The Anthropology of Humanity
Ours is a world of moral dilemma we cannot escape.
If the view of the anthropological construction of reality proffered within these pages teaches us anything, it should be that we must learn to exercise extreme caution in our judgments of the realities of others. Our sense of morality and ethics are as much anthropological constructions of our reality as are any other facet of our world. There exists no simple anthropological calculus or general solution by which to make such judgments or by which to construct our world. And yet we are always challenged by the dilemma of a moral imperative for acting and yet to act within a vacuum of moral justification. And we must also accept that anthropologically people are neither good nor bad, but are intrinsically capable of acts that may be both evil and good in the world. There is no person or social system that is without ambiguity or contradiction. Humans are by definition the creatures of imperfection prone to making mistakes in their constructions of reality. It is by virtue of our vices that we have the opportunity to learn.
The principle moral call of anthropology has been one of universal tolerance for human variation and difference, a call that is itself relative in falling short of the tolerance for intolerance. Toleration for difference does not necessarily constitute by itself a justification of evil and misanthropy in the world--it entails only that we seek rehabilitation of the harm and its sources rather than annihilation or vengeance. Those who confuse tolerance with indifference are themselves morally confused and contradictory creatures.
For good reason, anthropology has been aptly characterized as the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. We are left to consider the question of anthropology as a humanity as well as the humanity of anthropology. It is not enough to consider anthropology as only a history, or as a philosophy, but as its own kind of humanistic inquiry and its own separate form of humanity.
Anthropology as humanity values the human differences which underlie all our illusions of identity, and thereby seeks the identity and unity of anthropological difference in the world. It leads to an appreciation of the common humanness and human condition in our world. An archaeologist who discovers a ten thousand year-old baby doll in a child's grave has established a strange bond with the human objects of his study. Our humanity is to be found only in the buried realities of our world.
The construction of reality is inherently a human construction of a human world. An intrinsic part of our humanness is that we are morally and meta-ethically constrained in the world, whether we like it or not. The Nuremberg trials taught the world of the universal efficacy and legitimacy of the moral basis of our own humanity, the imperative of which we cannot escape in our actions, the consequences of which violation must sooner or later rebound upon ourselves in the world.
If we search for the source of such humanity in our being, we must find it ultimately in the possibilities created by our own human sentience that allow us to feel the feelings of others, and sense the meaning of others places in the world. It arises from a recognition of the possibility of our own error in the world. In short, it is a product that we have no choice but to live within a world of our own making.
The moral efficacy of our humanity is thus intrinsic to the very process of our anthropological construction of reality, whether we acknowledge it or become aware of it or not. Moral dilemma is implicit to the happenstance of our own anthropological contradictions in the world--part the fact that we are coherent creatures who must make mistakes in order to become more human.
It is possible to formulate a universal moral calculus rooted in the social dialectics of human rights and responsibilities, of human needs and resources. Such a calculus would yield a basic contradiction to anthropological knowledge itself. The anthropological world has been mostly one built of stratification and asymmetry, with all its implications of violence and promotion of aggression. Historical processes of modernization in the mobilization of the earth's resources, with all the evils this entails, are seemingly irreversible and inexorable. We can scarcely imagine no other effective form of social integration which does not institutionalize or incorporate some measure of asymmetry and violence in social relations. And yet, somehow, we must resolve this contradiction in our anthropological construction of reality, because morally speaking, we have no other choice.
An anthropology of humanity might begin with the premise that all human construction is reality is oriented by some fundamental contradiction which involves a basic moral dilemma. Every human situation, every anthropological dimension, is morally constrained within this kind of contradiction. The sense of contradiction, and the demands it makes in any given context will never be exactly the same. Such incorporation of contradiction will constrain anthropological processes in certain historically decisive ways. Furthermore, we can speculate that each person's life is endowed existentially with a central purpose, or a basic anthropological reason for being, by which, from a humanitarian point of view, we can make sense of that persons life experiences.
Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of
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granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only. Last Updated: 03/07/05