What Does It Mean to Be Human?
For years I wanted to follow in the footsteps of my paternal grandmother by becoming a high school English teacher. I had a deep love of literature, philosophy, and theology from a young age. My third-grade teacher introduced me to the awe-inspiring world of poetry. Shortly afterwards, I remember staring up in wonder at the bright winter moon while riding across the silver prairie east of Lewistown, Montana, on a family trip home from my grandparents’ house. I wrote a poem about it.
All of that changed when I returned to Montana to finish my undergraduate degree after 6 years in the Navy. My eagerness was quickly stifled by the ideology of the English department. Everything was seen through the lends of materialist atheism and progressive ideology. There was no debating with ideologically blinded professors, and the fire that had quietly burned within me for years was snuffed out. Coupled with the depressing state of my old high school I encountered as a debate coach, I switched majors and abandoned my dream. There were no more guides in wonder.
The atheistic materialism that runs through so many colleges—including too many Catholic campuses—has resulted in a form of blindness, despair, and shallow thinking. It’s rendered us unable to understand the deeper meaning of life and the world around us. We no longer see the necessity of seeking the true, the good, and the beautiful. We have accepted a cheap counterfeit. We are like Martin Shaw’s description in his recent book Liturgies of the Wild: Myths that Make Us, “squatting in a magpie’s nest of things that glittered mysteriously but often proved plastic.”
This turning away from deeper truths and beauty is not only a secular phenomenon. Post-Enlightenment influences have often led the Church to abandon her richness, depth, beauty, truth, and goodness in favor of a counterfeit. One of the greatest disagreements I have with Catholic education today is its left-brain dominance and ready acceptance of technology in the classroom. We have unwittingly aided in the addiction of young people to technology in our desire to keep up with the world rather than build saints. Harvard became more important than heaven.
This battle wages in my own home, as it does in every home today. My daughter’s classical education reveals what a left-brain-dominated technological age is doing to us. This is coupled with an age that is devoid of meaning. The answer key that we need to understand the ancient and medieval worlds has been tossed out or burned up in the fires of progress. It is difficult for us to glean the deeper truths that our ancestors understood.
The poverty of my own public-school education of the 80s and 90s is constantly felt as I pick up texts that I cannot understand. We are lacking in wisdom and authentic guides on the journey to the good, the true, and the beautiful. In many ways, we have become intellectual adolescents, as Martin Shaw describes our sorry state. I count myself among the adolescents.
Thankfully, the fire that was snuffed out during my undergraduate days was not snuffed out for people, such as Anthony Esolen, Joseph Pearce, and Martin Shaw, who spend their days trying to lead people into a life grounded in the transcendentals. There are still people scattered in our midst who are seeking to reclaim a deeper life; who are not content with the lies and counterfeits of the Machine Age.
Classical education is making a comeback. Thankfully, even some Catholic schools who blindly followed the zeitgeist, to the detriment of families, are starting to return to the rich tradition of the past and the Tradition of the Church. Beauty is being re-awakened through Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire and David Henrie’s newly released EWTN series Seeking Beauty. A longing that we may not have known was within us is being re-awakened after a long, harsh winter.
A study came out recently pointing to how Gen Z is dumber than the previous generation. While this is startling, it should not be surprising. A generation that grew up with non-stop screen time and ideologically driven, left-brain-dominated education is unable to understand the world in a deeper sense. I was shocked when I spent a year teaching high school debate and creative writing in a local classical school where my students were incapable of reasoning. Discussions that would have been engaging and interesting in my own high school classrooms were met with dull silence and blank stares. Most of the students simply could not work through an argument on their own.
All of this should alarm us as we hurtle headlong towards an AI-dominated world. Why are we so quick to embrace a world that looks like a Tesla truck? In my mind that’s the symbol of the future being created for us: no beauty, cold, dark, bulky, and entirely utilitarian. It is a secular iconoclasm that mimics the iconoclasm of the “spirit of Vatican II” that sought to strip all beauty in favor or bland, banal, and beige. We seem to have forgotten what it means to be human.
The question that all these experiences point to is one that I think is the most urgent of our age: What does it mean to be human? This question is being asked with greater and greater urgency as we move further and further away from our center. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that my college students are increasingly concerned about AI. While my generation seems to be embracing it all too quickly, Gen Z is starting to wonder if all of this is good for us.
Studies may say they are dumber in certain forms of learning, but definitely not in seeing the dangers of unbridled technological progress. They asked me if I’d be willing to do a talk for the campus community on AI and the dangers it poses to our fundamental human nature, because this is a very real concern even among those who would be considered materialist atheists. The perennial question of what it means to be human is being re-awakened in people’s minds. This is good news for the Church.
These various threads—English literature, technologically driven classrooms, inability to decipher the deeper works of the past, Tesla trucks, and becoming dumber—are all tied together. They are the result of a worldview that has forgotten what it means to be human. The Church, who has the deepest and truest anthropology, has failed in her mission because we have been too embroiled in petty in-fighting, which is typical after an ecumenical council. The navel-gazing debates based on worldly desires need to stop. We must reclaim the supernatural vision we have been given through the power of the Holy Spirit to read the signs of the times and confront them head on with the true, the good, and the beautiful. We have the answer to the darkness of the present age. We have the answer to what it means to be human.
The solution is to reclaim the transcendentals while also slowing down and returning to the queen of the cardinal virtues: prudence. We need to stop jumping on every bandwagon—technological and otherwise—to be seen as relevant. This mentality unleashed on the Church by some in the wake of Vatican II needs to be wholeheartedly abandoned. The world does not set the Church’s agenda. The Church meets the world with truth, goodness, and beauty in order to draw people into the depths of the Most Holy Trinity.
To reclaim our humanity encompasses all areas of life and all subjects of study. As more and more research reveals the dangers of social media and technological addiction, and as the ideological divides driven by social media widen, we should be asking ourselves how to be a part of the healing and freedom of young people by jettisoning addictive practices in our schools and families. We should abandon the left-brain dominance of STEM in order to provide a more balanced view of the world and reality through a return to the Humanities.
Extremes do us no good. We need both left- and right-brain ways of thinking to live the full human experience. Those who are science-minded need to be tempered by art, literature, philosophy, theology, history, and so on. The excesses of those within the Humanities can be tempered by those of a scientific or mathematical bent. There should be harmony in human learning that leads us to live more human lives.
The Church possesses the answer to what the world needs. The Church knows the answer to what it means to be human in every age. It’s time for us to reclaim our supernatural vision, guided by the Holy Spirit and the teaching of the Church, so that we can lead a confused world into the true, the good, and the beautiful—and save future generations from all that is counterfeit or opposed to a truly human life.
Photo by Matteo Vistocco on Unsplash
