Reflexive
Statement
In the fall of 1976 as a very green second year anthropology graduate
student I happened upon a session on "Humanistic Anthropology"
at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington,
DC. These were my first professional meetings, and as a grad student,
and I stood in awe as I listened to Clifford Geertz present in an
ethnography session on the Balinese and literally dropped my jaw as
I rode an elevator with Margaret Mead. But it was the humanistic anthropology
session which has had an ongoing impact on my quest to understand
the human condition. In this session I heard Miles Richardson deliver
a paper entitled "Culture
and the Struggle to be Human." This paper, more a work of
poetry than prose, was dense with insights and suggestions concerning
our collective struggle to make sense out of what nature has produced,
a primate which not only can but needs to write a reflexive statement
and share it with others of his kind. I have re-read Miles' paper
dozens of time since that day, many times to my classes back at Elon
College, and each time I learn something new and, for better or for
worse, I am still unpacking and understanding some of the content
of that paper.
Exactly 20 years later in 1996 I delivered a paper at the AAA meetings
(but on the opposite coast in San Francisco) in a session on "Humanistic
Anthropology: a new vision for the 21st century." Miles Richardson
was in attendance (he had actually suggested that I be included) and
I was both a lot thrilled and intimidated to have him and the other
humanist anthropologists hear my offering entitled "Vico Meets
Gaia: Humanism for a More Just Planet." My quest to understand
the human condition had led me to read not only the standard sociocultural
authors such as Fromm, Berger, Marx, etc., but non "academics"
as well: poets and visionaries such as Miguel de Unamuno, spiritual
physicists like Frijof Capra, and a wide variety of popularized science
books along the lines of James Gleik's Chaos. Most
recently my reading has lead me to re-look at Fromm in light of the
concept of Gaia and, just in the last 18 months, I discovered the
name Giambattista Vico. It is no accident that I am attracted to a
fellow Italian, especially when he has as his major opus a work entitled
Nuevo Scienza or New Science.
My quest continues and my presentation today is a sampling of some
of the directions my studies have taken me. What I ask of you is that
you follow my threads with patience and, if you find some of what
I have to say functions as a catalyst for your thinking in some way,
continue the conversation in whatever form time and space allows.
The quest to further define "human"
As is the case with many of my humanist colleagues the exploration
of what it means to be a humanist is an ongoing endeavor, a forever
open-ended question. As I look back on my own resume of the last decade
I find that my writings have almost obsessively dwelt on this most
fundamental question. Of late I find that I am focusing more and more
on the human part of humanism as in the question "what does being
human mean?" Much of what follows in this essay constitutes my
current thinking about questions related to this major question. Hence
I include an extended discussion of brain, mind and consciousness.
But before starting on that section two more admissions must be made,
both not small ones at that.
First, I am not a sociologist. I started in graduate school as a sociology
major but soon switched to anthropology and finished both my Masters
and Ph.D. in this discipline. I have been teaching in departments
of sociology for almost 15 years now, so in terms of institutional
(and or course organizational) affiliation I am technically a sociologist.
I say that I am not one because I feel I can no longer be bound by
such a narrow disciplinary label. More accurately, I have never been
bound by these labels and the only difference now is that I am publicly
elaborating on this posture. I know that I am not alone, especially
when I talk to many of my humanist colleagues; many of us are forever
wandering into other fields for clarification, inspiration and, well,
just to get more pieces of the puzzle together.
And here's admission number two: I feel puny. As I told my physics
colleague a few days ago, I'm not sure I have much to offer my colleagues.
I have no confidence in my ability to say anything about our world
that has not been said before and better. Let me talk about feeling
puny for a minute, and maybe make myself feel better in the bargain.
How can an alive and active thinker NOT feel puny in 1997? Consider
the vastness of what is out there to be known..... The list of thinkers
which have come before me is far beyond imposing: Vico, Kant, Hegel,
Descartes, Unamuno, Plato, Weber, Plank....and on and on and on....
with no end. Each has added in his or her own way to the corpus of
thought about our world with immense subtlety and depth, and each
deserves a close reading. My mind cannot take it all in and synthesize
it as effectively as the content merits. Nor should I be able to do
this. Consider the examples of Vico who spent his entire intellectual
life drafting versions of Nuevo Scienzia,
or Charles Darwin who spent more than 20 years formulating and articulating
his theory of evolution. Their ideas were the culmination of much
intellectual labor over a great deal of time and I should expect myself
to understand fully their ideas in one or even a few readings? Most
definitely not.
