I have a short essay in the next edition of The Monthly looking at some ideas around the strength (I hope) of our common humanity. Here’s a sneak peak … check out the full piece when the May edition comes out next week …
There’s another side to this age of the individual: that in this digital age we stand alone, but crowded by things of which we are aware but can’t influence. That awareness of intimate yet remote externalities can be urgent, often traumatic. But so often we feel disempowered by the act of knowing. What can we do with all the global detail – war, peace, hope, joy, contempt, lies, truth, politics and personal poison – of which we are suddenly, so constantly aware? Talk back to the internet in protest? Sign a petition? We see so much but are simultaneously lost in the little well of ourselves, so befuddled by the diversionary assembly of modern being that the old truths that might be found through deeper, quiet self-knowledge seem to slip beyond our grasp.
This is the age of the individual, standing supreme and self-absorbed but so focussed on outer expressions of self – the self of aspiration and accumulation, the self of things – that we are turned against the great mystery of our common humanity, that shared sense of a human self that begins in a deeper knowledge of our naked, unencumbered individuality. The self of the unknowing body. The self of breath. The self before thought. If all we know of our true being is the jumble of thoughts and things by which we define ourselves both externally and in self-image, then we trade away the chance of a deeper idea of basic being and the opportunity to see that sense of profound humanity in others.
It seems simple, that inter-human connection is the connection that begins in the mutual recognition of our unadorned human essence, the thing we sense when we hold the gaze of another. I see you. It’s simple but so routinely absent.
It has little place in this modern material world. We live in a culture that has forgone the subtle infinities of hope for prescribed notions of aspiration, where success is defined by the material things that might be had. We’re left not with the simple self, but with the adorned individual. Not with common humanity, but with a culture of stuff and ideas.
And all of this comes at a moment in history when the biggest problems that confront us are universal to humankind and coldly existential: climate change, inequality, the potential for global disease, environmental degradation and mass extinction. Each will require solutions only found in the collective, in joined social action. Rugged individualism won’t cut it.
What a muddle.
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So important, yet I could never have expressed this! You've somehow articulated something that tugs at the core of my being. My soul feels cleaner for having read this.