"My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together"
-Edmond Tutu
Like a storm that we didn't want to believe in, even though it was announced, COVID-19 came upon us and changed the rules of the game, perhaps for good. 'Social distancing', quarantines, curfews. Shaking hands is a protocol of the past. Unacceptable. Hugs, which used to be a universal means to express affection or solidarity, have been stripped from their spontaneity. Distancing rules. New rules that are so difficult to understand and internalize. Children struggle, because these rules demand from them a level of maturity that is incompatible with their age. Some others (many others, many more than we would want to see) struggle, because these rules represent, in their minds, a threat to their misconceived-as-absolute freedom.
Personally, I haven't missed life 'as it was before COVID-19'. My pre-COVID life routine was not materially different from what it is today. COVID-19 and its new rules, however, have made me seriously think about what 'distancing' means. And I am not talking about the 6 feet distance I need to keep from others when I go grocery-shopping, or the impossibility to leave the house every morning to go to work, or the restrictions to visit people outside of my nuclear family. I am talking about the idea of being without others, absolutely. Being in complete isolation.
I wonder what would define me as a person if I had nobody by my side, or around me, or face to face. I wonder what my purpose and my destiny would be. I wonder what my moral duty and my essence would be if I didn't have others with me. In isolation, these questions could not take place and the answers wouldn't matter. These are not, of course, original questions, and they represent only an atomic part of the universe of questions we could ask ourselves when trying to understand what makes us human.
I don't have, of course, any answers to the ultimate question of what makes us 'special'. I have an idea of the complexity of this question from the little I have learned so far, and, more importantly, I have a great deal of reading and learning to do ahead of me, but today is not about an academic dissertation. Today, I want to make a point that is, perhaps, obvious, when asking the question of where human worth (human dignity) comes from. I sometimes feel compelled to point out the obvious, because it is easy to forget. The complex often becomes more attractive to explore, and we end up missing the essential.
Whether we find human dignity surging from our autonomy and individual freedoms, or from our existence as part of a community, or from any other system of beliefs, there is, I think, a common denominator to all of them: Human dignity is a relational concept. Our humanity can only be conjugated in plural. Our human condition becomes apparent only when there are others. In absolute isolation, what would it matter to even think about what makes us human?
There is an African concept, and one particular interpretation of that concept, that I find extraordinarily powerful and captures the idea that we can't really conceive a human being without others: Ubuntu. As with everything, Ubuntu has many different definitions and interpretations, but I want to offer the following for reflection: We are because you are. Michael Onyebuchi Eze summarizes Ubuntu like this:
"A person is a person through other people' strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the ‘other’ becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance."
We can't be humans in isolation, says Edmond Tutu. And this may be a basic fact, but one that we forget about more frequently than we should. In fact, this is the one thing we should be aware of every single day. I have realized that I don't wake up every morning thinking there are others in the world. And it is not that I don't care. It is that I take it for granted, as if having others around me were another unearned privilege of mine.
The message today, then, is about the urgency to recognize the necessary empathy that is involved in seeing ourselves as 'humans'. It is urgent to see the other, see the colour of their skin and their eyes and their hands; recognize the pulse of their heart, so identical to our own; be amazed by the fact that the worth we are able to see in ourselves can only be shaped in relation to others. As Edmond Tutu teaches in No Future Without Forgiveness, "we are bound up in a delicate network of interdependence because a person is a person through other persons.... To dehumanize another inexorably means that one is dehumanized as well..."
COVID-19 means a lot of things, unpleasant things and often horrible things. It has created a great deal of uncertainty and imposed changes we didn't ask for. And it is making us face some of our most dreadful fears.
But I think it also represents a wake-up call to recognize the otherness as a mirror that reflects who we are. A mirror that we should look ourselves in every day so we can realize our worth, because as James Ogunde explains, recognizing others and being recognized by others humanizes us. We cannot be humans all by ourselves. Perhaps children have an implicit understanding of this notion, and this is why their struggle with the COVID-19 rules is so real. It is urgent to compensate for the mirror they are currently lacking, because we can't postpone their recognition of their own worth and that of others. It is urgent to persuade those who believe that freedom is an absolute right that our freedom has always had a limit in the rights of others, and that recognizing others doesn't make us less free or less autonomous than what we already are, but rather genuinely human.
