about his involvement in various bombings these groups carried out. Mahatma Gandhi, one of the world’s most prominent activists to use non-violence to enact sweeping social change, went through a period where he tested himself as a Brahmachari by sleeping next to young, naked, often underage, women.
Such information brings up a lot of questions: Should a person’s contribution be seen as any less significant or valuable because they also held opinions or acted in ways we find appalling or know to be misinformed and ignorant today? Why do we declare past negative actions as the ‘truth’ about a person? Should a flaw mark a person irredeemable, outranking the positive contributions they make? What do such demands for perfection do to a person’s humanity?
Too often we irrevocably unify what a person does, or once did, with who that person is. We create categories of things that are definitively ‘good’ and definitively ‘bad’. If you carry out a ‘good’ act, then you are a ‘good’ person. Conversely, if you carry out a ‘bad’ act, you are a ‘bad’ person. This is a damaging view to hold as it assumes that any individual, ourselves or anyone else, can only be one way. It does not account for the complexity of a human being. Within this limited view, we reduce a person’s humanity to single acts, often putting more weight on acts we deem negative.
This is flawed reasoning because humanity does not equate to being ‘good’. To have humanity is not to be virtuous or flawless. To have humanity is not to be kind or perfect.
Humanity is the quality or state of being human.
“There’s a danger in Churchill gaining a purely iconic status because that actually takes away from his humanity.”
Inviting people to question their humanity — to question how, as human beings, we participate in, benefit from and perpetuate systems that assign worth according to gender, sexual orientation, skin colour, religious beliefs, ability, age and wealth — can be a dangerous business. It’s inviting people to go against the status quo, to consider that what they think they know is actually harmful or damaging, and not actually the way things are.
Such questioning frightens people. It removes the neat little boxes we have been given by our families and our cultures to make navigating the world ‘easier’. It asks us to self-reflect, to get in touch with human suffering, all human suffering, not just what we think of as affecting us or those we love. It forces us to acknowledge the diversity of human embodiment and how one group will create distortions around these embodiments and treat another group accordingly.
When a person has spent their entire life building habits to avoid suffering, it feels confrontational when someone points out that the ways we have of ignoring or justifying suffering are harmful. But to ignore this suffering — to ignore the complexity of human experience, to not truly see the full range of human expression, experience and embodiment — is to deny humanity.
When we limit what we deem ‘bad’ to also mean inhuman, we demonise and separate. We put up barriers and become unwilling to examine such things, even in ourselves. These unexamined beliefs, along with the need to reinforce our ‘goodness’ by ignoring the harmful things we do, is what allows us to perpetuate prevalent, although subtler, forms of societal oppression. By thinking of ourselves as ‘good’, equating only very extreme acts of oppression as ‘bad’, and not cultivating self-awareness to combat our unconscious biases, we are just as much part of the problem. On the flip side, however, if we choose to question what we think we know about ‘good’ or ‘bad’, about humanity, about the limitations we set on others by holding unexamined beliefs passed down to us through the society we grew up in, we can and will be part of a solution.
Human beings are diverse, complex creatures with a multiplicity of defining characteristics and a vast array of emotions. To be human is to be capable of great violence, ignorance and hatred, just as it is to be capable of great compassion, kindness and love. Within a single person, an entire universe resides, and within the world we live in, the actions of each individual do matter.
It doesn’t matter if we think we’re separate, we’re not, we never have been, and we never will be. The best way to understand this is to become familiar with it in ourselves, to truly see our own humanity: our capacity for hate and fear, for love and grace, for great animosity and great collaboration, for ignorance and for awareness, our various identities and embodiments as a single human being. To look at ourselves in this way is humbling, as well as necessary. Each time we look so deeply, we can’t help but relate better to each person we meet, and in doing so we will see that while humanity is not synonymous with virtue, it is also not void of it.
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Originally published on Medium
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You may also enjoy reading The Antidote, Take Care of Each Other and Leveraging Privilege. And you’ll probably really dig my Podcast, Everything is Workable—especially the episodes on Basic Goodness, Compassion and Being the Change.