How do you evaluate the human condition? Are the basic and inevitable characteristics of human life such that it is great or lousy or so-so? It might be more like Hobbes’ brutish and nasty, red in tooth and claw, a dog eat dog existence only barely mitigated by civil order or, on the other hand, the human condition might be like a weekend family barbeque where the only anxiety amidst the enjoyment of gazing at your wife and children is making sure to turn on the tv to see the football game. Is the human condition closer to heaven or to hell? This question is very difficult to answer because there is only one human condition to contemplate, all the comparisons merely thought experiments. Moreover, it is difficult to assess what is to be included within the human condition. It could include that people are not able to directly enter the consciousness of another person, as if there were a mind meld, or there were just a shared experience for a brief period of time with someone else’s thoughts and feelings about their own discreditable habits or cravings (horrible) or only their more attractive features, such as a will to do the decent thing (heavenly or still just awful to experience in someone else’s skin). Another thing to think about that it is possible to imagine but not realize is that people cannot travel in time so as to alter or even just contemplate when Washington crossed the Delaware or when Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment or when the west was anything over the Appalachians. Did our sense of ourselves very different when traveling in those circumstances? We experiment at that all the time by reading history, our imaginations conveyed to us through books, but would we be very different if we could in fact transport ourselves in that way? I wonder how awful it would have been to confront a world where Hiitler was alive and well in 1940. Would I always be terrified or just continuing on the usual things of getting through school and work and courtship or, more likely, having to do all of those things all at once, aware of both world politics and the quotidian, as one does every day during this or any other time.
There are other ways to imagine what it would be like to imagine how the human condition might be different, though that depends on what is the standard for real change. Let us say there were three biological sexes all of which had to deal with one another to procreate. Would that be enough to make it a different human condition if the three sexes could still not enter one another’s minds? Or, however many of the sexes there might be, all people still died for not much longer than a hundred years of age? In fact, it seems that the human condition is very narrow in that so many possibilities that might complicate it have not occurred. Let us say that there are really three or four basic biological stocks that live in this world, humans competing with neanderthals and some one or two others that began in different continents and prospered and then migrated to intermingle. But that wouldn’t do it either because history has imagined there being multiple races rather than different strains of the same human race and so we have to manage that anyway, for better and worse.
From the Thirties to the Sixties a lot of writers invoked the human condition so as to contrast it to the political or the economic or the social condition so as to get at something very fundamental, but I still don’t know what it means except as a way to flag something important. The writers and playwrights of the time saw people shrieking or isolated or nauseous and the thunder of rhinoceroses on the street to show how disjointed they were and their awareness of a bedrock condition which was alien to what seemed to be ordinary life. The real human condition was the opposite of what was the ordinary condition. How could that be? Moreover, the human condition could also be used to mean simply the ordinary processes of social life. Hannah Arendt thought the human condition had to do with the nature of work and occupations, but that seems very specialized. Does the concept of the human condition persist or was it just part of the verbal furniture of a particular literary age?
One thing that does not seem as of yet to alter the human condition is technology, which has not as yet altered anything basic in our condition. Lives do not live much longer than the biblical three score and ten, and people are still subject to diseases, and children still have to be born and grown up and telecommunications may allow people to commute via zoom but geography has not been abolished so that geographical areas as a nation or a city or a neighborhood no longer obtain. People could just be healthy and then die of a cold in a few days and people are still struck down.
Despite the ruminations during that age of anxiety in the Thirties through the Sixties when the human condition was a singular all encompassing thing, it might be better to think of it as what statisticians think of as a dashboard. There are a number of independent measures that are variable, as is also the case with an automobile dashboard, which measures on different gauges speed and mileage and gasoline consumption. The same is true with the human condition. There is a gauge on human meanness that alters over the centuries and there is a gauge on social organization that changes over the millena, as does a gauge on culture, so that the human condition at about 1000 AD thought that the human condition was that there were spirits and dragons and miracles happening in Europe just over the next hill. That is a very different human condition than held during a secular age. Even metaphysical issues have time spans. Isaac Asimov imagined a time when human consciousness had become resident in very advanced computers and so made immortal and still distinct and subjective. We look at our gauges to show what the human condition holds at the time.
