January 4, 2020

Human Nature (Across the Sundering Seas 2020 #01)

Hello from the future, everyone! —where by “the future” I mean “2020,” because it’s kind of amazing to me that we’re in 2020. William Gibson’s line—

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.

—seems more true today than ever. 2020, already?

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This is Across the Sundering Seas, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of Christianity, ethics, technology, internet culture, and scholarship—by Chris Krycho. You can always unsubscribe for any reason, and my feelings won’t be hurt: there’s more than enough calling for our attention in the world!

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Today’s issue is a little bit special: it’s a reintroduction to a revamped newsletter. It has a shiny new visual design which matches the design of my website. More importantly, the newsletter is taking on a new shape: I have a much better idea what this is for.

In 2019, I ran this newsletter as a quirky mix: most weeks (that it went out!) it had a few links and some extended commentary on them; a few weeks it had reflections in the style of a blog post or short essay. In 2020, this has one purpose: sharing my research, in the interest of (as one of you put it in response to the last email), building a culture of studying and challenging yourself with those thoughts.

Instead of that unpredictable mix, the newsletter will have the same structure every week: some extended commentary on something illuminating I’ve read lately. “Something illuminating I’ve read lately” is intentionally broad: I will be drawing from the reading I’m doing for the Winning Slowly Season 8 book club, the prep work I’m doing for a Sunday School class on theological anthropology I’m teaching in the summer, the fiction and hopefully even poetry I read, and of course my usual wide gamut of miscellaneous non-fiction reading online. The subject matter will range from explicitly theological to the politics of open source and everything in between.

The total number of articles or items I cover will go down overall, but I hope the quality of reflection will go up overall. Taking this tack should also make it easier to make sure the email goes out on Saturday every week (instead of kind-of-weekly-sometimes). The kind of essay-like content I posted here in the 2019 version of the newsletter will instead become actual essays, living at v5.chriskrycho.com/essays.

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With that out of the way, a brief (because I only sorted this all out in the last couple days!) reflection on the first essay I’m reading for that theology-of-humanity class I’m teaching this coming summer: Kathryn Tanner’s “In the Image of the Invisible.”¹

Tanner opens the essay with quite a punch:

The divine, in short, cannot be comprehended or contained in any respect; it is simply not anything that we can get our heads around.

Christian theologians, following verses in Genesis to this effect, also commonly claim that human beings are created in God’s image. Putting the two ideas together, one might expect them therefore to develop just as commonly the way in which human nature reflects divine incomprehensibility. Theological discussion of what it is about humans that makes them the image of God frequently moves, however, in the opposite direction: such discussion often simply amounts to the effort to find some clearly bounded human nature of quite definite character that both reflects the divine nature and sets humans off from all other creatures.

She continues:

[An] apophatic anthropology is the consequence of an apophatic theology. If humans are the image of God, they are, as Gregory of Nyssa affirmed, an incomprehensible image of the incomprehensible…

This is, in short, a perfect inversion of the way most Christian scholarship has tended to think about the imago dei, the image of God, and what that means when it comes to being human. The focus is nearly always on (allegedly) distinctive characteristics of the human creature: rationality, intelligence, ensouledness, spirituality, concern about and understanding of death, creativity, social relationships, culture, technology. I say allegedly distinctive because the more we understand about other high animals, the less many of these attributes seem distinctive to humans in kind rather than merely degree. Tanner wants us reevaluate this whole approach, but for a deeper reason still: human incomprehensibility.

This is a radical claim: that what is distinctively human is as ultimately incomprehensible as what is distinctively divine. “Incomprehensible” here is not total-inability-to-understand-at-all, but rather inability-to-fully-grasp. God, the claim goes, supercedes human understanding. We know him truly but only ever partially. The same, Tanner suggests, is true of humans. And so it is sometimes easier to say both of God and of people like you and me what is not true of us than what is. This is the apophatic way: knowledge obtained by negation rather than affirmation. What does it mean to be human? Perhaps it is easier to say what it does not mean to be human.

(Here forward I am departing from the focus of the rest of Tanner’s essay, which I’m still mulling on. I think I like where she goes, but it needs more thought.)

But then: so what? Maybe we cannot fully wrap our heads around human nature; perhaps it is in some degree ineffable. What does that mean for the way we go about our lives, the ethics we live by?

That basic question—what does it mean to be human?—lies at the core of many of the debates we have in our culture today. Many, perhaps most, of our public and political arguments founder at least in part because we do not agree about what humanity is and is not, may be and may not be. It’s there at the bottom of arguments about sexuality and gender. It’s the crux of the abortion debate. It’s where all the important questions and arguments about transhumanism come home to roost. It is the heart of the ethical arguments around human cloning and the (il)licit uses of CRISPR. It is the hinge even of debates about how to internet well. When people talk about online platforms dehumanizing people, or operating at inhumane scales, we bring to the table (almost always implicitly) notions of what it is to be human.

The fact that our notions of the human so often remain implicit is a serious hindrance to getting anywhere on these questions. It’s a failing of places like The Center for Humane Technology (“realigning technology with our humanity” but without ever defining “our humanity”), but they’re hardly alone. I have too often made the exact same kind of mistake in my own writing, and certainly Stephen Carradini and I have left the matter under-defined in our podcasting.

Perhaps that is because Tanner is right and the question is necessarily underspecified. Maybe we can only in thinking of human nature trace out the edges of a space that will forever exceed our grasp. Grant all of that: it tells us why it is easier to leave human nature implicit in these discussions, but it does not absolve us of the necessity of thinking hard about human nature. Again: final incomprehensibility does not mean total incomprehensibility. There are things we can say both positively and negatively about our humanity, even if what we can say cannot exhaust what we are. And if we are going to do well ethically in the inevitably-challenging decade ahead, we must reflect on human nature: what it is, what it is not, what we can know of it and what we cannot, how it is directed and shaped—and what those mean for what we can do, what we cannot do, and what we ought do and what we ought not do. That goes for all of us, whether you share my Christian priors or not: ignoring the question just leaves us at the mercy of the boundless human will that is certainly part of our nature.