By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org. [The following is the Introduction to Thomas Harrington's book, Staying Human: In a Soul-Shredding Age.] It began spontaneously on an unusually warm day in the Fall of 2021 when, after exchanging the generally muted pleasantries in the way one does in such situations, I locked onto the tired visage of the overheated and masked woman behind the supermarket check-out counter and asked, "Are you staying human?" Suddenly her previously somnolent eyes became focused, indicating a desire to confirm that she had heard me right, a signal to which I responded with a soft restatement of the initial query. Given the chance to step out of her assigned role as a human automaton, viewed by the executives of company that pays her as a more costly and less reliable version of the bank of self-service scanners 15 feet away from where we stood, she confessed demurely that staying human was "really hard" for her these days. But seconds later her face lit up as she told me about her three babies at home and the classes she was taking fulltime at night to get her LPN degree. When I expressed amazement at her ability to manage all she had on her plate, she shot me a smile that was an equal mix of determination and resignation and said, "What are you going to do? You just got to keep your head up, right?" She wanted to continue, but after seeing the impatient looks on the faces of the customers behind me, she knew our little tête-a-tête needed to end. She understood all too well that she was there not to cultivate human warmth, affection, or even humor, but to swiftly and accurately register the store's revenue flows. And so I grabbed my bags and, turning round once more to face her and say thanks, headed for the door. I have continued to ask the same simple question intermittently and in various social settings since then. At times I am met with blank stares, and occasionally outright hostility. But more often than not people are delighted, and in many cases clearly relieved to have been approached in this way, reactions that, in turn, tell me that much is amiss in the ways we are currently conducting our daily lives. For most of my life, it would have never occurred to me to conjure up such a question, never mind serially pose it to others. Being human was for me, and I suspect for many others fortunate to grow up in the glow of the US postwar prosperity, a highly stable category, different in its particular qualities but akin in its ontological stability to things like trees, rocks, or dogs. But the happenings of the last six years have conspired to expel me from that zone of conceptual complacency. I am now increasingly convinced that becoming and staying human is not, as I once believed, a simple matter of remaining alive, but the fruit of an intense and highly self-conscious effort to align ourselves, as Lincoln famously said, with "the better angels of our nature." To believe in angels, even metaphorical ones, is to admit that there are forces in our lives that transcend the scope of our tools of rational analysis, and that we are, in some mysterious way, subject to their powers. It is also to suggest, moreover, that there are mental concepts, such as love, beauty, and dignity, that, while impossible to fully capture, explain, or quantify, are absolutely central to human flourishing. The idea that every human is condemned to hosting a perpetual struggle between their material and ethereal selves is, of course, not new. What is relatively new is the belief that such a struggle need not exist because, as that great scholar of metaphysics, the singer Madonna, announced to us back in 1984, "We are living in a material world" where anything worth having or knowing can be apprehended through the senses of hearing, sight, and touch. To accept that we are and always have been mere seekers of material comfort and gain is to erase the aspiration that we humans can be something different and better than the...
