Humanity as a Man-Made Phenomenon

James Paul Gee, What Is a Human?: Language, Mind, and Culture

Like “freedom” or “democracy,” most people think we have a working definition of “humanity” in our heads, and it works adequately most of the time. But this loosey-goosey approach to human essentialism has caused negative outcomes throughout history. War and slavery have let powerful people strip the social designations of humanity from strangers, while belief in human exceptionalism currently threatens humanity’s very existence through anthropogenic climate change.

In his youth, James Paul Gee initially trained for the priesthood, but after losing his faith, he earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. This duality probably influenced the interdisciplinary nature of his subsequent activities, such as the tacitly public nature of literacy, or the social interpretation of video games. This book, written as Gee retired from active academia shortly before the pandemic, is the culmination of his life’s work.

Gee identifies human nature through a balance of extremes. Each human is utterly unique, he writes, but unique human attributes manifest themselves mainly through social context. Therefore we are separate, circumscribed by the limits of our senses in the world, but we’re never truly separate, as we rely utterly on relationships with other humans and the natural world. We lack “free will,” a sludgy and imprecise term, but that lack doesn’t justify determinism.

Past attempts to define humanity have fallen down on the lack of nuance inherent in brevity. Recall Plato defining a human as a “featherless biped,” and Diogenes responding by brandishing a plucked chicken. Gee makes no such mistake here. His definition of humanity sprawls over 200 pages, sometimes narrowly focused on precise scientific outcomes, other times expanding to encompass philosophic maunderings and autobiographical anecdotes. Brevity isn’t Gee’s weakness.

Humans, to Gee, exist in community; he uses termite mounds as his metaphor (sometimes stretched to breaking). Obviously we rely upon others to divide labor, collaborate on labor, and amplify our thought processes. But we don’t just exist in community; we are ourselves communities, what Gee calls “transacting swarms,” made up of our microbiomes and our relationship with the earth. We live in termite mounds, and we are termite mounds.

James Paul Gee

But Gee distrusts the mechanistic materialism of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Just as humans have organic biomes, we have “spiritomes,” the complex nest of spiritual realities in which humans dwell, individually and collectively. Though Gee, a lapsed Catholic, flinches from capital-T Truth claims, he believes human spiritual subjectivity is real enough to matter in making life-altering decisions. We all have relationships with evidently noncorporeal realities.

To this point, Gee’s thesis draws heavily on research from other thinkers academically grounded in the physical sciences. Not surprisingly, as a linguist, Gee’s anthropology becomes most dense and detailed when discussing how language shapes the human mental structure. Gee admits coming from a Chomskian generative linguistic background—fascinating but often abstruse. But exactly how his linguistic background shapes humans may surprise you.

Gee admits never reading poetry until after achieving his doctorate. How he studied linguistics without at least a historical survey of poetic metaphor eludes me, but whatever. Gee waxes rhapsodic about what a revelation it was discovering poetry in adulthood, unclouded by state-school “skillz drillz.” The unsullied joy he describes bespeaks a wonder that we who still read poetry often struggle to recapture. I’m downright jealous.

Despite his sometimes scientistic mindset, the humanities offer Gee’s greatest insight into the relationship between our outside, communal world, and the strictly internal neural landscape of senses and higher reasoning. We perceive the world according to our senses, and also according to our ability to describe it to others. His lavish fondness for poetry, especially Emily Dickinson, bespeaks a worldview in which subjectivity isn’t a weakness, but a defining trait.

To his credit, Gee doesn’t pretend his definition is more binding or global than it actually is. He acknowledges that any definition of humanity is provisional and circumscribed by the author’s background and prior knowledge. His language is colored by nuance and the frequent need to walk a tightrope between seemingly contradictory positions. He invites informed readers to challenge and refine his definition of humanity; he doesn’t just stand pat.

Now past seventy, Gee clearly writes with one eye angled toward how posterity will remember him. He clearly intends this volume as a capstone of his academic career. He finished writing in the months leading up to the pandemic, and one wonders how this book might’ve looked just six months later. Yet as a prolegomenon to future humanistic studies, Gee offers an exciting, readable, and purely joyful philosophic consideration.

