" the human par excellence, as he discovers the true and full meaning of his humanity " As Opposed To The Trump Strong-Man Vision Of Life

The opposite view of life from that of Donald Trump, Dirty Harry and the High Plains Drifter is readily available. though hardly enjoying widespread promotion.   As you could imagine, Marilynne Robinson, one of our greatest writers and intellectuals holds the opposite view of life.  Here is her interview with Bill Moyers on Faith, Capitalism and Democracy.    The transcript is especially valuable because the stop time experience of reading, the instant review of what was said which is possible makes her points even more strongly.

Also, by chance, this weeks On Being program is of Krista Tippett's interview with someone else who has an entirely different view of life.

Xavier Le Pichon, one of the world's leading geophysicists, helped create the field of plate tectonics. A devout Catholic and spiritual thinker, he raised his family in intentional communities centered around people with mental disabilities. He shares his rare perspective on the meaning of humanity — a perspective equally informed by his scientific and personal encounters with fragility as a fundament of vital, evolving systems. Le Pichon has come to think of caring attention to weakness as an essential quality that allowed humanity to evolve.

Here is the unedited tape.

The Fragility at the Heart of Humanity

I especially like what Krista Tippett says at the start about how intimacy can come from encountering the mind of someone else without visual cues.   

Here is the transcript of the produced show.

What Le Pichon says about the discovery of the neanderthal skeleton called Shanidar 1. a profoundly disabled individual who was, clearly, cared for for years in his community of neanderthals, without almost any of the technology of even primitive human beings, carried from place to place, fed, a member of the community who almost certainly was without any economic utility to people living on a far narrower edge of survival than any but the most desperate of modern Americans is especially worth considering.   Here, from Xavier Le Pichon's essay republished at the On Being website.

To illustrate this point, it is best to consider signs of humane behavior among prehistoric societies. The most extraordinary example is probably the one hundred thousand years old Shanidar 1 skeleton. This skeleton belonged to a Neanderthal man about forty years old discovered by Ralph Solecki in the 1950’s in a cave of the Zagros mountains in Iraq . This man was so severely handicapped that he could not have lived to this age without the support of the group to which he belonged. According to Trinkaus and Shipman5,

“Careful study of his bones revealed a plethora of serious but healed fractures. There had been a crushing blow to the left side of the head, fracturing the eye socket, displacing the left eye, and probably causing blindness on that side. He also sustained a massive blow to the right side of the body that so badly damaged the right arm that he became withered and useless; the bones of the shoulder blade, collarbone, and the upper arm are much thinner than those on the left. The right lower arm and hand are missing, probably not because of poor preservation as fossils but because they either atrophied and dropped off or because they were amputated. The right foot and lower right leg were also damaged, possibly also at the same time. There is a healed fracture of one of the bones in the arch of the foot associated with advanced degenerative disease of various bones of the ankle and big toe. These problems would have left the foot with little, and very painful mobility. The right knee and various parts of the left leg also show signs of pathological damage; these may have been either further consequences of the same traumatic injury or lesions that developed in reaction to the abnormal limping gait that must have resulted from the damage to the right leg and foot.” As Solecki argued, “someone so devastatingly injured could not possibly have survived without care and sustenance. Whether the right arm was severed intentionally, accidentally, or as a result of physical deterioration, a one-armed, partially blind, crippled man could have made no pretense of hunting and gathering his own food. That he survived for years after his trauma was a testament to Neanderthal compassion and humanity.”

When Ralph Solecki popularized his findings in a book entitled “Shanidar, The First Flower People”, because the skeletons discovered in the Shanidar cave appeared to have been buried below a bed of flowers, many scientists expressed strong doubts about his conclusions. Since then, it has been well established that Shanidar 1 was not an exception and that Neanderthalers “fed and looked after severely handicapped members of their communities who were too disabled to contribute to the food quest.”6 Actually the skepticism of the scientists appears to me to be a demonstration of how difficult it is for us to face this apparent contradiction with straightforward Darwinian theory. In order to be able to continue to live for many years (as the healed bones show) it would have been necessary for him to be entirely taken care of by his community. What was this community? It would have consisted of perhaps twenty or thirty people living by hunting and gathering, without a permanent camp. Every day the community would have moved on in search of new resources. We can only imagine the considerable effort, which this group had to make for many years in order to transport this person from camp to camp, in order to feed him and in order to simply allow him to live. Why did a small group of nomads, having each day to look for their food through hunting and plant gathering decide to radically reorganize their life so that a severely handicapped man would become the center of their efforts and attention? What did they receive from him to continue doing this during forty years? Why did they decide to bury him? In the past, the fact of being buried showed the great respect shown by the community for that person. Not everyone was given a burial during this era—interment only becoming general about ten thousand years ago. What did they discover about their own humanity through this long and arduous process of sharing their life with a severely disabled man? Was this their way of facing death and suffering? Why did this person become the new focus of society?

The Shanidar 1 individual demonstrates to me that this experience of welcoming the suffering of our neighbor is at the very heart of our identity of humans since the origin. Actually I have argued elsewhere7 that when humans enter into the type of relationship that was lived within the Shanidar group of Neanderthalians, the gift they receive from each other is the discovery of their own humanity. Our humanity is not an attribute that we have received once and forever with our conception. It is a potentiality that we have to discover within us and progressively develop or destroy through our confrontation with the different experiences of suffering that will meet us throughout our life.

We are therefore faced with a phenomenon as old as man himself: in the face of the utilitarian logic which dominates the world of living things, man came up with a way to put someone who no longer had any “utility” at the center of his community thus allowing him to live and to continue to occupy his place in society. This choice inevitably leads to a reorganization of society. As soon as this seemingly foolish choice is made, everything must be reorganized around the person who suffers the most, who is the most wounded and handicapped. It is the only way. That person becomes the center of everyone’s attention. Something completely new is created: this person becomes the new focus of society.

We are dealing with the emergence of the human par excellence, as he discovers the true and full meaning of his humanity. And in a way one can say that since his origins/beginnings, the human has not ceased to re-invent this humanity. When faced with the suffering of a sick, wounded, ageing or handicapped person, we are confronted with an extremely difficult and painful choice: we may say, “ I cannot “ or “I don’t want to”, or “ I don’t want this any more”. This is rejection. Either Society becomes hard by concentrating only on those who are productive or who will be in the future, or it opens out by refocusing on new avenues, new dialogue and a new way of life. In this way of life people will invent new goods for society like the goods of communication, openness and sharing: the person who is no longer capable of direct contribution to the survival of society discovers moreover that he is welcomed as a full contributor. And this welcome profoundly changes the community that practices it.

It is remarkable that with our incredible technology and our enormous wealth, we, apparently are tempted to a lesser view of our species and ourselves than that which that band of neanderthals had. I could mention what Walter Brueggemann points out in the Hebrew Prophets, the point where they see the dangers of affluence under empire in encouraging people to forget the humane dimensions of life and their own history but that will come later. 

Also, I will forego the temptation to point out the mention of the English-language, Darwinist view of life which is contradicted by this example, the one which has been promoted by the scientism which Marilynne Robinson talks about in her interview, the view which has enjoyed a dangerous academic and popular cultural resurgence since the mid 1970s as the experience of the Second World War ebbs. At least I will not go into that today but I'm sure it will come up soon, it is a shorthand version of what the opponents of fascism are up against.   Darwinism is intimately connected with fascism,  even that fascism found among those who officially oppose Darwinism as science, it is embraced as a vision for society and government.  Such people don't mind living in irony and contradiction.