“Bradley understands love. He’s going to make it just fine as a human being, and the only things I personally choose to exterminate are demons.”
~ Dante, Devil May Cry episode 3
With how much time people spend wondering about who they are and what their purpose really is in the grand scheme of things, perhaps it’s to be expected that so many stories concern themselves with the question of what it really means to be a human being. Or, as it may turn out, what it means not to be a human being—whether or not you really have to have supernatural powers or come from another dimension to be a demon.
As a fantasy writer, I also have a certain fascination with the philosophical details of these questions.
It’s interesting how often emotions of caring or love are associated with a person’s humanity. I have to admit that such an association appeals to me, but I wonder if perhaps this has more to do with what we want to believe than what is actually true. Likewise, we call the people who do terrible and evil things monsters because we don’t want to believe that a human being—a being like ourselves—would ever commit such cruelties.
of course, that’s the rather pessimistic view of things.
It's interesting how in both sci-fi and fantasy, the usual distinguishing characteristics for humans are their capacity for love, their creativity, their bravery, their tenacity, and so on, while other creatures are usually identified by various physical traits or abilities: the telepaths, the immortals, the beauties, the ones with fur. You almost never see humans identified for their color vision, their vocal range, or their opposable thumbs.
ReplyDeleteI think the common explanation for this is that the sci-fi stories that don't care don't put much effort into the outside view of homo sapiens, while the ones that do care have a story to tell about humans and humanity, and any alien creatures are there mainly for contrast. Both cases end up leading to humans as a sort of given baseline, all other creatures being defined by their deviation from that baseline.
Which isn't bad, exactly, but it's certainly "anthropocentric". It's refreshing to read stories where it's not as much the case.
Ah, a GRE vocab word in an everyday setting:)
DeleteHuh, now that you mention it, I guess the physical characteristics thing is rather true.
On the other hand, maybe it's just really hard for humans not to use humans as a baseline (all considered). It feels a bit like trying to define or talk about culture and other things without the bias in language but with languages that are inherently biased.