In triathlons (or athletic competition in general) I know that there
will always be someone faster than I am. By the same token, I know
that there will always be someone slower as well. The same goes for
intellect and understanding: there will always be someone better read
and more deft of thought. But the situation is even more complicated
than that because of the rapid accumulation of new knowledge that
is being created every day in our global scientific community: no
one is able to know the entire history of their own discipline and
cannot reasonably keep up with all the new knowledge being generated
every day. An additional complication has to do with the fact that
thinkers such as me feel that they must be intellectual omnivores,
they have a need to search for a "unified theory of everything"
and hence look toward all fields of thought for insight. In my case
that necessarily leads to the type of reading I am doing now, i.e.,
popularized broad strokes versions of evolutionary psychology, physics,
etc. There is always one more book to read, one more brain to pick,
one more note to take (or, more recently, one more web site to surf).
Again, how can one NOT feel puny with the enormity of what is out
there and the greatness of the minds that line the halls of intellectual
history not to mention the ones that are alive today.
What do I have to offer? Why should I, for example, write yet another
book which ultimately will do precious little to make the world better
and will only clog up the library shelves. To write a book seems,
ultimately, as narcissistic as doing triathlons. Is all behavior ultimately
selfish and hedonistic? Robert Wright, an evolutionary psychologist,
offers some of the history of the wisdom on this question and cites
no less than Martin Luther who said, in effect, that "...a saint
is someone who understands that everything he does is egotistical."
We only fool ourselves into believing that what we do is for others
or some greater good (see the discussion of determinism above). Luther
also pointed out that "chronic moral torment is a sign of God's
grace." Well, by those measures I am both a saint and in God's
grace, and thus not very puny at all. Probably more well read than
most, more relativistic and humble than most and certainly filled
with moral torment. What better traits could one ask for in an author?
Puny? Perhaps not.
And now to talk about Thomas Kuhn and how progress can be made (passive
voice) or how I can contribute to progress (active voice) in understanding
the nature of social and physical realities. In The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn argues that the most typical
sources of paradigmatic change within each science are from the outside.
The fresh perspective and naiveté of the "outsider"
allows for freer thinking and more creative thought about various
questions. The omnivorous thinker with strength and depth in at least
one "home" field can offer a great deal when interacting
outside his/her own field. There are several reasons which keep this
from happening more than it does. The nature of the reward system
in academia is such that fairly narrow specialization is the rule
(far beyond the scope of this discussion to explain why; see Arcaro
1982 ) and the scientist who is more than vaguely familiar with all
of the areas within his/her own discipline is rare. Most sciences
have their major divisions and within these there are myriad subdivisions.
A graduate student will be encouraged to specialize fairly early in
a program and be taken under the wing of a faculty person of has staked
out a specific subspecialty territory. After doing research in that
area and being granted the Ph.D. the now new faculty person will go
out into the academic world and continue this specialization, hoping
to publish enough in that area to finally receive tenure and promotion.
Illusions of retooling and doing broader brush stroke work are kept
alive early in the career as the new faculty person interacts with
students (both graduate and undergraduate), but these illusions fade
away and tend not to be rekindled in the mid and late career: there
just isn't the positive reinforcement in the academy for that behavior
to exist in any great measure.
A second reason why most do not stray far from their field is that
academics, like most people, are insecure and, in the case of an academic
where self esteem is in large part tied up in appearing intellectually
in control, stepping outside of one's home field is tantamount to
self image suicide. When I meander into psychology or physics, for
example, I am bound to make a fool of myself by the simplicity of
my questions and lack of background knowledge. Stepping outside of
one's field can be a humbling experience. In my case, never having
suffered greatly from delusions of grandeur as an academic, I don't
mind treading around in other areas. There is always the possibility
that the accusation of "academic dilettantism" will be tossed,
complete with the sneer of "what are you doing in here trying
to talk with us...you haven't earned the right (read: done your Ph.D.
and published in this area) to even talk to us much less offer suggestions
or pose questions." But this slander does not deter me from this
behavior, and I continue on exploring numerous fields outside of sociology.
