On Seeing the Human Condition

Toward a New Civic Humanism

 

by John L. Godwin

 

Twentieth century observers at times described it as “the modern condition.” We are talking about the kind of social psychology that could produce the mass destruction of two world wars, the Holocaust, and the Great Depression. The total death toll in these wars—including Asia and the Chinese Revolution—has been calculated as high as 100 million; and millions more besides in countries throughout the world were plunged into poverty and despair on a scale that yet requires us to question our most fundamental assumptions about human existence. A vast literature grew out of this experience, and its metaphors have remained outstanding. War, despotism, genocide, mass destruction, agonizing poverty, and family disintegration became the norm—providing the familiar frame of reference by which reality was defined for millions of unfortunate people.

T.S. Eliot’s exquisite poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” summed it up so poignantly:

“Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table...”

Observe that the primary metaphor here is one of mental and physical impairment.

Norman Cantor, whose immense scholarship in The American Century, Varieties of Culture in Modern Times, describes this culture of modernism as one in which history lost relevance, with the mind focused on a world fragmented, disjointed, concrete in its substance, yet lacking in a universal dimension binding it to a common sensibility, asserting that even the smallest segment of life could reveal the whole, with insistence upon sexual frankness if not prurience, the elitism of a presumed cultural vanguard, and the despairing pessimism of a Proustian conviction that “the only paradise is the one we have lost.”

If this is the way we see the human condition, we are likely to agree that the civic humanism of the founding fathers in the U.S.A. was exceedingly optimistic. So the twentieth century experience suggests a new cultural watershed, a vantage point from which a modern Dante might have found himself gazing into hell and unable to look beyond it. Yet, like the founding fathers, we have no reason to assume that the angels that helped Dante are likely to save us from future catastrophes. Here it seems necessary to consider just a few of the relevant assumptions that have been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others of their generation pertaining to the human potential and its relevance to political culture. The belief in reason, responsibility, and the capacity for self-government for this generation coincided with the construction of representative democracy through the concept of a limited, republican form of government. Democracy in this context, resting upon an educated and informed citizenry, was thought to thrive and actually improve upon the human condition through the perfection of social and political institutions.

Over the years since 1787 the nation by starts and fits and even cataclysmic disruptions, did actually grow and improve its institutions. But the events of the twentieth century were easily thought to blow all this to hell. For millions of people the social reality of the age did in fact destroy the spiritual and intellectual moorings that had established a cultural frame of reference. And not much as happened in the years since 1945 to show otherwise. Twentieth century social philosophy has found us groping often unsuccessfully toward new conceptions of civic humanism. And I’m not sure that the fundamentals have change. Some groups in our own time are much too eager to declare war in the name of “culture”.

In the U.S.A. our vastly proportioned superstate seems to thrive upon a politics in which principles and ideas are cast aside in the name of coalition and pragmatism. The discerning mind, in this context, seems sadly to be the one thing truly missing from the larger picture. A profound frustration and anguished alienation can be the result. And we may no longer assume that for millions of Americans, the concepts of citizenship and the consequent effort to discover the truth about government, its wars, and the economy, carry equal weight with the average American’s obsession with his car or the television.

Is this the state of the human condition?

What was that high inspiration in Thomas Jefferson that accounts for his assumption, so charitably given, that we humans have the capacity to deliver ourselves from tyranny and elevate human freedom to a condition generally available to the masses?

I think there are human qualities held in the balance of a Jeffersonian outlook that are yet worth considering, along with that of Cicero and the concept of civic duty prized by those who’ve shared his reasoned assumptions. Jefferson also revered the life and teachings of Jesus, whom he viewed in a decidedly non-traditional manner. The substance of those teachings remained a lifelong concern for Jefferson, while religious freedom and education became his foremost principles.

