Life Is a Long Journey Between Human Being and Being Humane

Until the eighteenth century the English language used a single word, spelled either way, for both human and humane. A human being was expected to be humane, to show kindness, and the idea that the two might differ was hardly thinkable. Only gradually did the spellings and the meanings separate, so that the first named a biological fact and the second a moral aspiration. The topic captures this gap in a phrase. Life, it says, is a long journey between human being and being humane, and the distance is travelled slowly if at all.

Being human is a given. We are born into the species with a body, a language capacity and a set of instincts that include both affection and aggression. Being humane has to be earned. It means feeling for the suffering of others, restraining one's power over the weak and acting for the good of strangers. The Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola argued in 1486 that God gave man no fixed nature, so that he might shape himself as he chose, and rise to the angels or sink to the beasts. The journey is a matter of choice and effort.

History records both directions. The twentieth century witnessed mass slaughter on an industrial scale, from the trenches of the Western Front to the camps of the Holocaust and the gulags, perpetrated by educated people with the tools of science. In 1961 Stanley Milgram showed that about two thirds of ordinary volunteers were willing to administer what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to a stranger when an experimenter in a white coat told them to. Cruelty did not require monsters. It required only obedience, distance and a story.

Yet the same century gave us counter examples. Nicholas Winton, a young London stockbroker, organised the rescue of 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on trains in 1939 and said nothing about it for fifty years. Gandhi stood unarmed against an empire and insisted that his opponents be treated without hatred. Ashoka, after the carnage at Kalinga in the third century BCE, turned to the promotion of compassion across his realm. Such figures show that humane conduct is not a fantasy and that individual lives can travel far along the path.

Such figures show that humane conduct is not a fantasy and that individual lives can travel far along the path.

There is also evidence that societies as a whole have moved in this direction. Steven Pinker argued in The Better Angels of Our Nature in 2011 that violence has declined across centuries, from the abolition of judicial torture and slavery to the fall in rates of homicide and war deaths relative to population. His thesis is debated, and statisticians have disputed some of his numbers, but few doubt that the moral circle has widened. Ideas such as human rights, animal welfare and the protection of children would have seemed strange to most of our ancestors.

What drives the journey? Part of it is empathy, the capacity to feel what another feels, which develops in children from the age of a year or two, when they begin to comfort a distressed adult. Part of it is reason. Peter Singer has argued that the expanding circle of concern is driven by the recognition that there is no principled reason to value a stranger's suffering less than a neighbour's. Part of it is institutions, such as courts, schools and a free press, that reward kindness and punish cruelty. Religion and culture too have carried the message, from the parable of the Good Samaritan to the Jain principle of non harm. Children raised in homes where adults model kindness tend to show more of it, which makes the early years, and the schools that follow them, the first stretch of the road.

Yet the humane is not the same as the sentimental. Paul Bloom has argued in Against Empathy that feeling for the suffering of one identifiable victim can bias us, making us give more to a single child whose photograph is shown than to thousands who are statistics. Real humanity requires judgement as well as feeling, and the discipline to extend concern beyond those who move us. A person may be warm toward his family and cruel to outsiders, and so be human in the narrow sense and not humane in the full one. The journey requires the head as well as the heart. Cruelty and kindness often sit in the same person, which is why the road runs through each of us and not around us.

It also requires effort in small things. Being humane is shown less by dramatic rescues than by how a person treats a servant, a junior colleague or an animal when no one is watching. The courtesy to a watchman, the patience with a slow customer and the refusal to join a joke at the expense of the weak are the daily marks of progress. An institution is humane when it treats a prisoner, a patient or a refugee with dignity, and a country when it protects its minorities. The journey is made in millions of minor acts.

Is there an end? The phrase long journey suggests that there is a destination, but the experience of moral life suggests that none is ever reached. A person who thinks himself fully humane is probably blind to some area in which he is not, as history shows in the example of those who were kind to their families and owned slaves. Each age discovers a new circle of the neglected, whether the poor, the foreigner, the animal or the unborn, and sees its predecessors as callous. To walk the road is to keep finding that it goes further.

A last question lingers about the starting point. If human and humane were once the same word, perhaps the journey is not toward something new but a return to a state that we have always been capable of and have spoiled. Or perhaps it was always a hope, expressed in a language that merged the fact with the ideal. The traveller who carries this doubt may find it a useful companion, since it prevents the arrogance of thinking that the humane is already ours.