I perhaps will be always a "generalist" and hence not expert
in any area, but I choose that path to the more narrow ones which
seem, ultimately reductionistic. Just like in the ecological world
where we know that "everything is connected to everything else"
the same goes in the scientific world: you cannot be an expert in
one area without exploring hold it interconnects with others. If you
do not do this and remain enclosed within one field you -in my estimation-
are not much more than a mere technician.
Some thoughts on mind
In this section I will attempt to share with you my concept of mind,
how this concept is "new," touch on epistemological and
ontological issues raised, talk about ecology and deep ecology of
mind (bringing in the point that this is how the mind works and all
of that compartmentalization we think we are doing is only an illusion).
We think with our whole central nervous system and even body; my triathlons
are part of me, so when I think about what it means to be human, I
have to bring in ideas from all learning that I have done)), in talking
about ontological issue and ecology bring in a potentially controversial
mention of the sin of "biocentrism," (and how this relates
to the mind/body, individual/cultural dualism's and also to the animate/inanimate
false dichotomy. Here I will also bring in some ideas concerning the
scale of time and use the concept of "time frames" looking
at things from a big picture Gaian perspective) and point out that
we make the mistakes we do because we just don't understand enough
about the functioning of the brain, individuals and Gaia. Also I will
be working on the problem of how the "whole appears to be more
than the sum of the parts." I will touch on the poverty of Cartesian
thought with respect to thinking/feeling dichotomy. Also need to work
in mention of the premise from Thompson's book: cultural vestiges
are crucially important to learn from. We know this now from advances
in medicine (e.g., St. John's wort) and even (according to Capra)
from physics. Finally I will talk about the implications that this
conception of the ecology of consciousness and ontological/epistemological
assumptions have for the social sciences and for humanism.
What does being human mean?
1. To be human means being an animal. Humans
are animals. Being human means, well, kinda the same thing as
"being squirrel." To be human is to be a warm blooded mammal
with a particularly well developed and sophisticated central nervous
system, most dramatically highly developed frontal lobes which allow
for a level of brain functioning somewhat different from other species.
All species have life spans, i.e., individuals are mortal. All life
is transitory (we will come back to that important point below) and
human life is no exception. We are, in the words of Miguel de Unamuno
"el hombre de carne y queso." A finite being, we are born,
have sex, and die. We do all this in a grand ecological dance with
all other life forms on the planet.
2. To be human means to share a past with all other life forms.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The human central nervous
system is only in one sense the product of many hundreds of thousands
of years of evolution. Specifically, the frontal lobes, the "modern
brain," was formed in this latest push of development which made
us human. Our brain is actually a recapitulation of all evolution:
our inner brain (brain stem, etc.) is similar in structure and function
to our reptile predecessors, our mid brain is also similar in structure
and function to other mammalian brains. There is no discontinuity
between we humans and what we describe anthropocentrically as "lower
species," no quantum leap of difference exists between us and
them. This statement clearly flies in the face of much religious tradition
and a great deal of Western (and eastern, I believe) philosophical,
spiritual and of course scientific thought. I'm not sure if there
is such a thing as a soul, but if humans have one they only have one
to the extent that other life forms do.
3. To be human means we are part of all existence.
We can learn much from our fellow species. Following from
the above it can be argued that it is only an anthropocentric illusion
that there is a huge discontinuity between our species and all others.
Humans share the basic brain structure with all other mammals. We
think and have emotions, and to assume that other animals do not is
the height of species chauvinism. Personhood (as our colleague Brian
Sherman pointed out to us many years ago with his study of cats) is
not limited to humans. When we anthropocentrically separate ourselves
from other species we implicitly infer that there is not much which
can be learned from them. Many physiological psychologists who have
studied, for example, the behavior of rats may be on to something:
we share the same inner brain structure with "lower" species
and what is true of them may shed some light on our own species.
In his short commentary entitled "Are we in Anthopodenial?"
