Human Being

Errol turns one next Thursday. This marker in his remarkable life has shaken loose all number of thoughts and emotions.

In my civics class today, I asked my students one of those old fashioned, traditional politics questions.

"If you had a car, and one year you replaced a part, say, a wheel, and then the next year you replaced the fan belt, and then a while later you replaced the transmission, and the next year you put a new timing belt in, and you continued in this fashion until you had replaced every part of that car, so that none of the original parts remained, would you still have the same car?"

"Will that be on the test?"

I then asked the question in a more human and less possible (so far) way.

"A few years ago, my father had hip replacement surgery, then last year he had a knee replacement, six months later he had another knee replaced. Hypothetically, if he subsequently had every part of his body replaced, at what point would my father no longer be my father? Would he be a different person when he had his heart replaced, or his skin, or his brain?"

You never know when the big questions you’ve been gnawing on will come out. But they will. Now that I am the proud father of a special needs kid (term du jour) I think a lot about what it means to be human. It’s not just special needs kids' parents, I imagine. My not special needs, but still needy Owen prompts plenty of hairy questions, too. In other words, when I asked that rather slippery question, I was asking, "What makes a human a human?" Which pretty much freaked the kids out (of course, for many of them being more or less freaked out is a mostly permanent thing, which is part of the joy of teaching them. After all, if this crazy world didn’t freak you out just a little bit, I don’t know what would.)

The students had lots of reactions to my question. Many agreed that the point of no return to humanness would be a brain replacement, and being a materialist, I would have said (approximately 12 months ago) the same thing.

But post Errol, I’m not so sure any more (about a lot of other things, too) how central intelligence is to our definition as humans. After all, the great apes we see at the zoo are probably much smarter than Errol is now (sorry Errol, but the same goes for most human babies), but that doesn’t make them human, or the president a gorilla. Many of my students tie our humanity to the "soul", but I have yet to see a soul, and need something more tangible to cast my lot with. So, if it is not our mind, what is it that makes us human?

I think, in fact, it is our ability for empathy - to see ourselves in others, and others in ourselves - that distinguishes us from the other beasts, and makes us human. Tonight as we were heading towards sleep, Cary was reading The Owl and the Pussycat to Owen, as I read a picture book to baby Errol. The book I was reading Errol didn't really register with him (so much for Baby Sartre), so I put it away, took out a picture of Owen, and held it up, right in front of Errol’s little face. "Hooo! Hooo!" Errol smiled and smiled. “Hooo! Hooo!” There was a twinkle of recognition in his eyes as he saw something in Owen's beautiful face that was familiar, loved, like his own, human. Or maybe he was just pooping (it happens all the time). One of the great gifts of being human is our ability to connect to other humans. This evening, surrounded by the people I love most in the world, it was.