Being Human
So, then. Would you betray your kind? Your race? Your species?
I watched two movies recently which made me examine my own feelings on the matter – the first, in the cinema and on the big screen, and twice in quick succession (went to see it first with my husband and then took my mother to see it) was the new “apes” franchise movie, “The Rise of the Planet of the Apes”. The second, on TV and the small screen and for the first time, “Avatar” (Yes, I know it came out years ago. No, I never went to the cinema to see it. So sue me.)
For those who have been living under rocks over the period covered by the release of these two fairly high-profile movies, here are basic nutshell summaries of them:
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”: well-intentioned human scientist develops virus which has cognitive improvement effects… and before human testing is approved, tests it on our closest genetic relatives, the great apes, specifically chimps. The virus naturally turns out to be more than the scientist bargained for, and not only improves cognitive abilities but sends actual intelligence and sapience levels into the stratosphere. Inevitable conflict between humans (the profiteering kind who are in it to grab as much individual gain in terms of money and power as they can and who as usual are relaying on raw force and firepower against entities fundamentally unable to retaliate in the same manner) and the now just-as-intelligent-if-not-more-so and certainly functioning on a higher moral ground great apes then ensues. Humans lose.
“Avatar”: not-so-well-intentioned humans arrive on an alien world populated by a sapient race other than their own which is inconveniently in their way when it comes to raping the planet of its natural resources in the fastest, most ‘efficient’, and most destructive way possible or imaginable. The humans conveniently classify the other race as “savages” and feel no compunction in basically ripping their world from them – because, well, they are sitting on “our” Unobtainium (and wasn’t that an inspired choice of name for the natural resource in question). The humans are benevolently inclined and offer things like ‘schools’ (just what in Hades would they be teaching the little savage children in these schools? Other than a language that as a slave race they must now learn in order to communicate effectively with their masters and possibly some variation of “your religion sucks, take mine, it’s better, take it I said or I’ll shoot you”, of course…) and ‘medicine’ (for what, exactly? Given that we are on an alien world WHOSE AIR WE CANNOT BREATHE FOR LONGER THAN A BRACE OF MINUTES WITHOUT CHOKING ON IT and whose pathogens are unlikely to affect us, or ours them?). The natives, understandably, want none of it. Which makes them ungrateful, and, well, savages, right? Therefore to be expediently exterminated. But as usual the humans who rely on the flash and the bang and the gung ho haven’t explored or bothered to understand or even learn about some of the more esoteric aspects of the world they are about to wantonly destroy for their own personal gain. The world fights back. Humans lose.
In both movies, I found myself tearfully cheering on… the OTHER SIDE. The one which was taking on the human beings. The one which would whip the human beings’ collective asses.
In “Apes”, during the scene on the bridge, I was practically whooping when the apes got one over on the idiot police and army goons in their jackboots and helmets, pointing Uzis at unarmed opponents who fought with nothing but raw courage and faith and, when it came to it, sacrifice, throwing naked bodies into the field of fire so that some died and others could live, and live free. It was a palpable payback, and dear GOD, a deserved one. Human beings had made this mess – they had dabbled in things that they did not understand, as usual, and their immense hubris in doing so had brought them down low before the thing that they had created. And no, I am emphatically not using their innocence or ignorance as an excuse in this. Yes, the human race is not perfect and yes we are fallible and perhaps I should simply stand up with the jackbooted thugs and scream “It wasn’t my fault!” and shoot at the nearest ape – but I can’t, dammit, I can’t, not when they look back at me with intelligence and even compassion (They! They pity ME!) and I know that what was done to them may not have been done by my hand but it was done by hands like mine and as like as not in my name, “for the common good”.
I pretty much could not watch the climactic battle scenes of “Avatar” at all, sick to the stomach at the inequality and the injustice of it all. When the gung-ho military leader of it all meets his Maker I may not have pumped my fist openly but inside I was jumping up and down and screaming “YES! YES! YES!”
And yet in “Avatar” we are left with a dubious proposition which I have seen much discussed out there in the cyberworld – namely that, even given (at least according to HUMAN psychology, but we are dealing with aliens here so that might have been allowed to be explored under the circumstances) that the disparate clans could not really unite under any single one of their own (because, well, what’s in it for them, right?), once again the “savages” are shown to achieve whatever they achieve ONLY by submitting to and being led by one of US. One of the great human kind. The parallels to our own history and the rise to the top by the white guy who rose to a leadership position (and only by virtue of this was victory by the ‘savage’ underdogs achieved) were inevitable, and they came thick and fast. The premise was that even an enemy who went “native” on them could somehow be trusted more than any single one of their own kind. And in “Avatar”, the leader of “our” side, the side that is annoyed that the best and deepest deposits of the Unbotainium that we want and we somehow claim as “ours” sits right underneath the Mother of All Trees which just happens to be home to an entire sapient species, that leader, the one who is willing to destroy that tree even with its inhabitants still within it (perhaps especially then!), he is the one who faces our protagonist, the “gone-native” fellow, with the deadly question which is supposed to hobble him and destroy him: “WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE TO BETRAY YOUR OWN KIND?”
What is my kind, then? That guy? The one willing to order extermination, annihilation, genocide and environmental catastrophe because of a shareholder’s bottom line? THAT is the “kind” I should take my stand behind? Really?
What does it mean, then, to be human?
Rephrasing the question from the top of this essay, would *I* betray my kind, my race, my species?
Probably. In a heartbeat. Because in my mind and in my soul that ‘Being Human’ thing (I mean, in a species sense, as opposed to being anything else) is so much less important than ‘being human’ (in the sense that if I can’t identify with what is the best of us there is no point in any of it at all and sometimes the best of us, the most ‘human’ of us, is not found inside ourselves but instead in that thing which we are trying to control or destroy…)
In a war like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, damn right I would have stood with the apes.
In a war like the one in “Avatar”, damn right I would have gone over to the “savages”.
Send in the goons now, if you have to. But here I make a stand. I will stand for fairness, and decency, and compassion, and the basic idea that what is yours is not necessarily mine because I can simply take it by superior force. If my kind/ my race/ my species violates that, then I might well side with the ‘enemy’. And if anyone thinks that makes me any less ‘human’… then there isn’t anything else I can say to make that person understand, because it is likely that eventually that person and I will be staring at one another across a great divide and they will be asking me in genuine outrage what it feels like to betray my own.
And my only answer to that would be, “I am not. YOU are.”