Frans de Waal, an ethologist with an interest in the development of
morality, coins a new term "anthopodenial." This new term
means "a blindness to the human-like characteristics of other
animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves." In
the article he warns that anthropomorphization is a danger, but that
it can be taken too far and lead to anthropodenial. The standard argument
going all the way back to Descartes and reinforced (sorry) by Skinner
is that we humans are special and that animals are merely "automatons"
and "stimulus-response machines." Further, conventional
scientific wisdom is to follow the law of parsimony and to explain
any phenomena with the fewest possible assumptions. Hence behavior
like that of Biniti (the female gorilla who protected the little boy
who fell 20 feet into the zoo enclosure for gorillas) must be explained
by learned positive reinforcement, etc., but by the same logic de
Waal argues that the "...same rule of parsimony argues against
a huge cognitive gap when the evolutionary gap between humans and
apes is so small."
4. To be human means to be a contradiction. We
are an anomalous animal. We do not play by the same rules as
other species. We have begun (ever since we left the simple gathering
life and became "civilized" some 5000 years ago) to function
as a force against all other life forms as opposed to in symbiotic
harmony with our fellow life forms. We are chronically anthropocentric
and feel ourselves not only apart from but divinely ordained to be
dominant over all other life on the planet. Much could be said about
this point, but in the context of this essay it is enough to point
out that we are a not like other species in our lack of desire to
"get along" with the rest of the Gaian community. Redundantly,
although all species act in such a way as to maximize their own survivability
in the environment, most --i.e., all but humans-- do this "by
the rules" of nature. Humans, whose main adaptive mechanism is
culture, manipulate their environment in such a way as to lead to
permanent change. Our development as a species appears to have a destructive
direction, we tend to leave a huge permanent imprint on the land wherever
we settle, and any sober thinker must look into the future with great
trepidation. No other species in Gaian history can make these ignoble
claims. (See Daniel Quinn's Ishmael for an excellent discussion of
our deadly anthropocentrism.)
5. To be human means to be insane. The Unibomber
was right. Following from the above, I would argue that there
is a major problem with being human in the late 20th century. Just
as the human dental system as not designed to deal with processed
sugar-filled diets and hence tooth decay is the most universal human
disease, the human brain was not designed to deal with the quantity
and quality of information (both social and sensory) that we are exposed
to every day. The pace of life today, as many of us had already suspected,
is far faster than we were designed to cope with. In The Sane Society
Erich Fromm argues that a culture will generate endemic psychological
instability when the core social structure does not meet the basic
needs of humans. Fromm's analysis is a mixture of Marxism and neo-Freudianism
(which are both very powerful frameworks of analysis when used in
less than myopic and dogmatic fashion) and hence in essence places
the etiology of the pathology squarely on the level of the culture.
By contrast the Unibomber, along with many contemporary evolutionary
psychologists, places the etiology on the physiological level of the
brain. Although I lack the space at this moment to explain how it
happened that a gap was created between how we live and what we can
handle, I do known that one exists, and that it is clearly akin to
what W.F. Ogburn described long ago when he described the phenomenon
he called "cultural lag." This lag is increasing in size
and intensity and an easy prediction would be that both individual
and cultural pathologies will grow more acute as we begin the next
millennium.
An additional way to look at this problem is through the use of G.H.
Mead's ideas of mind, self, and society. To be human in 1997 is to
be part of a population --some 5.9 billion souls-- which, taken together
with all those who have lived this century, is more than were alive
cumulatively in the entire history of our species. We still certainly
are ruled more by the dead than by the living, but the inertia of
the entirety of past human consciousness (an unstoppable force?) is
now running into the (immovable object) present mass of minds and
cultures on the planet. This psychic mass is being made even more
formidable as a result of the speed and pervasiveness of communication
via television, radio, air travel and of course the internet. Mind
is getting bigger and much more complicated because Society is no
longer a simple coherent and somewhat homogeneous entity that it was
in earlier periods of human history, but rather a monstrously large
and polymorphous web of minds, memories and experiences from all over
the globe. The Self for its part must deal with ever more roles to
play, most of which are characterized by a thinness and superficiality
which has become all too habitual (yet necessary?) for most.
We are being overwhelmed on many different levels, and hence the externalization's
of our psyches, i.e. the material culture we produce will become less
and less readable for a humanist. How this increase in size and complexity
of the Society and the Mind will impact the connection with our evolutionary
Gaian past is unclear, but I see no increase in clarity. As a close
reading of any culture will indicate the past is enfolded into the
present, but with the size of our "present" being so large,
the past may be overwhelmed and become ever more difficult to read
and interpret. Staying sane will increase as a challenge as our species
deals with rapidly changing world.