Advanced Placement and Unadvanced Schools

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in his
favorite pose: angrily lecturing the crowd

The College Board’s Advanced Placement program has existed since 1952, and in that time, no state has refused to certify an AP course. Until last week. In the latest salvo in his one-sided war against “wokism” and “Critical Race Theory,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issued a blanket refusal to participate in a pilot program for African American studies. This despite the course not even being offered in Florida yet.

I never participated in Advanced Placement in high school. I was slated to take AP American History and AmLit in 11th grade, the first time that school offered any AP courses at that level. But circumstances changed and my family relocated that summer, to a school where AP only existed in 12th grade. I handled the adjustment with resentment, and mentally checked out of school, nearly flunking Senior Year.

Therefore I’ve watched subsequent AP developments through a lens of lingering resentment. But I’ve also watched through the recollection of how I reversed my academic skid; after a few years of desultory employment, I returned to school, graduated college with a double major, and earned a Master’s Degree. I taught Freshman Comp for four years, and had students report that my course was their favorite in four years of college.

I say all this so you’ll know who’s speaking when I say: American high schools aren’t equipped to teach Advanced Placement courses. AP began with noble intentions of shepherding advanced youth through college-level general studies courses without wading through tedious prerequisites or paying college-level tuition. But we have abundant evidence that American public schools are beholden to pressures that make AP teaching impractical, if not impossible.

Even assuming younger teens’ brains are sufficiently developed for deep dives into collegiate liberal studies—a premise I doubt—their schools aren’t equipped for such education. Teachers’ credentials are regulated at the state level, creating uneven standards across jurisdictions. Some states may permit intensive study of academic subjects, but my state requires more courses in classroom management than in any academic subject to receive a teaching degree.

This isn’t a knock against teachers individually. Rather, like police or landlords, good individuals often come a-cropper against institutions designed to preserve the status quo. As Dana Goldstein writes, American public (state) schools are organized to maximize cost efficiency, not pedagogical efficiency. Even the most dedicated teachers can’t provide intensive education when working short-staffed, underfunded, and with years-old textbooks.

Charlie Kirk

Worse, the DeSantis Administration’s attempt to kneecap African American Studies isn’t the first time states have undermined AP. In 2014, Colorado students staged a mass walkout when school boards tried to rewrite advanced history courses. Rather than teaching history, with all its messy contradictions, authorities wanted to teach patriotism and libertarian economics. The language presaged current anti-CRT rhetoric, which fears that kids might not unquestioningly love America anymore.

College-level education requires academic independence, something the America First crowd abhors. Charlie Kirk, a prominent young nationalist, kick-started his pundit career by complaining about supposed anti-American sentiment in higher education, despite having dropped out of online Bible college. Christopher Rufo almost single-handedly engineered conservative America’s pants-wetting paranoia over Critical Race Theory. They and others propose tighter state controls on education as the solution.

The DeSantis Administration’s rejection of AP African American studies explicitly cites fears about the subject’s “ambiguity.” High school teachers have long struggled with institutional fears of ambiguity. That’s why social studies teachers inevitably reduce history to lists of dates and vocabulary words, while literature teachers make students memorize plot points, and biology teachers often have to include disclaimers leaving room for seven-day creationism. State schools institutionally forbid ambiguity to creep in.

But any serious academic knows that real scholarship happens in ambiguous spaces. History isn’t just what happened; it’s the great debates about why it happened, and how events continue to influence us today. Great literature always emerges from, but also reacts against, its social environment, and therefore exists in dangerous tension. As scholars like James Loewen and Gerald Graff write, only where ambiguity exists can real learning ever happen.

The College Board generously wants to help advanced students clear academic hurdles in high school. But it ultimately can’t, because high schools face administrative burdens that prevent college-level learning. Again, this isn’t a knock against teachers, who generally enter the field for love of students. But public schools are motivated by political goals, not simple generosity. Schools simply aren’t free.

