Carl Sandburg gets it right: “There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.” Human beings are a walking paradox! I recently wrote about how dangerous it is to visualize complex issues—and especially people—in simplistic either/or ways. We see this especially in our own humanity.
First, we are creatures of dust, yet far more than dust. Blaise Pascal captures it in his epigram: “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.” Human intelligence has offered us technological mastery, yet our supercharged minds exist in fragile bodies; an infinitesimal virus can kill us.
Like all animals, we respond to hormones and instincts; unlike the animals, we are unique. The Bible calls this being “made in the image of God.” Only humans can choose to transcend our own impulses, cultures, traditions, and even (or especially) our own pasts. It’s hard to imagine human life without this possibility for growth.
Second, consciousness itself is part of the human paradox. However adept computers become in mimicking human thought, their behavior can be explained in physical terms. Is the same true for us? Or is human consciousness an indefinable extra that transcends physicality—something no computer will ever achieve, the “ghost in the machine?” The more we enhance the power of computers, the more we realize the paradoxical anomaly of human consciousness, which is inexplicable in purely materialistic terms.
Third, human freedom is paradoxical. Eugene Peterson puts it well: “Freedom does not mean doing whatever pops into our heads, like flapping our arms and jumping off a bridge, expecting to soar lazily across the river.” Genuine freedom is only experienced in relationship to boundaries, from the laws of gravity to the laws of society. Advertisers speak of the paradox of choice: “Give us too little freedom and we’ll stand up to dictators in Cairo and fighter planes in Libya. Give us too much freedom (and too many channels), and we’ll sit in front of the TV, mindlessly flipping through our options, watching nothing.”
A final paradox: we only grow as individuals within community. “No man is an island,” John Donne famously declared. We Americans prize our individuality, yet we discover most of “who we are” only through our interactions with parents, siblings, friends, peers, neighbors, and, more broadly, our tribe. Most of us live in this paradoxical tension all our lives—neither swallowed up in a hive-like collective nor asserting a naked individuality.
Here’s the point: to be human is to exist within these four tensions, among others. To be human is to be aware of both the wind in our faces (as we soar) and the mud underneath our fingernails (as we wallow).
Especially today—when human beings can too easily be labeled based solely on a religion, a demographic group, or a skin color—we are wise to remember this paradoxical truth about ourselves.
Question: when has the paradox of being human been most apparent to you? Please share a comment.