6. To be human is to have a mind. The whole is
not more than the sum of the parts. Indeed, to be human
is to have a mind and a brain, but in saying that I am only making
a traditional semantic distinction. There is no "real" split
or distinction between the brain and the mind; the whole (mind) is
nothing more than the sum of the parts (the array of matter which
constitutes the central nervous system). In our attempts to make sense
of the wonder that is human thought and culture we have committed
the error of not using Occams's Razor, i.e., we have made assumptions
(namely that the whole is more than the sum of the parts) that do
not seem to be supported by recent research in neurophysiology. In
Descartes Error, a book written for a non-medical audience,
Antonio Damasio describes some of the complexities of how the brain
functions and says, finally,
"This is Descartes' error: the abyssal separation between
body and mind, between
the sizable, dimensioned, mechanically operated, infinitely divisible
body stuff, on
the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, un-pushpullable, nondivisible
mind stuff; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment...might
exist separately from the body. Specifically: the separation of the
most refined operations of the mind from the structure and operation
of a biological organism
(pages 249-250)."
The whole only seems to be more than the sum of the parts, and as
we learn more about neuropsychology and neurophysiology the wonders
of the brain/mind will, perhaps, become less of a mystery.
This brings in the hoary ontological question. I have spent my intellectual
career thusfar as an ontological pluralist (though I would never have
previously described myself in those words) meaning that I assumed
the existence of many levels of being. This ontological pluralism
lead, necessarily, to an acceptance of a multiplicity of epistemologies,
and I have spent much energy attempting to understand the connection
between ontological and epistemological levels. My recent reading
has lead me now to a monistic ontology which is perhaps tempered by
pointing out that reality may have different "aspects" (as
discussed by Spinoza) and hence lead to many ways of knowing. Descartes
was an ontological dualist, as have been the vast majority of western
scientists. I believe that the paradigm shift possible with further
study into evolutionary/Darwinian psychology (as discussed by Robert
Wright in The Moral Animal) will bring with it an anti-Cartesian
monistic ontology which will provide a more parsimonious set of assumptions
about what being human means, especially in terms of understanding
the pitfalls in making a mind-body split.
The assumption that the whole can be more than the sum of the parts
is, I believe, at the root of many of our misunderstandings about
not only our minds but the physical and social worlds as well and
merits further discussion in a future essay.
7. To be human is to have thought. Descartes was wrong
again. "I think, therefore I am." said Descartes. He
argued that thinking and the self awareness of being were the sine
qua non of being human, but I humbly disagree. As alluded to above,
our brains have many "layers" and none is dominant. This
is a crucial point: we do not "think" sometimes and "feel"
other times. My blush on how the brain works involves borrowing a
phrase from environmental theory, namely "deep ecology."
As I understand it deep ecology assumes an interconnection of all
life, including humans. "Deep ecology" is different from
what is called "surface ecology" in that the latter tends
to take humans out of the equation and/or take actions which assume
that human needs are more important than non-human needs. In short,
deep ecology looks at the "web of life" as an interconnected
whole, a Gaian entity with many cybernetically interrelated components.
This is also an accurate picture of how the brain operates. Brain
functioning is not compartmentalized into various locations but rather
is a symphony of action taking place in many locations at once. Further,
just as Freud told us long ago (though coming at his study from a
radically different perspective) most of what is happening in the
brain is not at the conscious level. The vast majority of our "thinking"
is at the subconscious level and most certainly is done well before
the step where any language is applied to, in effect, reify some hyper-complex
neural processes. Of course, non-human species have thought as well,
and at probably near the complexity of ours.
8. Being human means having both the ability and need to create.
Vico was right. In his essay "Anthropology and the Human
Story" Miles Richardson wrote,
"Nature,
blind and uncaring, selected from us, not those who ran swiftly,
not those who killed dispassionately, not even those who were content
with each other's warmth, but those who dreamed. The dreamers prospered,
and we became more adept at translating imaginations into stone
and sound."
