«Intruder», Robert Thurston
What Is A Human Being?
Isaac Asimov
It sounds like a simple question. Biologically, a human being is a member of the species Homo sapiens. If we agree that one particular organism (say, a male) is a human being, then any female with which he can breed is also a human being. And any males with whom any of these females can breed are also human beings. This instantly marks up billions of organisms on Earth as human beings.
It may be that there are organisms that are too old to breed, or too young, or too imperfect in one way or another, but who resemble human beings more than they resemble any other species. They, too, are human beings.
We thus end up with something over 5 billion human beings on Earth right now, and perhaps 60 billion who have lived on Earth since Homo sapiens evolved.
That’s simple, isn’t it? From the biological standpoint, we are all human beings, whether we speak English, Turkish, or Japanese; whether we have pale skin or dark; red hair or black; blue eyes or brown; flat noses or beaky ones; and so on.
That, however, is a biological definition, a sophisticated one. Now suppose that you are a member of a primitive tribe, homogeneous in appearance, language and culture, and you suddenly encounter someone who looks superficially like you but has red hair, where you’ve seen only black; fair skin where you’ve seen only dark; and, worst of all, who cannot understand “people language” but makes odd sounds, which he seems to understand, but which clearly make no sense whatever.
Are these strangers human beings in the sense that you yourself are? I’m afraid the consensus would be that they are not. Nor is it entirely a matter of lack of sophistication. The ancient Greeks, who were certainly among the most sophisticated human beings who ever lived, divided all human beings into two groups: Greeks and barbarians.
By barbarians, they didn’t mean people who were uncivilized or bestial. They recognized that some barbarians, like the Egyptians and Babylonians and Persians were highly cultivated. It was just that non-Greeks didn’t speak Greek; they made sounds that made no more sense (to a Greek encountering other languages for the first time) than a silly sound like “bar-bar-bar.”
You might feel that Greeks may have made that division as a matter of convenience, but that they didn’t go so far as to think that barbarians weren’t human.
Oh, didn’t they? Aristotle, one of the most sophisticated of all the ancient Greeks, was quite certain that barbarians were slave-material by nature, while Greeks were free men by nature. Clearly, he felt that there was something sub-human about barbarians.
But they were ancients, however sophisticated they might have been. They had limited experience, knew only a small portion of the world. Nowadays, we have learned so much we don’t come to those foolish conclusions. We know that all human-like creatures are a single species.
Yes? Was it so long ago that most White Americans were quite certain that African Blacks were not human in the sense that they themselves were; that the Blacks were inferior and that to enslave them and let them live on the outskirts of a White society was doing them a great favor? I wouldn’t be surprised if some Americans believe that right now.
It was not so long ago that Germans maintained loudly that Slavs and Jews were sub-human, so that they were right to do their best to rid “true” human beings of such vermin. And I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if there were lots of people right now who harbor similar notions.
Almost everyone thinks of other groups as “inferior,” although often they do not care to say so out loud. They tend to divide humanity into groups of which only a small part (a part which invariably includes themselves) are “true” human beings.
The Bible, of course, teaches universality (at least, in places). Thus, consider one of my own favorite passages in the New Testament, the parable of the “good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25-37). Someone tells Jesus that one of the beliefs one must have if one is to go to Heaven is “to love…thy neighbour as thyself. “ Jesus says he is correct and the man asks, “And who is my neighbour?” (In other words, does he love only his friends and people he likes, or is he supposed to love all sorts of bums and rotters?)