But it may also true that within today’s discerning mind, the thought of the capacity for love, religious devotion or even human compassion should be held at arms length where mere sentiment threatens to impair the view or limit the understanding. We know that an ignorant rapacity has too often lain concealed behind the vulgar smiles of a vacuous piety. Just as we also know that Jefferson’s outlook was notoriously flawed. Brilliant though they were, few of those among the founding fathers were able to think their way out of slavery, male chauvinism, or the elitist trappings of the eighteenth century. And today, with new wars, environmental pollution, and a public discourse submerged in the dregs of utter folly, we can hardly imagine that our circumstances have been much improved.

The tragic flaws of human existence thus seem hardwired. A Greek tragedy here is as revealing as a Hebrew testament.

So the four horsemen of the apocalypse are relevant, though the proposition is as doubtful as a Sunday morning habit.

And so we ask—if this is the human condition, what then does it take to make us see?

I am thinking of a contemporary film that accomplishes this in a way the ancients probably never guessed or imagined. This is a German film with almost nothing drawn literally from the experience of the two world wars or the Holocaust, but everything that is metaphorically suggestive of the same. This film by Reinhard Hauff called Knife in the Head (1978) is so relevant because it is a sad fact that we humans are like the protagonist, awakened too often like a mute amnesia victim to our lack of perception, only to discover a sense of impairment—a perception fundamentally flawed, of a world seen through a corrupted lens. The film is a cinematic tour de force, depicting the struggles in post-WWII Germany between radical Right and Left and the people caught in between. The film can be taken as a guide to reality for the masses in this age of diminished hopes. For us it is the human condition: like the tragic protagonist in this state of impairment, we don’t know ourselves, don’t recognize our friends or our enemies—and most poignant of all, don’t recall how we managed to get into this condition.

So it is for us, maybe too often. This mentality has been linked to the origins of all of the wars, mass killings, and other forms of depravity in the annals of twentieth century barbarity. There are many names for it in the lexicon of social psychology: alienation, disassociation, depersonalization, and more. But the pathos of this type of human ignorance is not well enough understood unless we see it in terms of the banal, everyday quality by which the limitations of this present reality shape our lives. Young people, having health and beauty, don’t know how to live or love. Leaders have only the vaguest conception of what government is for or how to use it for good ends. Elderly people, having at last attained to wisdom, become too feeble and dispirited to make adequate use of it. Physicians who possess the powers of healing and knowledge of intricate medical techniques—remain too absorbed with matters of technology and cash flow to apply their knowledge. And the myriad followers of the true religion—what do they do? They sit vacantly through the ritual, as likely to blow themselves up afterward as to love others—or to push the Ultimate Button.

So what does it take to enable us, the impaired victims of a blasted out world, to truly see the human condition? I am talking about a faculty of perception that goes beyond sensory images, of course. I am talking about a quality of mindfulness in which we have learned effectively to see through those commonplace assumptions that define our world to the reality of the human condition, affecting all of us in a larger sense, the entire hapless, seething, complex mass of humanity—full of contradictions, weighted down with illusions, prejudices, arrogant pride, impassioned animosities and sheer ignorance. In such an expansive cross section of humanity, of course it is no stretch of the imagination to see that political obsession, racial prejudice, religious bigotry, sexism, or excessive devotion to a single national origin or cause can distort the perception and prevent us from looking clearly at the intrinsic humanity of people.

This is the state of the human condition.

This is the pathos of our ignorance.

So what does it take to enable us to see? A crash course in film criticism or social history? To live in a commune in some decaying inner city? Some quiet work in a lovely sheltered garden? Hours of study by lamplight, pouring over the ancient scriptures? Camping out alone under the stars in a desert wilderness? Or to work daily in a hospital where the sick and injured remind us of human frailty?

Maybe all of these and more.

But it is a fact that the great mass of humanity seldom have the time or opportunity for such things, let alone the chance to see a film by Reinhold Hauff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the film we observe that the protagonist, Berthold Hoffmann, is a politically neutral figure drawn into the intrigue only because his bored and beautiful wife has fallen for a left-wing political activist who may belong to a terrorist cell. As a result of a gunshot wound to the head that has made him an invalid, Hoffman becomes obsessed with his own condition and the suspicion that he is the victim of a terrible crime—perpetuated by whom? By the terrorists? The police?

