We may not like the cultural blender or centrifuge fashioning the humanity of humanity and coalescing most in the monotheist traditions around a monotheist humanism (the proposed universal values and virtues I apply for that are compassion, humility, inclusion, and integrity), but that may be where we’re going. The so-called “real” Islam, which carries the burden of the Banu Qurayza legend (was that a good thing or a bad thing? Was the slaughter just? Today, Aafia Siddiqui — heroine or villain?) or the “real” Christianity, which owes much of its “realness” to Constantine’s marches (that one had a colossus made of himself), or the “real” Judaism that preoccupies Kirs Joel in New York State spin out in schism, separation, and war. Those come apart and the “humanity of humanuty” recovers its main and progressing regions.

Every child born comes equipped with a legacy in culture, customs, family, language, and religion.  Perhaps the greater the separation from others, say the tribe from the greater family of man — or here the person from social anchorage — the more autonomously evolving, eclectic, and narcissistic.

The narcissistic bubble, the house of mirrors, even perhaps Plato’s cave afford freedom within their interior boundary responsive entirely to its inhabitants — or inhabitant — but introduce some cultural and political commerce to that sealed environment (and should you hear in that phrase an echo of the “sealed nectar”, enjoy the faint metonymy) and something is going to change.

In what direction always — and tragically after much fighting, shouting, suffering, and dying?

Call that the “humanity of humanity”.

Analog: Lincoln’s “better angels”.

Inspiration for the thought here: my uncle’s old Haggadah in which was stated in Jewish memory of the exodus from Egypt: “With each generation, a little more freedom is won.”

As we enter an era of dangerous and delicate energy technology, i.e., more nuclear power plants, expansive solar panel arrays, their vulnerability in war and our dependence on them for living plus improving qualities of living wants the clearing away of those who trouble lands with their own romantic mythos borne of deeply evolved isolation (evolved in thought in language) and once unhindered by any consideration of others.

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Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, Monday, March 4, 1861:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Notably, Lincoln’s message preceded the greater carnage of the Civil War.

The cynical may say he gambled.

The believing, however, may believe Lincoln knew and wrote the end of the matter at the beginning.

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