"What Does It Mean to be Human?" by Anna Bartlett

A common theme among science fiction films and novels is the question of what it means to be a human. The struggle to define ‘human’ is usually in the context of artificial intelligence—robots gone sentimental—or instances where human beings are living like zombies. Somehow the distinction seems to be in the ability to have emotions.

Today’s culture can be numbing. It seems like anger today is petty. More often than not, what we call anger is either a self-righteous call for sympathy or empathy or it is the result of a false sense of self-importance. Television has made it possible for us to be exposed to much of humanity’s horror and we therefore often lose our capacity to be horrified or to feel impersonal righteous anger. ‘Love’ is a word bandied about in so many shallow contexts that we often do not even realize the depth that is intrinsic in the word.

The Giver by Lois Lowry is formed around just such a situation. The Giver is set in a community formed on the basis of socialism. They have chosen to live with Sameness. The community is subjected to Climate Control, so there is no snow or rain, no clouds, no sunshine; therefore, nothing has color. The land is all flat; there are no animals. The Elders make all decisions, including spouse, children, and career. Each family is allowed one boy and one girl. Only those women assigned ‘birthmother’ as a career actually have babies, so the deep and intrinsic connection between mother and child does not exist in any of the families. The elderly are ‘released’ from the community once they reach a certain state of functioning. This ‘releasing’ is a celebration for the elderly, a sad occasion for infants who are not suitable, and a punishment for wrong-doers. The belief the community members hold is that those who are released are merely sent to another community. When someone reaches puberty he or she begins taking pills daily that essentially squelch sexual desire and severely subdue all other emotions.

Most importantly, the community members, save one, have no recollection of life ever being any different. They have no memories of the world up to the establishment of Sameness and therefore, since they do not experience it in their own lives, they have no idea what pain is, what grief is, what it is like to be passionately angry, to feel self-sacrificing love. They do not know what cruelty or injustice are. Only one man, The Giver, understands these emotions, for he alone holds all the memories of the history of the world.

The book follows the life of Jonas, a twelve-year-old boy who has just been selected as the successor of The Giver. The Giver begins transferring his memories to Jonas, who will eventually bear the burden of memory-holding alone. Jonas now experiences pain, hunger, and love, snow, and sunshine. He begins to see colors. He stops taking his daily pill and begins to experience every sensation with a new depth. In introducing himself and his task, The Giver explains that he holds the memories of the whole world. Jonas replies, “I don’t understand. Do you mean not just us? Not just the community? Do you mean Elsewhere, too? . . . I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now” (Lowry 78).

The Giver’s central concern is what it means to be human. The community is a dehumanizing environment. The people have come close to being robots. Freedom of choice and experiencing a wide range of sensory stimuli and emotions are what enriches the human experience. Neither of these factors is allowed in the restrictive environment of the community. Anything aesthetic or creative, anything threatening to stretch the boundaries, is not even spoken of. There is no room for debate because there is only one side of the road. Having every emotion and experience in the middle of the spectrum is neither desirable nor beneficial. Sameness may bring the highest degree of equality possible, but at the cost of experiencing life as God intended humans to experience it. The author of Ecclesiastes reflects on the meaning of life. Ecclesiastes 3 says: “There is a time for everything, / and a season for every activity under heaven . . . a time to weep and a time to laugh, / a time to mourn and a time to dance . . . a time to love and a time to hate” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4, 7). As God planned, humans are intended to experience both sides of every emotion.

The members of the community do feel emotions, to some degree. Every night after supper, every family sits in a circle and shares their emotions from the day and then talk through them to help remove these emotions. After Jonas stops taking the pill, he realizes the frivolity of these family sessions. One night Jonas’s seven-year-old sister explains her anger when someone broke the play area rules, but now Jonas realizes that what Lily calls anger is actually “shallow impatience and exasperation” (Lowry 132). He knew this because he had now experienced real anger: “Now he had, in the memories, experienced injustice and cruelty, and he had reacted with rage that welled up so passionately inside him that the thought of discussing it calmly at the evening meal was unthinkable” (Lowry 132). The petty anger he had been used to feeling no is overshadowed by his newfound capacity to feel intense, justified anger.

Jonas also now realizes the need for communities to share the burden of deep emotions. “He knew that there was no quick comfort for emotions like those. These were deeper and they did not need to be told. They were felt” (Lowry 132). Unfortunately no one can understand these emotions through words, only through experiences, and no one can experience them without the memories that Jonas and The Giver possess. “He [Jonas] felt such love for Asher and for Fiona. But they could not feel it back, without the memories” (Lowry 135). Having unrequited love in every one of your relationships is a lonely state to be in. When Jonas first experiences love through a memory of a Christmas celebration, Jonas asks his parents if they love him. They explain that the word ‘love’ has become almost obsolete; their answer, then, to his question is that they enjoy him and take pride in his accomplishments (Lowry 127). It can be argued that all any human being really wants is to be loved. If you live in a community that does not know what love is, that desire will never be gratified, even if never discovered.

