‘No man is an island, entire of itself’(John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII)
Our era is an era of extraordinary interconnectedness and equally extraordinary incuriosity. We are enmeshed in elaborate networks of human interdependence, yet we remain indifferent to the humanity of those who sustain them!
Let us take for example, the unassuming proprietor of a neighbourhood kiosk, whose modest establishment becomes an unofficial nerve centre of quotidian existence. We admire his efficiency and hospitality, but rarely bother about the disappointments he conceals.
However a subtle contradiction is inherent in this modernity: the more essential is one’s labour, the easier it is for society to make the individual dispensable. This phenomenon is not necessarily motivated by any kind of malevolence. Its subtle root cause is familiarity. William Shakespeare's Hamlet offers a philosophical counterpoint to this reduction of humanity: ‘What a piece of work is a man!’(William Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, ii).
This speech celebrates humanity's intellectual capacities(its reason, imagination and intellectual reach). Yet Hamlet subsequently describes humanity as ’this quintessence of dust’, thereby exposing the tension between human grandeur and human fragility. This is particularly relevant here because we cannot or rather should not understand a person through the narrow lens of utility that society assigns them. Society has become adept at doing business but ignorant of meeting people. The janitor becomes the means to clean, the courier becomes the means to convenience, and the guard becomes a welcome reassurance at the entrance. Individuals are reduced to their job titles, as if all that matters about them is their utility and all that they possess in excess is their humanity! Walt Whitman makes a related declaration in ‘Song of Myself’: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’. This very line articulates an expansive conception of identity. A human being is not a single attribute but a multiplicity of memories, contradictions, desires, fears, and possibilities, among others.
But a solution cannot consist of intrusive meddling in everyone else's private affairs. Neither does respect necessarily imply a need to know everything about someone else, nor compassion a right to question. All that it requires is acknowledgment without patronisation, payment without exploitation, and consideration without the demand of usefulness.
The moral imagination of any society does not show itself through any sort of grand claims about equality; rather, it shows itself in the everyday practice of distributing respect. The test comes in the instant of interaction, the ordinary transaction, when no one else is looking and there is nothing to be gained by treating each other respectfully.
And maybe the question that we can ask progress more than any other is how it maintains the humanity of those who provide them.
We do not need to know the story behind every stranger. What we need is to stop thinking that a person becomes important to us only if he or she can be of use to us. For perhaps the worst mistake of civilisation was that we learned how to rely on one another without acknowledging that the one on whom we rely is, like us, a universe.