Shift from the variety of the things that make up the human condition to one specific aspect: the natural state of human emotions and their morality. That too is the human condition by focussing only on what we can seem to control but which persists and so seems inevitable. Amd for eighteen hundred years and those who still consider themselves Christian, the view has been that the human condition is racked by Original Sin, which means either that mankind is cursed because Adam and Eve erred, or else that every person on its own decides to opt for evil rather than goodness, or that Original Sin is a metaphor for the fact that evil feelings and deeds are endemic in humanity, Whichever way, humanity is lousy and only Christian salvation can get people out of their condition.
Shakespeare is attributed as being a man of the Renaissance who invented the idea that characters were individuals rather than stereotypes. But Shakespeare remains a Christian in his view of human nature as far back at least in Richard III where he presented a particularly repellant figure as a fascinating one, All of the great tragic figures, from Hamlet to Macbeth to Othello to Lear are deeply tainted in their characters, each deeply repellant however much the audiences are driven to understand them, just as in the Twentieth Century people are driven to understand Hitler more than the organization he and his colleagues created, while Brutus and Mark Antony, before and after the great tragedies, are more acceptable as having weaker failings than those of the four. The human condition is wretched as every two bit tragedian, such as the one in Huck Finn can be made to understand, even though to Twain that was false. People being more sensible rather than fustian, Twain having the good sense of the Nineteenth Century that the human condition could be improved, whatever its psychological shortcomings, even if he despaired that improvement would not continue.
The great change from the Elizabethan view had occurred in the first part of the Eighteenth Century for reasons still in dispute. Conservatives think that the imposition of the Black Codes that made law extended and ever punitive might have turned the trick to making the people of England more pacific and pliable and reasonable. Economists think that a settled monetary system made the society more reasonable and manageable. Cultural historians might argue that the British Eighteenth Century became more enlightened and more humane because it developed a sense of the human rights of the citizenry. In any event, by the time of Samuel Johnson, in the middle of the century, human nature had seemed to have changed enough so that truly bad people were those who were eccentric people, like Richard Savage, whose peculiarities made him lie to himself and to others and a century later than that, Durkheim had transformed that to mean that anyone who was eccentric was a bad or reviled person, however much the much maligned Nineteenth Century believed in progress and the extension if freedom and welfare to people. Remember that Freud, at the end of the century, that eccentric people are just that, and for their own good reasons, and so they should not be regarded as bad. We should still maintain that resistance to blame people for doing bad things because they are just victims of their natures. We disdain the still supposedly prudish and the slaveholders and the victims of the working class while forgetting that the Twentieth Century was far, far worse. It is not an accident that there arose a concern with the metaphysics and very altered psychologies of human nature so as to escape from the politico and history that dominated the Nineteenth Century and was now teetering on barbarism, progress having been a failed prophet, so it seemed.
Here is a way to get to the chase: mto evaluate whether the human condition is worth it without carefully defining what it is. Look at suicide rates. There are about 47,000 people who suicide int the United States each year, which comes out to about fourteen per hundred thousand. Moreover, ninety percent of those who survive a suicide attempt don’t repeat the effort, which suggests that suicide is an impulse that is the result of multiple factors and where most have mental conditions rather than suicide an addiction or something that most sensible people will decide to do. Experts are reluctant to attribute suicidee to any single cause but if you include as sufficient cause for suicidde fates that are worse than death, such as interminable pain due to disease or being threatened with torture, then the percent would go down more. So most people, regardless of their race or social condition, do not decide to end their lives. They see life as being worthwhile and so one can conclude that the human condition is not so bad, just burdening us with unpleasant features many of which we could not imagine being without, such as bad romances or pain in childbirth and sweat for work. People find it pleasant to breathe or to move their bowels or cry over the songs of the Fifties which remind them of their youth, a tribute to the trick whereby memory can take you away to another time and so to be seen as a blessing rather than a curse. Life is worth it and people linger. That is also part of the human condition.