Mission Final: Operation Humanities and the Experience of Being Human

In the introductory unit we explored the concepts of myth, ritual, mind and language. We read an excerpt from The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain, who asserted that our current phonetic alphabet evolved so that we as a culture are further separated from our intuitive and emotional right brains. Instead, we are experiencing the growing domination of the left brain which incorporates the skills our society is developing. The female right brain recognizes faces, solves spatial problems, and uses metaphors to explain feeling-states. These attributes of being and holism were better evolutionarily for the earlier gatherer/ nurturer roles of humans. The masculine left brain is associated with doing, speech, abstraction and analysis. The ability to focus in on one aspect is associated with the left brain, and is therefore associated with the hunter/ killer aspect of the brain. Shlain also discuses story-telling, which incorporates both brain hemispheres because a lot of human communication is nonverbal, including gestures, voice inflections and facial expressions. Writing, however, only uses the left brain since it focuses on linearity, sequence and abstraction which separate our feelings from the act of writing characters on paper. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram also affirms that writing separated humans from our emotionality. In early forms of writing, characters were pictograms, which separated the emotional experience of the object into the lettering, but were still directly related. Eventually, the verbal names of some objects were combined when pictograms were put together. For example, “the Sumerian word ti, which means ‘life’, was written in cuneiform with the pictoral sign for arrow, which in Sumerian is also called ti” (98). Eventually, the phonetic alphabet took over, by creating a character for each consonant sound, and vowels, the sounded breath added, were chosen by the reader. Abram affirms that “a direct association is established between the pictoral sign and the vocal gesture, for the first time completely bypassing the thing pictured,” which also bypasses the direct, emotional, more-than-human experience. This more-than-human experience is referenced by Karen Armstrong in A Short History of Myth. Armstrong cites the Australian aborigine concept of Dreamtime as a more-than-human divine realm which they connected to through ritual. She writes that “a sense of participation in the divine was essential to the mythical worldview: the purpose of a myth was to make people more fully conscious of the spiritual dimension that surrounded them on all sides and was a natural part of life” (Packet 2). Our ancestors who created more fundamental myths connected to a divinity with their emotional and intuitive right brains through ritual. As evolution and writing progressed, the left hemisphere became more dominant. However, both hemispheres are connected and important for a human experience.

The next unit focused on humans, nature and sacred space. The Tempest by Shakespeare, relates in the discussion of Caliban, the native of Prospero’s island. Caliban eloquently speaks about the island, his homeland, with beautiful imagery. He represents the victims of European colonization, torn from their indigenous culture by those who exploited and subjugated them. Michel de Montaigne wrote an essay, “Of Cannibals”, a point of view that would see Caliban as a “noble savage”. De Montaigne’s experience of cannibals considered them nobler than the Europeans because they did not torment for fun, but killed for honor, although the Europeans thought themselves superior. They lived in accordance with nature, not synthetic institutions and devices or alienating inventions. Humans came from nature so it is seen as the proper was to live in that organic atmosphere. Caliban is rude and unrefined, but his emotionality and connection with nature is true. Sacred spaces were also considered in this unit, specifically with Chartres Cathedral for my group. The architecture is elaborate, but all is symbolic to Christianity and even ancient Greco-Roman mythology. The experience is just as important, including sensory stimuli and ritual, because it creates the right brain here-and-now participation. This is what creates the experience of the divine, like the prehistoric caves which were home to rituals. Shamans would enter the caves and connect to their spiritual realm, and create paintings that depicted their visions. Chartres has depictions also of religious figures and events that foster these connections and religious experiences. Humans have a need to connect to a divine more-than-human reality, and create sacred spaces to do so. Nature is sacred, and prehistoric peoples fostered a deep connection to it, and so did the indigenous. Caliban and de Montaigne’s cannibals lived naturally and in harmony with nature, and were therefore honorable, but seen to others as crude or foolish. Nature and experience are deep parts of being human and therefore related to the understanding of the sacred.

The next unit explored love and beauty. A video we watched again explored the concept of the more-than-human. It talked about art found from prehistoric times, and how it accentuated what was seen by that culture to be beautiful, even if it was not realistic. Love alters true perceptions. The Song of Solomon from the bible and Sappho’s poetry compare love to eating fruit and other sweet natural foods. It is a transcendent experience that has inspired them to create art and compare it to nature. Sybil Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde was the subject of the titular character’s love. He confused his love for her art and beauty as love of her. The beautiful distorts perception of reality, but is a transcendent experience for which Dorian was willing to sacrifice a great deal. In the film All the Mornings of the World, Saint Columbe was inspired to create his best art through love of his wife. Love is a spiritual, more-than-human experience that fosters beauty, or even is beauty personified. Kant considered beauty a model of nature. Again the natural world is of utmost importance when considered the human experience, although transcendent.

Law, ethics, and human frailty were discussed in the penultimate unit. The Ten Commandments were one of the first basic law codes. It contains many universals found in the Five Buddhist Precepts. Righteousness or faith, and forbidding killing, lying, stealing, and sexual misconduct are things found in most laws. Some laws stem from moral reasons, though some are for societal control. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky explored the nature of ethics as well in the main character, Rodion Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov suffered from a mental breakdown after breaking his own moral code. Humans are frail mentally in regards to morality, either from breaking their own code, or from succumbing to outside influences. His distress at his condition at the hands of society caused Raskolnikov to formulate a theory of great men. He claims he feels no guilt after murdering the old pawnbroker, yet he must suffer from some sort of transgression contrition gauging from his reaction. In the film Crimes and Misdemeanors, the main character Judah hires his brother to arrange the killing of his former mistress. He endures intense guilt, but it goes away once he realizes the good and morality in the world stemming from his faith which he had previously abandoned. It seems that morality is necessary to see the world as a good and overall happy place. Ethics put meaning in the world, and laws reflect that. From the books and movies explored, it seems that human frailty stems from a person’s unclear ethics or distress. Ethics and laws are necessary for a properly-flowing society and for moral and balanced human life.

Last of all in Humanities we explored the inner journey and the meaning of human existence. The entirety of the video, The Power of Myth: the Hero’s Journey, is focused on the inner journey, although the hero must defeat external obstacles. The hero must confront challenges along the way that reflect inner strife. Eventually s/he enters the “belly of the whale”, or the abyss, in which the hero must face their greatest fear or moral failing. The hero is thus transformed and comes to a revelation and achieves atonement or a feeling of oneness with his/her new self. “Night Journey”, a dance by Martha Graham based on the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, is a representation of the point of moral debilitation when Jocasta and Oedipus realize their fate and unwitting transgressions. They discovered the truth through a series of questionings and a prophecy, and atone for their sins in discrete ways. Jocasta cannot come to terms with her fate and sees suicide as the only way to reconcile the irreconcilable. Her inner journey could not come to full fruition because she did not see herself restored after atoning. The titular character from The Epic of Gilgamesh experiences many challenges is his quest to seek fame and immortality. The death of Enkidu sends Gilgamesh into the abyss of his heroic journey. After his failure to retrieve the plant of immortality, he must truly confront his mortality. Gilgamesh must heed and reflect on what the gods told him. Mortality is what made him human after all, and gave his life true meaning. The inevitability of death gave love and adventure more significance and impressed their importance onto Gilgamesh. Every protagonist, such as Hamlet from Hamlet by Shakespeare, must recognize their moral failings or disparity in their morality. The trial comes in seeking reparation and accepting and overcoming the ultimate challenge. Morality and mortality go hand in hand, for death gives meaning to life and its struggles.