The solution is to get students out of high school faster, not move college into politically hampered high schools.

Dark Rogers and the Illusions of Power

So I’ve seen this image drifting across social media, as they do, and it got me thinking. (No, surely not you, Nenstiel!) Fans of both Fred Rogers and Star Trek will recognize this thought process. The “Mirror Universe,” a recurring Star Trek thread, depicts an interstellar civilization controlled, not by a United Federation of Planets, but by an Imperium. The Mirror Universe is antidemocratic, violent, and ruled by the strong.

Star Trek fans love the Mirror Universe to the exact extent we generally admire Gene Roddenberry’s underlying humanist ethic. Roddenberry believed the modernist myth that all human history marks an unwavering path from caveman savagery, through an arc of warring tribes and nations, toward an ultimate gleaming future defined by peace, prosperity, and the shedding of divisions. Human societies are always moving from mud-dwelling to utopia.

This involves a sort of civic Calvinism. Okay, Roddenberry himself was personally atheist, and believed the arc of history would move away from religion and “blind faith.” But in accepting the modernist myth, Roddenberry believed the Calvinist precept of “Total Human Depravity,” the principle that humans, left to ourselves, are selfish, venal, and angry. John Calvin believed Jesus Christ would redeem this innate venality; Roddenberry trusted in an evolving state.

Fred Rogers, a Presbyterian minister (a form of Calvinism), had a difficult relationship with Total Human Depravity. He didn’t accept the maxim that humans are innately bad, and that Christianity must purge our sinful desires. But alongside icons of childhood like Roald Dahl and Maurice Sendak, Rogers recognized that children live in long-term states of intrinsic powerlessness. Children lash out, sometimes violently, because they have no other tools available.

Many ex-kids, especially we who preferred to think and build rather than compete and vanquish, have chilling memories of childhood authority. I understand now, as I couldn’t then, how many schoolyard bullies were simply reenacting the power dynamics they learned at home. But that didn’t matter when they’d literally form crowds intended to corner me, shouting and screaming and shoving. The only thing I understood then, was my own powerlessness.

Rather than stopping the constant low-grade violence, school authorities encouraged us to mollify the bullies around us. Not even metaphorically, either: my parents literally told me that bullies acted out of their own terror and pain, and they needed somebody willing to embrace them, regardless of their inappropriate behavior. My family literally told me that it was my Christian moral duty to befriend the kids who made me terrified to go to school.

Current sociology suggests early humanity wasn’t violent, despite what Freud, Marx, and Calvin believed. Little evidence of warfare exists before humans became settled. But then agriculture, with the limits of space and resources, took over. Just as the Biblical Cain, a farmer, killed his brother Abel, a herdsman, so early civilization invented war, and the scars which war produces. Humans had to learn how to be angry, violent, and resentful.

The meme jokes about Mirror Rogers claiming children are weak. But our Fred Rogers acknowledged that same weakness. The difference is, Fred Rogers didn’t see weakness as something to exploit or punish. Like Jesus, Fred Rogers encouraged children to embrace their weaknesses. He authorized us to care more deeply, to reach out to those suffering, to love without reserve. He didn’t promise it wouldn’t hurt, only that we would emerge.

Star Trek’s Mirror Universe, like its Klingon Empire, depicts a society ruled not by humanist values, but by chest-thumping displays of strength. Because Roddenberry realized, despite his ideals, that some people never outgrow their childhood vulnerability stage. We’ve all worked in jobs where the biggest assholes have the most friends, because just like on the schoolyard, scared peers never stop trying to constantly mollify them.

Roddenberry, an atheist, and Rogers, a Christian, shared an underlying belief that rule by fear seems enormous when we’re in its midst, but can never truly last. Roddenberry believed society itself would reach a stage of development where it shackled our violent impulses, but the shadow self, the dark mirror, would remain. Rogers believed the fight would never truly be won, but which side we chose would define our lives.

Because yes, fundamentally, children are weak. Humans are weak. We spend our lives vulnerable to money, violence, and injustice. We never outgrow our weaknesses; we only reach a stage of development where our weaknesses no longer rule us. Whether we reach that individually or together, we’ll all, hopefully, reach a point where weakness is no longer shameful.