Giambattista
Vico, anticipating both Mead and Richardson as well as the recent
developments in neurophysiology and evolutionary psychology by some
250 years, argued that the human mind had as it's key facility fantasia
or imagination. According to Vico the primary components of the mind
include memory, imagination and invention, and these three work in
concert allowing the individual to know the world. Through memory
of past experience the individual is connected to the sensus cummunis,
"common sense," and largely through the medium of metaphor
uses the imagination to create original knowledge about the human
world. The "new" scientist looks inward and outward alternately
in building knowledge of the world, and all aspects of culture are
important sources of data for understanding, especially myth, poetry
and other forms of artistic expression which employ symbolism and
essentially deal in the rhetoric of metaphor. Though these sources
will remain the most difficult to read, they are the most dense and
productive in terms of cultural and historical data. The collective
mind is revealed more through the material representations of its
dreams and visions than its more "rational" productions.
In Vico's words, "For when we wish to give utterance of our understanding
of spiritual things, we must seek aid from our imagination to explain
them, and like painters, form human images of them." Here we
see that Vico's epistemology is the antithesis of pure reason and
logic, and appears at least somewhat related to Eastern mystic religions.
For Vico and Richardson the sine qua non of being human is
creativity. Put in evolutionary biological terms, we have been designed
to dream and imagine, to recombine sense and experience in our minds
in various ways. However, going back to a point made earlier in this
paper, I do not believe that we are the only species with this trait;
it is a difference of degree, not kind that we have from others species.
Vico places a great deal of emphasis on the image. Donald Verne, one
of Vico's interpreters, argues
"All
that guides fantasia is the sense of ignorance, an unwillingness
to reduce the mind's uncertainty [what is going on internally in
terms of thought, both conscious and unconscious] by embracing what
is familiar to the mind. This sense of ignorance leads us to reach
out past our inclination to make experience familiar t through the
power of the concept and to engage the power of the image. We must
reconstruct the human world not through concepts and criteria but
as something we can practically see."
Thus
our creativity is part of us, part of the constant functioning of
the mind, an integral aspect of the process of moment by moment constructing
useful edifices of understanding (images) in our minds.
9. Humans are part of Gaia and Gaia is old. The
sin of biocentrism. To be human is to be part of the vast array
of life forms which in toto constitute Gaia, the entity made up of
the comprehensive matter of our planet. This understanding in itself
is useful, buy it can lead to what I will call "the sin of biocentrism"
When one looks at life on this planet in a grand time scale the comings
and goings of various species is a fact of life. In fact, by looking
at most any phenomena in a highly speeded up (or slowed down, for
that matter) time frame our understanding is enhanced and, with the
right kind of consciousness, one can see the interconnection between
organic and inorganic matter. A simple example is no further away
than the tips of your fingers. Your fingernails are "dead"
but were living, just like your hair, and this transition took place
over a long period of time. What made possible their living existence
was your body taking in various organic nutrients, but also some minerals
as well. My point is simply that the dichotomy between organic and
inorganic, living and dead is misleading. Most people accept this
point easily, but these same people are frequently brought to laughter
when asked to consider, for example, the healing power of crystals.
Can there be connections between inorganic and organic matter which
we have not understood as yet? Of course there can. What we have attempted
to write off as superstition and mumbo-jumbo (e.g., pyramid power)
in many cases may have some truth to it if we are only to look with
am open eye. Above I described myself as a ontological monist and
this position seems to infer an anti-biocentrist position. In short,
when we value the living over the dead, the organic over the inorganic,
we are missing the true usefulness of deep ecology, just as when we
compartmentalize the human mind into "rational" and "emotional"
parts we are misunderstanding the deep ecology of mind. Biocentrism
is an sin in the same way ethnocentrism or anthropocentrism is, and
as humanists we need to be aware that this "ism" exists.
What does this all have to do with humanism?
I take seriously the task of understanding what it means to be a "humanist
sociologist." For me that task has lead back to perhaps the most
fundamental question not only of sociology but of all social sciences
and perhaps philosophy as well, namely what does being human mean.
Above I have outlined some of my recent thinking on this question
and have moved a little closer, I hope, to a more complete understanding
of who I am as an individual and what being a human means to me. Some
of my points are more vague than I would like them to be, and some
could use dissertation length explanation. In other words I am on
a journey, one with perhaps no clear end but with certainly many pitfalls.
I hope that those of you who have joined me ever so briefly on this
leg of my journey have gained something in your understanding of who
you are and what it means to be human.