How To Be Humannotion of wellbeing. But they may also worry at what I am
smuggling in here, with my ‘celebration’ of the power of reli-
gious story-telling and the like. Biblical tales may inspire us to
love our neighbour, but they’ve also inspired the suppression of
women, say. Parables may speak of the highest virtues – of faith,
hope and love – but they also speak of eternal condemnation if
you fi nd yourself in the wrong group when the sheep are sepa-
rated from the goats.
That’s true, but that’s no reason to dismiss them all. Rather,
it’s to note that human beings simply cannot understand the
world without resorting to myths, stories or a vision of life – and
that this goes for scientifi cally sourced myths of what it is to be
human too. So a better question to ask is how conscious, and
therefore critical, we are of our myths, stories and the visions that
we deploy. ‘If we ignore them, we travel blindly inside myths and
visions which are largely provided by other people. This makes it
much harder to know where we are going,’ writes Mary Midgley
in Science as Salvation: a Modern Myth and Its Meaning. Her point
is made against the myths that arise from an over-interpreted
science, but it applies equally to the religious stories that may
serve us better – a critique we’ll shortly come to.
For now, though, we’ll conclude our discussion of the many
scientifi c accounts of human nature that do the rounds these
days. The fundamental problem is that they take human nature
to be simple, in the sense that we can explain ourselves to
ourselves in relatively simple ways. It’s a particularly powerful
fantasy, perhaps because modern technology puts within our
power not only the ability to manipulate the world around us
but, with genetics, our very selves too.
The pervading technologism leads us to think that we are
on the brink of a great leap forward that will cause us to
‘mutate’. It would become so easy then (and nearly ‘auto-
matic’) to make objection to every reference to humanity, its
weaknesses as well as its merits: ‘All of that is overcome! We
are in a new era! An entirely different race is born!