Learning To Be Human

INTRODUCTION

Today we watch the dawn of the psychological age: for many, physical subsistence has lost its ancient primacy to the goals of personal perspective and self-possession. Demands for individuality and self-expression spring up all around us. People shop at supermarkets of values and ideals that invite deciding for themselves. Extraordinary new sciences hold the hope of gauging and recording our states of mind. For the first time many feel free to ask: What do I feel? What is for me?

How do I build a life I love with those I love? What makes relationships so difficult and institutions so dangerous? What happens when people fall in love? Can we understand the psychological problems of sex? Or the basis of friendship? What do I possess when I possess myself?

Some problems seem trivial: Can I hang up the phone? Others momentous: Why do people disdain me? Conventions of thought impose feelings of clarity. Then other feelings erupt: anxiety, rage, sadness, as the gap opens between what we thought and the actual. These feelings are diagnosed as sickness or even diseases. But they may only be the body’s signals of what we are missing—a viable existence. Is there a map of that human ground?

The central theme of this book is a paradox: We must be both as free and as compliant as we dare. Without freedom, compliance is tyranny; without compliance there is only revolt and no freedom. Revolution has not proved useful in this century because it brings the same fury to the solution as produced the problem. This is apparent too on the individual level when dominating persons and creeds, even while they speak of liberation, impose new straitjackets. Most of all, liberty asks of its practitioners respect, even when it is spit upon. Such were the teachings of Gandhi and King. But how to achieve it in personal relations, in the family, in the state?

To be human precludes perfection or a single chain of being. There are very different races to run: One family gives closeness and harmony within convention, only to produce children who need to learn the lessons of the individual, even the alienated. Another is rich in rebellion, producing children who must find value in convention. No line points to a single future. We have to be ready to tell lies out of self-protection or loyalty, as Orwell wrote, and to be broken by love because we have committed ourselves to others and to ideals.

Every institution is the belly of a whale. How do we survive there? We give and take in the day-to-day. Can we contact one another without distortion and be alone in each other’s company when we need to? Friendship is being both close and open. How is this precious opportunity at once fostered and protected in a predatory world? Sexuality exposes humans to their greatest joys and fears: moments of transcendence and ample opportunities for humiliation and loss — nothing so tests the human capacities for both giving and possessing ourselves. Marriage is a statement of the bravest bet humans place on one another—to live and build together through an unbounded future. How can that dedication be protected throughout its life? Above all, when we give and possess ourselves, what is it we give and possess?

The paragraphs that follow are separated so the reader will not be hurried nor a strong continuity expected or imposed. I want reading this book to illustrate its message—to be treated humanly is to find a time and a space of one’s own.

Conrad, Nietzsche, Cézanne, Aristotle, some others, are quoted because their understanding of the human makes them like the most original of mathematicians, able to provide intuitive results that need lifetimes to grasp and test. In this guide to the human ground, inspired by their example, I mean to shape a vision for these new, psychological times.

TRESPASS

I can walk on your land if I secure your permission and practice respect of its contents. These simple rules do not now obtain between minds.

The result is: Human beings are trespassed on, their spirits hurt or crushed, many oblivious. And the intruders go their way unchecked.

A physical analogue for psychological trespass is the drunk driver: someone of clouded perspective propelling a dangerous instrument. The most common psychological instances are convictions of rightness driving powerful opinions. Convictions of rightness denote a clouded perspective whenever those convictions address areas for which only opinion and uncertainty are appropriate. Such areas include almost all of what people say about each other. Powerful opinions are essentially conventional opinions—that is, views backed by strong traditions with large bodies of often frantic adherents.

The concept of trespass in our culture is not now extended to these psychological acts of driving to endanger or assault with a deadly weapon because our ideas of mine and yours are largely restricted to physical property and do not include subjective spaces and times that should be equally respected. I refer to acts of aggression which are personally directed, as when I tell you. The reader can throw this book aside, with indifference or joy. Try that on your boss, or on your parents.

Psychological trespass is easiest to see with young people whose space is treated as a common ground into which I can push my ideas of what a person must be, thin, quiet, married, above all nice.

Or I can sense your individuality and your promise, hold it for a moment in my contact with you, treasure it.

Because there are no public trials for psychological trespass, we can only describe suspects, and that chiefly by their effects on us. Students of the jurisprudence of the future, finding the present efforts rudimentary, may turn the variety of human collisions into a new forest of torts. But the many victims of the legal system itself can hope instead for habits of