Getting Things Straight
By DONALD DeMARCO
One of the most bizarre features of the modern world is that ad men and retailers try to make products out to be more than they are, while certain lawyers and philosophers are at pains to make human beings out to be less than they are. One has to fight against the current of culture in order to have a fighting chance to get things straight.
A “permanent” hair treatment is temporary; “Joy” does not make dishwashing a joyful experience; “5-Day Deodorant” does not last for five days; and a certain aftershave lotion does not cause a bevy of adoring females to materialize out of thin air. We should remember that it is man who makes the clothes, and not clothes that make the man.
The attempt on the part of some professionals to denigrate the human being warrants more detailed attention. There is an inexpressible richness to the nature of human beings that is difficult to see when he is viewed in terms of a series of levels. The first level has to do with individuality, something that human beings have in common with everything that exists. Trees, oceans, stars, monkeys, and mountains all have a certain individuality. And that is why we assign them names.
It would be a grave injustice to evaluate the human being as merely an individual. Nonetheless, throughout history, man has been looked upon as little more than a functional individual having no rights or a property to be possessed by another. Oliver Wendell Holmes has gone on record stating that “I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand” (2 Holmes-Pollock Letters, 1942, p. 252). The 1857 Dred Scott decision, for example, held that slaves were property rather than persons.
A human being is more than an individual by virtue of his membership in the human species. But species membership, for some philosophers, does not entitle man to a privileged status. In his book, Practical Ethics, Peter Singer argues: “Some members of other species are persons; some members of our own species are not.” Therefore, he reasons, “killing, say, a chimpanzee is worse than the killing of a gravely defective human who is not a person.” For Singer and others, man does not necessarily rise from the level of individual to the level of person.
The United States Supreme Court, in 1973, ruled in Roe v. Wade and in Doe v. Bolton that the unborn child is not a person at any time before birth within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the words of the court, “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.” It is supremely ironic that the Fourteenth Amendment, which was a reaction to the Dred Scott case, was enlisted to depersonalize the unborn. The understanding of the human being has, historically, been both inconsistent and contradictory.
Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Hamlet a beautiful panegyric on the special place that man occupies in the cosmos. “How noble in reason,” he states, underscoring the time-honored view that man is a rational animal, and as such, sets him apart from chimpanzees and baboons. Indeed, as Hamlet continues, he is the “paragon of animals.”
Only man among all the animals is religious, artistic, philosophical, and literary. Only man builds hospitals for the sick, provides food for the poor, education for the ignorant, and asylums for the mentally ill. Man is not merely one species among innumerable other species. He transcends them all. He is not circumscribed by his biological classification, Homo sapiens. He belongs to a higher level than his taxonomy indicates.
“In apprehension like a God,” as Hamlet continues. Man can know truth, goodness, and justice. He can, as Aristotle remarked, “know all things.” He is created in the image of God and is His special creation — “the beauty of the world.” And finally, as Hamlet concludes, “the quintessence of dust.” He is a unification of body and soul, the highest of all material creatures (quinta + essential; the fifth essence was regarded by the ancients as imperishable). And he is immortal.
After delivering this lofty statement on man, Hamlet then states that “Man delights not me — nor woman neither” (act 2, scene 2). There is nothing wrong with Hamlet’s assessment of the human being. But something is missing. He is strangely alienated from everything he admires. He remains incomplete. He has not reached that level which crowns his humanity. The factor that would make everything that he admires enjoyable is the missing ingredient. Hamlet pines because there is no love in his life.
Man exists as an individual, but a very special one. He is a member of a species, but the loftiest. He is a person who is both unique and communal. He is a being endowed with rights. But this description does not take into consideration what a human being is supposed to do with his life. Unless he is doing what he is supposed to be doing, he remains incomplete. The core Christian message is that love is the very meaning of life. We are born to love and to be loved. And even those who are handicapped in their manner of expressing love, can be the recipients of love from others.
We do not expect lawyers and philosophers to grasp the full meaning of the human being. But we do hope that they would have a sense of its transcendence, that they would be open to further levels of its being. At the same time, we should become more humanized ourselves so that others will begin to understand the great value and dignity we all possess as human beings.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus of St. Jerome’s University and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest two books, How to Navigate Through Life and Apostles of the Culture of Life, are posted on amazon.com. 12 Values of Paramount Importance is in process.)
