We descend together.
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“He was struck again by the strangeness of people, their mystery, but also their recognisability. He felt he knew these people immediately, which to him suggested a certain homogeneity among humankind. A general familiarity. As if there were only ten different varieties of soul after all.”
— Sebastian Barry
“The ancient Greek word for slave - andrapodon - was derived from the word for cattle and essentially meant “animal with human feet.” Once you have dehumanized others to that degree, you don’t have to worry about killing or enslaving God’s children, because God’s real children are supposedly limited to you and your tribe or clan.”
— Sebastian Junger
Last weekend, we celebrated the 100th birthday of my wife’s grandmother. Four generations of family converged on the small North Yorkshire town where Dorothy has lived her entire life, gathering in a snug village hall a few doors down from her house. On the front of that village hall is a foundation stone bearing the name of my wife’s great-grandfather, a patron of the building, and a date sometime in the late 19th century.
The celebration was quite something to behold, not because it was elaborate or flashy (quite the opposite) but because of what was represented. As I looked around this old village hall, I was struck by the people, representing almost the entirety of the living family - children, grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, one of whom was my son.
They had come from all over the UK and around the world: as far south as Cornwall, Hampshire and Sussex, from London, from Copenhagen, from Mexico City and two parties from Berlin, us and my wife’s cousin. Many lived locally too, one of my wife’s uncles and his son still running the family farm, land they have worked for at least 500 years.
Another strand of the family, meanwhile, originates from Colombia, my wife’s uncle having lived there for years and met his wife. Their three children, my wife’s cousins, consider themselves both European and Latin American, and one of them is mother to the other great-grandchild, a sweet 18-month-old boy who toddled around the room smiling.
And so I sat there witnessing this scene, somewhat awestruck. My son, himself a descendant of centuries of heritage from Indian Punjab and Yorkshire, is running around the hall with a toddler also descended from Yorkshire and from Colombia. Around me, I hear different strains of northern English accents, some southern and Midlands ones too, and the occasional gorgeous burst of Spanish, loving words from one family member to another.
Whenever I looked at Dorothy, she had a beaming smile, eyes wide and shining with life as she sat facing a room filled with the rich tapestry of life that originated from her in some way. Throughout the day, she expressed what sounded like disbelief and wonder that we had gathered to celebrate her.
I had a sensation similar to that one has when contemplating where the universe ends or how long the Earth has existed. The gathering was a very literal and physical reminder of the remarkable fact of our existence, of the stories we carry within us, and the history we ultimately all share.
“It’s quite a thing isn’t it?”, I kept saying to my wife. “It’s quite a thing.”
We all walked out of the African continent somewhere around 90,000 years ago, spreading out across the then joined up landmasses of the planet, and before that, we crawled out of the sea onto the land of modern-day North and East Africa, something memorably satirised by Stewart Lee.
Perhaps our original wound as humans is that first migration out of Africa, like members of a family leaving home never to return. Since then, we have divided ourselves, separated ourselves in endless ways, as we are alien to each other.
It feels like it’s never gone out of fashion to form hierarchies, to define in-groups and out-groups, to create Others. It’s certainly all the rage now. There’s endless suspect or outright bad science out there telling us how this is all natural, how we are all inherently violent and competitive, as if perceived inferiority of a fellow human is some form of natural selection.
I have a feeling this particular strain of science serves narratives, one of which being that it is civilisation and culture that provide a socialising influence, without which we’d all be murdering each other. I can see why this feels essential to understanding humanity, and I’m fully on board with the idea that we are partly products of our culture.
But look closer, and this idea is quickly perverted into something darker, for instance, the idea that some cultures are more ‘civilised’ or superior to others. We know where that leads.
This view also makes propositions about human nature that not only intuitively feel wrong, but are also supported by quite shaky evidence. Take, for example, the idea that we are inherently violent. While we’re all descendants of violence, that’s not quite the same as being innately violent.
If we were predominantly wired to slaughter each other, how would we have got this far? The truth, both intuitively and supported by evidence, is that we are mostly descendants of co-operation and compassion.
As the world continues to burn itself down, it is easy to overlook that this is the real essence of humanity. Take a look around your own neighbourhood, town or city. It runs on people who, in small, invisible and infinite ways, help each other out. Easy, you might say, in a stable, safe and civilised population.
What happens in moments of crisis or emergency, times when we might expect to see the worst of human nature if we were so inherently bad? I recently heard human geographer and researcher Luke Kemp describe the largest marine transportation of humans in history. It’s not Dunkirk (that was my first thought), it took place after 9/11 in New York.
As people sought to flee the Manhattan peninsula in the aftermath of the terror attacks, the overwhelmed US Coast Guard put out a call for citizens to aid the effort. The people across the Hudson River responded: half a million New Yorkers were evacuated from Manhattan by private boats and yachts, owned by complete strangers who were willing to come and get them.
Half a million people taken to safety by strangers. Half a million people rescued by others in the most individualistic, capitalist and polarised country on the planet. It’s quite a thing.
If you’re a cynic, you might be thinking this is only members of an in-group or tribe helping each other. I’d say two things to that. First, those five hundred thousand people and those who came for them would have spanned every identity characteristic you can think of. Second, I was living in London during the 7/7 bombings, and I witnessed the same response there - a human spirit that is naturally inclined towards helping others.
I once heard Jane Goodall describe the moment an elder chimpanzee she had been observing in the Gombe rainforest finally came close and gently held her hand with two of his fingers. As she looked into his remarkably human eyes, she described an experience of communication that was pre-verbal, a deep connection that transcended species, something felt and shared in a way that defied language.
We should be more awestruck at what joins us, shouldn’t we? Life, the privilege of existing and sharing a home, is not all the layers of identity we cloak ourselves in; it’s the joint endeavour of over 8 billion humans and trillions more lifeforms.
It’s quite a thing, isn’t it? It’s quite a thing.
“So Shaun thinks and as he slips the postcard back in its pouch he feels like laughing at the question before him. How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf.”
— Samantha Harvey
About me.
I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
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[main image from The Academy of Achievement, by Hugo van Lawick]