We No Longer Know What a Human Is

How the crisis of culture has turned our politics into religion

One of the great Freudian observations is that people are always telling on themselves. If we listen carefully enough, people say what they mean, even and sometimes especially when they seek to hide their true thoughts and feelings—including from themselves. Individuals do it, and I believe communities do it too. We find ways to confess to our sins, our fears, our fantasies, our plans.

This election season is yet another opportunity to practice this kind of careful listening.

I wrote recently that the Harris campaign’s use of “brat,” “joy,” and “weird,” along with Harris’s choice not to speak with news media—that is, I will now add, not to speak without a teleprompter—all suggest that we are seeing the purest form of the kind of political speech George Orwell warned us about. He observed that political speech uses words to obscure meaning; but the logical end of this use of language is talk intended to obscure the total absence of meaning: language as an instrument of vibes.

At last week’s Democratic National Convention, which was not totally devoid of substance, speakers added a few more buzz words to the ones I listed above; among them, notably, was “freedom.” Commentators have already noted the smart political strategy at play here: progressives have long ceded patriotic speech to conservatives, especially concepts like freedom, and if Democrats hope to win over undecided voters, they’ll need to embrace some of these core American values like love of country.

But there’s something more significant beneath this savvy rhetorical move.

This speech betrays an uncertainty about humanity. Western culture, and perhaps American culture especially, finds itself in what I will call an anthropological crisis: we have neither a confident nor shared sense of what a human is, what a human is for, and what place human beings should occupy in the world. Virtually every “culture war” issue is a proxy in a larger war of anthropology; from gender and sexuality to abortion, to antiracism and anticolonialism, to certain forms of environmentalism, the fight beneath the fight is about the human. But this isn’t news. And while commentators and politicians love to minimize culture war issues (and evangelical Christians, embarrassed to be associated with something so low-status, love to say how tired they are of the culture wars), noting that most people vote based on “kitchen table” concerns like the economy, public safety, immigration, and school policy, what they ignore is that the kitchen table issues derive their importance from our understanding of what the human is, is for, and where it belongs in the world. The deeper the anthropological crisis becomes, the more difficult it is to differentiate culture war issues from kitchen table issues.

One way to make sense of this problem is to notice that the difference between culture war and kitchen table issues is the difference between humans and animals. Kitchen table issues are the concerns we have as animals: survival, sustenance, shelter, security. Of course people vote based on these issues: they are urgent animal necessities, and voters have no choice but to prioritize them. But man does not live by bread alone, and our politicians know it. Human cultures are a testament of our faith that we are more than animals. Political life under normal conditions, by which I mean, conditions in which a community has a generally shared and relatively stable anthropology, is a constant struggle over means, not a fight about ends. Under normal conditions, political actors understand what Reinhold Niebuhr observed in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, that

Economic desires are never merely the expression of the hunger or survival impulse in human life. The desires for “power and glory” are subtly compounded with the more primeval impulse. The lion’s desire for food is satisfied when his maw is crammed. Man’s desire for food is more easily limited than other human desires; yet the hunger impulse is subject to the endless refinements and perversions of the gourmand. Shelter and raiment have much more extensible limits than food. Man’s coat is never merely a cloak for his nakedness but the badge of his vocation, or the expression of an artistic impulse, or a method of attracting the other sex, or a proof of social position. Man’s house is not merely his shelter but, even more than his raiment, the expression of his personality and the symbol of his power, position and prestige. The houses and the raiment of the poor remain closer to the original “natural” requirement; but it is significant that the power to transmute them into something more spiritual and symbolic is invariably exploited.

However, under the conditions of our ever-deepening anthropological crisis, where our politics is not about securing conditions in which we can transcend our animal needs in the cultural sphere of distinctive human life, our politics has taken on the role of determining what it ought to look like for us to transcend animal needs: rather than arising from culture, our political life has become about forging culture. But that means our political life has come to be about fundamental metaphysical claims about the human being and what separates the human from the animals.

“Banished” (1985) by L. Michèle Franklin. According to Genesis 1, God gave men and women dominion over all the other animal creatures―a mandate which included dominion over their own animality as humans made in the divine image. Under the conditions of sin, human power is always tempted to assert itself as an instrument to return to Eden and to secure our distinctive human place among the animals.

In other words, our politics has become religion. (A far more potent problem than the right-wing insertion of religion into politics.)

By this, I do not mean that “wokeness” or Trumpian conservatism are religious in nature. I don’t mean that the state is enshrouded in religious glory. I do not even mean that people are expressing devotion to political causes, and deriving religious meaning from politics. All of that’s true, but that’s not what I am talking about here. Rather, I mean that our political life has come to do what religion does: it tells us what a human is, what a human is for, and the human place in the world.

Questions that could otherwise be settled by reasoned debate over the constitution, competing interests, and even right versus wrong, take on new meaning. In Hillary Clinton’s words from her DNC speech,

What do I see? I see freedom. I see the freedom to make our own decisions about our health, our lives, our loves, our families. The freedom to work with dignity and prosper, to worship as we choose or not. To speak our minds freely and honestly. I see freedom from fear and intimidation, from violence and injustice, from chaos and corruption. I see the freedom to look our children in the eye and say, “In America, you can go as far as your hard work and talent will take you,” and mean it. 

Embedded in her implicit claims about governance is a metaphysically dense account of human life: that freedom so conceived is what human life is for, and that America, with the right governing party, can make it so. Clinton’s words betray an anxiety about the very things she promises; not just that the political opposition is threatening the progressive understanding of freedom, but, more deeply, that these distinctive features of human life have to be manufactured. The human is not a given; the human must be made—if necessary, by political fiat.

Politics-as-religion perhaps requires politics-as-vibes. One is reminded of Émile Durkheim’s notion of “collective effervescence,” which formed the basis of his sociological account of religion, that people come together in common purpose and individual self-forgetfulness and thereby do they achieve spiritual meaning and sense of the human’s place in the world. The more uncertain we are culturally about the human, the more our politics takes on this Durkheimian religious tenor, gathering us together in order to tell us what a human is.

One obvious consequence is that differences of opinion are no longer good-faith disagreements. We are already beyond saying our political opponents are bad; now, if only implicitly, we suggest they are less than human. History has no shortage of examples of what happens in these conditions.

The urgently needed response to this kind of politics isn’t just more or different politics. When politics becomes religion, what is needed is religious critique—not only of politics, but of the culture. Only when we are clear with ourselves about anthropology will our politics achieve what Joe Biden promised in 2020, a reduction of the national temperature. It’s for this reason that the “culture war” issues actually do matter, but it’s also why those issues can’t ultimately be solved by electing the right president or right congress or getting the right judges onto the right courts.

What is required of us now, especially of those of us who are Christians, is attentiveness to all the ways that we erode or reinforce a coherent anthropology. Even at the risk of sounding like a reactionary, it is worthwhile and necessary to be a critic of race-essentialist forms of antiracism, which are intensifying the problem they allege to solve. It’s worthwhile and necessary to talk about the meaning of gender; our culture has swung from rigid gender essentialism to an account that denies animality—but we are neither merely animals, nor merely spirits. These facts matter. And it’s necessary to listen closely to our politicians, and to notice when they are proposing to the public what is rightly called religion.