It is precisely that what bothers me. Even thoughtful people do not seem to realise that in practice, one has to take the concepts of religion as referring to concrete things: people as agents, the methods and instruments they make use of, and their objects. If the concepts had no referents outside themselves, they could not have any bearing on how people actually live in this world. But the (perhaps sole) function of religious concepts is to guide, steer and limit people in their relations to their surroundings. Were this function to be taken away, not much would be left of religion.
Thus, my message to all believers is this: if you refuse to point out the referents of religious concepts, you won't know what you are supposed to make out of religion in your life, in relating yourself to others and the world. And if you won't interpret religious language, someone else is going to do that for you. I recommend trying, even though it might turn out to be in vain.
Let us now turn to basic Christian ethics for the sake of demonstration. See, for example, this well-known passage of the Bible (New King James Version):
Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7:12)
This so called Golden Rule is one of the most cited teachings of Jesus and is included independently in perhaps most ethical traditions around the world. Even for non-religious people, the Golden Rule usually seems reasonable and worth obeying to. It is sometimes cited as the tiny but yet so significant common denominator of the world religions, and taken as representing some kind of inherent universal philanthropy in them. One might ask, is this interpretation valid?
It all comes down to anthropology, the way of conceiving humanity, defining "our kind". Like most contemporary Finns, I presume, I have been brought up to appreciating a great many living things as beings of my kind. There are about seven billion of them at the moment. I have been told that all of them are human, regardless of their phenotype (so-called race), language, sexual orientation or religious beliefs. Even if they for some reason cannot speak at all or lack some other typically human capacities, they are still human. And by virtue of being human, they have certain common rights and duties: for example the right to be treated in accordance with the Golden Rule. Now this is amazing. But as you may have noticed, there was no clue to actually identifying beings of my kind.
In fact, I still today can't claim to know who are to be labeled "human beings"! For my whole life, I have learned to identify them through ostension, that is, pointing out beings and naming them. Acts of ostension have mostly been implicit, as when people in my vicinity have related to one another in ways that suggests them to be of the same kind. I used to observe my mom and dad back when I was a child, and see them relating to certain other beings in a roughly similar way they would relate to me: they would talk, listen, make certain facial expressions, touch the other and so on. They would not point to the ground and command "sit down!" They would not whistle to those beings to make them follow, nor would they walk them on a leash. When observing patterns of behavior between myself and my nearest, and then between my nearest and others, I learned a lot of categories – such as "my kind" and "not my kind".
As a fact of the matter, those categories are culturally conditioned and can be shaped in very different ways. Consider, for instance, a wealthy landowner's son being brought up in southern United States sometime before the Civil War (1861–1865). In his surroundings, he would be in contact with living things who shared some characteristics with him: the basic shape of their body and the ability to communicate using language, perhaps the use of certain religious concepts as well. They would differ from him only in their skin color, theirs being dark and his light, and maybe some facial traits. And they definitely would have been labeled "human" by me and, I dare suppose, by most of you reading this blog. But back then, the landowner's son did not have enough in common with those other beings to identify them as "his kind".
This child would observe how his father and other family members would interact with individuals of light skin. It would more or less resemble the way they interacted with him. Those other beings, of similar shape but different pigment, however, would not so much be interacted with as acted upon. The landowner and his friends would command them to sit down and fetch things in pretty similar manner as they would do to dogs – and those beings would obey. If they wouldn't, they could be punished in any way their master saw appropriate, even put to death right away. They would be expected to approach or follow on a whistle. They would be walked on a leash, led to a marketplace, bought and sold. The landowner's son definitely would not learn that those beings were "his kind", quite the opposite. Presumably he would be told even explicitly that niggers – for that was the name of the dark beings – were not comparable to white people, for they were so different. And we, when reflecting upon this history, think it was wrong it went like that. Why?