Making a Law About “Gender”

State Sen. David Clemens (R-ND)

Online journalists, like crows, often get distracted by shiny novelties, and this week’s North Dakota "Don’t Say Trans" bill is no different. Many outrage reporters have seized State Senator David Clemens’ proposal to compel public institutions to identify residents by their biological sex, not their preferred gender. The desired outrage has appeared, but the bill is a guaranteed nine-days’ wonder. Local reports show the bill has no support beyond Clemens himself.

I care less about this worthless spectacle, and more about the motive behind it. Clemens’ bill aims, for the first time ever, to create legally binding definitions of gendered words. Legally binding definitions give words power, and not just the moral power that language always has. Once words have legal definitions, the state has authority to enforce those definitions, without regard for context. Lawyers love creating legally binding definitions.

Read over any contract you might have lying around your house: your student loan documents, the lease or mortgage on your house, any nondisclosure agreement you signed with whatever celebrity you last slept with. These contracts will make the same statement multiple times in multiple ways. Because of this excessive wordiness, “lawyerese” is notorious for its complete obscurity, a form of language famous for thoroughly obstructing communications.

Except that impenetrable lawyerese serves an important purpose. By requiring you to agree to multiple definitions of the same concept, lawyers reduce to the smallest possible factor your ability to weasel out of contracts. Ambiguous language permits free riders and bad-faith actors to interpret the contract in ways that advantage them, regardless of the intended spirit. You personally might not do that, but it only takes one actor.

Consider real-world examples of what happens when language is ambiguous. Religious discussions bog down over minute nuances of Greek and Hebrew terms, and what those words meant to Bronze- or Iron-Age prophets. Playful Christmas songs written around playful vaudeville in-jokes have been condemned as predatory because we no longer remember the context. What seemed clear when it was written down is vague and scary now.

Linguistic ambiguity allows people to find the worst possible interpretations in words that were written with the best intentions—and vice versa. Rhetoricians speak of the 100% Natural Fallacy, a logical failure that creeps in because people put the best possible spin on the word “natural,” a word that has no agreed-upon definition. When words have no binding definition, naïve optimism or bad-faith cynicism tend to creep in.

Lawmakers like David Clemens attempt to foreclose this ambiguity by giving binding definitions to words we formerly just assumed we knew. I might disagree with Clemens’ long-term goals of making it illegal to be transgendered, but I understand his desire to weed out vagueness. After all, in my teaching days, I formerly told students to structure their language to make it as free from vagueness as possible. Boldness and specificity always beat uncertainty.

Plato and Aristotle, as painted by Raphael

Except…

Sometimes vagueness is good. We argue about how to interpret Levitical law, not because we lack our ancestors’ moral confidence, but because we aren’t a poor hill-dwelling nation on the margins of Bronze-Age Asia anymore. Even True Believers who insist that Moses and the prophets understood the Truth, must acknowledge that how we live that truth has changed. Hebrew law is a foundation, not a prison.

Ambiguity lets bad-faith actors manipulate the system to their advantage. But ambiguity also lets good-faith actors grow and change when faced with new evidence, without having to abandon the foundations upon which they’ve built their lives. Why, it’s almost like there’s no one-size-fits-all moral code that means anything! Almost like we have to face situations as they are, and make decisions here and now, not relying on a dead-tree text.

Senator Clemens assumes that, if we permit English gender definitions to remain subjective, then everyone will misuse those definitions for selfish purposes. Which means that Senator Clemens assumes human nature is necessarily selfish, that humans are manipulative, that deep down, we’re all bad-faith actors. Therefore he wants to lawyer that ambiguity out of existence, reining in what he perceives as human weakness and venality.

I prefer to assume that subjective gender definitions give us, you and me, the freedom to investigate what it means to be a “man,” a “woman,” or neither. It liberates me, a cishet man, to decide how I will express being male in the healthiest and most productive terms, and how I can identify toxic or harmful maleness. Fundamentally, Senator Clemens distrusts us, but I believe humans are good.

