What It Means to Be Human by Joanna Bourke

They promote jingoism over international cooperation, vilify the opposition, demonize immigrants and rival nations, and then win elections. The liberal story-think democracy, free markets, and globalism-reigned supreme for a decade until the 20th-century nasties-dictators, populists, and nationalists-came back in style. World War II eliminated the fascist story but stimulated communism for a few decades until its collapse. Every person, group, and nation has its own tales and myths.” Three grand stories once predicted the future. As the author emphasizes, “humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. of Jerusalem) proves that he has not lost his touch, casting a brilliantly insightful eye on today’s myriad crises, from Trump to terrorism, Brexit to big data. Having produced an international bestseller about human origins ( Sapiens, 2015, etc.) and avoided the sophomore jinx writing about our destiny ( Homo Deus, 2017), Harari (History/Hebrew Univ.

Historians and philosophers may be engaged, but this is much too weighty for casual readers.Ī highly instructive exploration of “current affairs and…the immediate future of human societies.” Among them are illustrations comparing the face of an Irishman to that of a dog, and of a Negro slave being boiled alive, and photographs likening the slaughter of pigs to the Holocaust. Her writing is dense and demands close reading, but the black-and-white drawings and photographs are often showstoppers, even stomach-turners. All criteria for dividing human from nonhuman-e.g., language, intellectual ability, use of tools, possession of a soul or belief in God-are seen to be inadequate, but humanity's continuing and futile efforts to make such a demarcation is 'the greatest driving force of history and also the inspiration for systematic violence.” Bourke ranges widely, looking at the denial of full humanity to women, children and nonwhites, at the arguments for and against the rights of animals and at the problems posed by the radical biotechnological techniques that have enabled the merging of human and animal cells. In examining the various distinctions made between human and nonhuman creatures, the author turns to the image of a Mobius strip, a one-sided surface with no beginning or end, for she finds the boundaries between human and nonhuman just as indistinguishable.

of London Rape: Sex, Violence, History, 2007, etc.) focuses on Anglo-Americans and Haitians, the former for their perceptions of cultural and ethnic outsiders, and the latter as an example of a subjugated people who revolted against their white colonial overseers and established a black republic. A scholarly look at more than two centuries of varying interpretations of what it means to be human.īritish historian Bourke (History/Birkbeck, Univ.

What It Means to Be Human by Joanna Bourke