It is not through ostension alone that human beings can come to be known. I have also been told that we all belong to same species, called Homo sapiens. Now, this insight provides no unquestionable means of pointing out humans among all living things. To this day, we have not found any single empirically observable common denominator by which to identify a Homo sapiens individual. Philosopher of science John Dupré was quoted thus in Conversations on Human Nature (p. 28):
”What has become increasingly clear to post-Darwinian biologists is that there can be no necessary and sufficient condition for being an organism of a certain species, and the characteristic properties of members of a species are, first, almost always typical rather than universal in the species and, second, to be explained in various different ways rather than by appeal to any simple or homogeneous underlying property.”
We don’t have any biological human component to separate all of us from all the rest of Animalia. The idea of this species-identity is that we have descended from the same stock, the same population somewhere way back in time. How have we come to know this? It actually cannot have been before the days of the landowner family discussed above. Such methods of genetical research that allow us to track our ancestry beyond the scope of historical genealogy have been developed quite recently, almost completely from the 20th century onwards.
Of course, it was widely thought even before that all humans had common ancestors: in the Abrahamic religions it was the Biblical primordial pair, Adam and Eve, described in the Book of Genesis. Their story was although of little use as an anthropology with ethical implications, for there was no way to find out if different populations actually had them as their common first parents. One could freely claim one's own group of identification (e.g. white people) to represent actual human beings, and speculate that others (e.g. "niggers") were merely some kind of outwardly human-like beasts. Such claims were disapproved by some, who indeed had wider intuitive or culturally conditioned definitions of humanity than, say, your average American slave-owner. But back in the early 19th century, they were just differing intuitions with no more support from empirical studies than the narrow, racist ones.
Next, let us consider the aforementioned Golden Rule cited from a different edition of the Bible, New International Version:
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7:12)
If we are to claim that common ancestors make us beings of the same kind (which is not obvious philosophically!), and thus ethically responsible for each other's well-being, contemporary genetics lets us identify people of all continents, countries and phenotypes as beings of our kind. But in fact, it does more than this. It blurs the culturally drawn lines between different kinds of beings by presenting evidence for a common ancestry of all forms of life, not merely all Homo sapiens individuals. It seems that, when doing to "others" what we would have them do to us, we may have to consider not only humans but also whales, bees, oaks and so forth. They share common ancestors with us, very far back in time, but nevertheless – does not that make them beings of "our kind"?
In my previous post, I discussed an Aristotelian Thomistic approach to anthropological problems, one where human beings were defined by them possessing a rational soul, a feature that other living things allegedly lacked. It could be seen as one possible way of narrowing the notion of "our kind", but I had my reasons for not finding it particularly convincing. Judging by common ancestry, it seems that all living things are our kind and that the Golden Rule applies to them all as "others". And if we don't want to judge by common ancestry in the strict sense, are we not going to lack an ethically binding definition of our kind? Where are, then, the preconditions for establishing and enforcing universal human rights, for example? Perhaps it would be okay not to have them... Maybe universal race rights or merely local kin rights would do?
The conceptions of "human" and "our kind" that steer Christian philanthropy in practice have their sources mostly, if not totally, outside the Bible. (One could disagree pointing to the concept of the "people of God", which I will analyze separately in the future). Yet some take it for granted that it is a post-Enlightenment universalist egalitarian humanity that God always stands for. But if we found ourselves in a fundamentally different culture, in which there were no "neighbors" outside our own clan, or perhaps no "humans" outside our own "race" – what would happen to the philanthropic obligations of Biblical teachings? They wouldn't be as wide as they seem to me or you, would they? After all, the scripture has little to say when it comes to discussing human beings in any other terms than their relation to God. It is up to everyone, even Christian believers, to define the "neighbors" or "others" that are supposed to be loved. In practice the task is going to be collective rather than subjective, but it is time to recognize that no unquestionable authority has set the definition for us.
To close with, take a look at this Biblical confrontation, again from the Gospel of Matthew (NIV):
A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.” Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said. He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.”And her daughter was healed at that moment. (Matthew 7:22–28)
Who was this Jesus who, even though he eventually had mercy on the woman, decidedly implied that she was not as much a human being as were the Israelites? Apparently it was the same man from whom we got the Golden Rule.
All Bible quotes from biblegateway.com
Further readings:
Fuentes, Agustín; Visala, Aku: Conversations on Human Nature. 2016, Left Coast Press.