Some Pessimistic Thoughts On “Plagiarism”

Last summer, when historian Kevin M. Kruse was accused of plagiarism—a serious accusation in academia, and one that submarines careers—I wrote a lengthy examination of the concept. My views on plagiarism have shifted substantially since my “zero tolerance” teaching days, when we were institutionally encouraged to distrust any writing that was too well-written. I’ve come to accept that the workload schools impose on students is simply too exorbitant to permit serious original writing.

So I congratulated myself for my Gandhi-like enlightenment and walked away from the discussion. Dr. Kruse was eventually cleared by a council of like-minded nabobs, and the issue retreated from public consciousness. Then yesterday, I received a Facebook message from a stranger identified as Emmett Cullinan, admitting he’d repurposed one of my reviews for a classroom assignment. He wasn’t even circumspect about it. He acknowledged he hadn’t read the book, simply repurposed my written review.

Suddenly I found myself back in “teacher” headspace, cueing up platitudes about the evils of slapping your name on somebody else’s words. Though I doubt an online scolding will discourage any undergraduate brazen enough to actually tell a writer after lifting another’s words, I at least went to Cullinan’s Facebook page to find his school. Turns out, Cullinan has set his Facebook profile to private, making him inaccessible to anybody he doesn’t already know. Crafty.

Cullinan’s message initially looked smug, boasting in performing an act of intellectual dishonesty. But the longer I live with it, the more I suspect there’s something more going on. Yes, this kid (I’m assuming youth and inexperience drive this cocky impudence) acknowledges slapping his name on my words. Considered in a vacuum, these words imply a galling level of self-importance, since he not only performed the plagiarism, but wanted me to know he’d performed it.

But he says this pilfering “really saved my life” and “legitimately saved my grade.” These aren’t the words of somebody rubbing my nose in his dishonesty; they’re the words of somebody scared of falling behind and losing out. Indeed, his use of the word “legitimately” suggests that although he knows his actions are illegitimate, he feels his necessity is more than legitimate, or at least legitimate enough to justify his actions, taken out of desperation.

In other words, the longer I live with Cullinan’s message, the more I realize they’re written from a place of inner fear. He writes with an exterior mask of audacity and entitlement, perhaps because he believes his position as a student is precarious enough that he can’t admit terror. Students frequently learn early that professors, whose own position is frequently shaky, can smell fear. Therefore, with professors and with me, Cullinan masks fear behind arrogance.

College degrees, once a signifier of aristocratic erudition, have become job credentials for most Americans. The time spent getting a degree has become a mandatory buy-in for a middle-class life. Many jobs that, in the past, simply required an apprenticeship or on-the-job training, like office managers, industrial technicians, and law enforcement, now actually do require higher education. Sometimes the requirement is unofficial and simply customary; but some employers or jurisdictions have made this requirement official.

This means that an upwardly mobile life increasingly requires not only college, but frequently a graduate degree, to stand out and move ahead. This means a commitment of years, effort, and debt. Undergraduates and grad students are nominally adults, but see the period of juvenile dependency dragged out for years, sometimes until they’re pushing thirty. It’s even worse for anybody hoping to change careers in adulthood, which can mean more years studying for more credentials.

Emmett Cullinan’s message sounds ballsy, at first. But it reflects childhood fears dragged out onto an adult, a grown-ass man who is considered culpable as a grown-up if he mishandles a car or a beer, but who isn’t allowed to take responsibility for his working life yet. Like kids throughout history, he acts brazen because, perhaps, it’s the only power he has. Far from the unashamed plagiarist I first assumed, I think he’s just scared.

Of course that doesn’t stop me from using his real name, or screenshotting his message. I’m no longer angry enough to pursue consequences, but I’m passive-aggressive enough that, if consequences find him, I won’t cry. Because that, too, is part of higher education. Students learn to have opinions about books they haven’t read, or experiences they haven’t experienced, but they also learn to get called out when they fib. Learn to live with it.