Outside in the warm California sun, with that stunning blue Pacific sky, in this crazy but extraordinary city, in this crazy but extraordinary country. Still having images of Daniel Pearl's death and jihadi rocketeers in Gaza... as I walk by the local baseball diamond in front of the pompously named but placid Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, full of elementary school kids.
Our common humanity.
What an empty phrase.
One of the plaints of the evolved, conscious and high-minded is that dividing people into Us and Them, making them "Other", de-humanizes them for us and allows us then to treat them abominably. True enough.
But that's what they do to us, too. Ask the Blackfeet about the Crow. Or the Iroquois about the Huron. It's neither a new nor a Western concept. So we'd better not forget how.
It is part of our common humanity that we de-humanize other humans. If you don't, under certain circumstances, you die, or worse. Like hatred, which is today considered a crime when evinced by very particular demographic groups (and never by others), de-humanization is part of the politically impolitic survival arsenal of our cosmically-challenged species.
When the high-minded make appeals to "our common humanity", they intend a dangerous half-truth. As if what we all have in common is just noble, generous, warm-hearted or honest. What have in common as well, as an essential and inherent part of our common humanity, not just some passing phase of reactive anger or temporary misunderstanding, are the ideas, the attitudes, the desires and actions which we call criminal, savage, barbarian, or --denyingly--inhuman.
Years ago, the Times of London --when Britain was still British-- asked a variety of famous people to answer the question, "What is wrong with the world?". GK Chesterton wrote a polite note in reply, with full salutation and conclusion, but with this single sentence in the body: "I am." Here was a man who understood his own "common humanity".
I hold strong views about certain groups which I consider inimical to me and to those I love. I do not thereby de-humanize them. I don't need to. It is precisely as fellow-humans, humanizing them, that I hold these groups in the place of "enemy". Were they in fact animals, they would be easy to deal with. But they are savage homo sapiens. Nothing is more dangerous.
That does not mean that they are all, every one of them, equally my enemy or even my enemy at all. But the lack of ill-will or even the good will of some does not necessarily change the lethal nature of the whole group. If an Israeli says to Hamas, "But some of my best friends are Palestinians", he may be telling the truth. But it is without significance. In some situations, many situations, what counts is the tribe.
I am something of a curmudgeon --allowed at my age-- but I am not a misanthrope. When asked by a rather dualist minded friend what my attitude to humanity was, I answered, "Compassion and suspicion, in about equal parts." Being of purer heart than I, he could not comprehend how to hold these opposites together.
Anyone who finds the human race nothing but evil has a lot of explaining to do. Beauty, generosity, charity, heroism are common. But anyone who "believes in the essential goodness of humanity" --like poor Daniel Pearl-- has far, far more explaining to do.
It seems obvious to me that we are a very mixed bag of a species, and that to forget either side of our makeup renders human history, much less the behavior of our loved ones or our own selves, unintelligible. To hold this view prevents neither love nor joy nor hope. In fact, to me it has been a source of some comfort and relief. I am a kinder man, both to myself and others, because I am unburdened of cruelly unreal expectations for us. But the mixed view forbids stupidity or blindness or suicidally utopian innocence. I know an enemy when I see one and have no illusions about what that may mean.
To invoke "our common humanity" is as at least as much a cause for suspicion as compassion.
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* I am sure that some people would be or were offended at my pleasure in that man's ironic demise. For some ludicrous reason, we are now supposed to value every human life equally, every one, in almost the same way --except maybe George Bush's or an Israeli's-- even when they are trying to kill us or, as in Britain, invading our homes to rob us. I must have missed that very-late-in-the-day memo.)
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