There is nothing explicitly wrong with living a life of comprehensive mediocrity. No one except Jonas and The Giver has ever known any differently than these mild emotions; the people cannot regret their circumstances because they know nothing of the alternative. The people are happy, they are spared the possibility of experiencing pain or other negative feelings, and they do not have to stress over choosing the direction their life will take and possibly dealing with the consequences of choosing badly. However, there is a possibility of greater overall happiness in life that comes with the ability to experience the whole spectrum of emotions. You cannot choose only the positive emotions and eliminate all negative ones. Experiencing the one leads to an appreciation of the other. How can you know what joy really is if you have never experienced suffering?

Alfred Lord Tennyson illustrated this truth in his poem “In Memoriam.” This poem was written as a response to the death of one of Tennyson’s very close friends. One famous line reads: “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Tennyson experienced a deep love and in consequence experienced a deep grief, but the love was worth the grief. Living on the safe, mediocre track in the middle is less gratifying in the long run. Jonas’s response to his first memory of love is a desire to have love in the community but also a realization that it would not work because it is a dangerous way to live. When The Giver asks him what he means, he hesitates: “He wasn’t certain, really, what he had meant. He could feel that there was risk involved, though he wasn’t sure how” (Lowry 126). There is a great risk of pain that comes with the ability and the choice to love someone. The leaders of the community are perhaps not committing such an atrocity after all in commandeering the lives of the inhabitants because they desire to spare them as much pain and suffering as possible. However, there is intrinsic value in every emotion. Anger can be the catalyst for social improvement, grief can inspire great artistic achievement, pain can produce an empathy that creates deep connections to other people. There is value in the extremes. Is not the fulfillment of life experiencing the range of emotions and sense that we are capable of, whether it be sorrow or joy? If God created us with the capacity to feel deep emotions, we should live in a way that does not restrict that God-given capacity.

Paul emphasizes the need for humans to experience the full range of emotions and experiences; we should “rejoice in our sufferings” and “delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties” (2 Corinthians 12:10, Romans 5:5). God is glorified when we suffer for His sake or maintain our faith and devotion to Him through tough times. Christ experienced great suffering; we are to share in His suffering and thereby share in His joy as well.

Jonas and The Giver were right to want to change the community. Some of The Giver’s last words to Jonas encompass the belief in the necessity of understanding what it means to be human: “My work will be finished . . . when I have helped the community to change and become whole” (Lowry 162). The community is missing something vital by lacking deep emotions, and they are unable to fully live, to truly connect to one another, and to be wholly human without the possibility of experiencing deep pain and deep love.

However, we must not only live in the extreme sides of emotions. Aristotle, in his “Nicomachean Ethics,” discusses the importance of finding virtue in the middle ground:

For instance, both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue. (“Nicomachean Ethics”)

Without the extremes, the ‘intermediate’, where virtue is found, would mean nothing. The value in middle ground emotions is that “virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate” (“Nicomachean Ethics”) when presented with the extremes on either side. It is the choosing of the appropriate emotion that brings value to that emotion.

Blade Runner also brings up the question of what it means to be a human. The Replicants have come to Earth because they desperately want to find a way to extend their life. A desire to survive is not uniquely human. All creatures desire survival above all else. The lives of animals are completely structured around trying to survive. Therefore Roy’s moments of grief for Pris’s death, his choice to save Deckard’s life, and his poignant death scene do not indicate that he is capable of feeling emotion, but rather that he is a creature as averse to death as any other creature. Nor is the repeated reference to living in fear something uniquely human. All animals experience fear. What seems to indicate that the Replicants are indeed human, then, is Rachael’s distress in discovering that she is a Replicant and her declared love for Deckard. Rachael realizes that if her memories are implants, then she does not know which experiences she actually went through; she no longer has an identity. Coupled with this is the knowledge that Replicants were designed to not feel emotions. A true Replicant would not understand the significance of the loss that Rachael goes through in realizing that her emotions are not the true emotions a typical human experiences. Rachael’s desire to prove she is human and her eventual love for Deckard cause the viewer to stop and think more seriously whether or not these Replicants could be humans.

Feeling emotion is an inextricable element of being a human. The more the capacity to feel emotion is willfully suppressed, the more we separate ourselves from the essence of humanity. Our ability to feel the extremes of emotions should be tempered by an understanding of when emotions are appropriate. To fully live to our potential, we must be able to experience to our full potential—our lives should not be willfully restricted by higher authorities, using Pleasantville as a paradigm. Humans must be able to feel the depths of love, sorrow, joy, pain, and “everything under the sun.”