The poignancy of the film is given as a result of the fact that Hoffmann remains uncertain. And the memories come back painfully as he slowly regains health. He knows that out of concern for his wife he went to a Berlin youth center and was there involved in a scuffle. The police have seized upon the theory that Hoffmann was himself involved with the terrorist gang—for in the midst of confusion someone pulled a knife, and the policeman fired a shot… There was a knife, of course, or was there a knife? Wasn’t this just a ruse created by the police for the purpose of drawing him into the situation, having someone to use against the Left—this group whose overzealous commitment to the poor and disadvantaged have led them to take justice and the law into their own hands? And isn’t it clear enough that in this situation, both sides operate with the same assumptions, the same pervasive cynicism, the same easy conviction that in the struggle for political control a special moral license has been issued exclusively for their cause?

And how is it that Hoffmann was drawn into this conflict? Was it love?

The film’s answer I think is “yes” and yes, it is love that will draw us into this painful, anguished schism between Right and Left, between Yes and No. For this is the fundamental call of human existence; for the compulsion to love and be loved is the very heart-cry of being itself.

But for Hoffmann, as for humanity, the knife in the head represents a kind of impairment that is common maybe to all of us in this corrupted and degenerate age. Indeed, the “knife in the head” in a deeper sense is the human condition. Mired in our world of consumption, pollution, growing cleavages between poverty and affluence, mass communication without knowledge or insight, advanced technological sophistication while the wisdom to use technology to good ends is lost, with impersonal cities teeming with estranged and deluded people, it seems that our inability to see ourselves and our world poses a threat to the very survival of human kind.

In Berthold Hoffmann, therefore, we can see the human condition and the very pathos of our ignorance revealed almost as in a biblical testament. The four horsemen of the apocalypse threaten our world with their ride of destruction. War, famine, plague, and death itself—humanity’s greatest and most perennial enemies—they are waiting for us to decide who we really are. We have only to contemplate Germany and the reality of the millions whose lives were lost to understand the angst and despair of Hoffmann.

At the root of this suffering, therefore, is ignorance and poverty of spirit, human want, and the tragic perfidy of our love-obsessions and our hunger for revenge. But to salvage human hope out of the wreckage of this disaster, the solution can be quite simple. While it may not be easy to understand the human condition, it is easy enough to see Hoffman and to feel an immense sympathy for all that he represents. For in Hoffman we see the concrete image of ourselves and the human condition as we know it.

So on the weight of this assumption, it may be possible to construct a new civic humanism out of which a sense of duty and moral purpose may thrive. A contrivance like the film Knife in the Head can contribute greatly. Norman Cantor, hardly a pessimist on the subject of the human prospect, has observed that recent currents in contemporary thought may be stations on the way to a new era in the making. “If the twentieth century teaches one lesson,” says Cantor, “it is that of the capacity of the human spirit over time to overcome seemingly impossible odds…” (501)

Like Jefferson, perhaps, we return to the imperatives of the discerning mind. But here it should be evident at least that a civic humanism worthy of the name must look again with compassion on the human condition as it exists in our time. And if we embrace the cause of Hoffmann, we must pledge ourselves to remove the impairment, to open our eyes, to see as we have not seen before, and out of the vast extent of human suffering in the world—to try and repair the damage and help the convalescent walk free.

So the enterprise we are involved in is no mere materialism. Where mind and spirit converge, the wisdom that is essential for participation in the life of the community may begin. This is a humanism grounded in understanding, perception, love, and a genuine desire to help people live. If our politics has been wanting in this area, it is time to find a cure. And in seeing the human condition—yes, I mean actually seeing it in this ultimately synthetic, highly cultivated and supremely intellectual sense—may be the first and most important step toward a new civic humanism. But in a sense more fundamental in the context of our own lives and for each of us, it may be the only exit from the knife in the head.