Rashid A Mughal
Humanity is the human race, which includes everyone on Earth. It’s also a word for the qualities that make us human, such as the ability to love and have compassion, be creative, and not be a robot or alien. ..But when you talk about humanity, you could just be talking about people as a whole. The two are not inter-changeable — humanity is human nature, humans in their true form. … Humans are people, with emotions and morals and ideas — they are more than humanity. Human nature is good, but some of the humans are bad. A person (plural people or persons) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. Humanity means caring for and helping others whenever and wherever possible. Humanity means helping others at times when they need that help the most, humanity means forgetting our selfish interests at times when others need our help. Humanity means extending unconditional love to each and every living being on Earth.
How can you demonstrate humanity? Let your humanness shine. Being human means, we must acknowledge that human beings are “human,” and at times, imperfect or fallible. Humans show Gratitude. … And express Respect and Humility. Humanity is a virtue associated with basic ethics of altruism derived from the human condition. It also symbolizes human love and compassion towards each other. … That is, humanity, and the acts of love, altruism, and social intelligence are typically individual strengths while fairness is generally expanded to all. “The power of humanity ” is the strength of individual commitment and the force of collective action. Both must be mobilized to relieve suffering, ensure respect for human dignity and ultimately create a more humane society. The humanities play a number of roles in a man’s life, including providing greater insight into the world, helping to better understand both the past and the future and fostering a sense of empathy. Broadly defined, the humanities are the study of human culture through art, literature, philosophy, music and languages.
In one sense, the future of humanity comprises everything that will ever happen to any human being, including what you will have for breakfast next Thursday and all the scientific discoveries that will be made next year. The definition of humanity is the entire human race or the characteristics that belong uniquely to human beings, such as kindness, mercy and sympathy. An example of humanity is all the people in the world. An example of humanity is treating someone with kindness. The quality of being humane; benevolence. The Seven Heavenly Virtues are defined as: Faith, Hope, Charity, Fortitude, Justice, Temperance, Prudence.“Philanthropy means ‘the love of humanity’ – love in the sense of caring for, nourishing, developing, or enhancing; humanity in the sense of ‘what it is to be human,’ or ‘human potential.’ ” Some of the biggest social, cultural and natural changes humans are now facing are: decline of moral values, fading away of age-old customs and traditions, scarcity of natural resources-particularly water, collapse of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity, human population growth beyond Earth’s carrying capacity, global warming and human-induced climate change, chemical pollution of the Earth system, including the atmosphere and oceans.
Humanity means three different things: a species; a behaviour, and a global identity. The historical relationship between these different dimensions of humanity has been elegantly discussed by the late Bruce Mazlish in his 2009 book The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era and it is important to distinguish between these three aspects of being human as we prepare to meet as a global humanitarian movement once again. The first meaning of humanity describes a particular kind of animal that biologists encouragingly call homo sapiens – or wise human – and which seems distinct from all other animals because of its powers of language, reasoning, imagination and technology. This biological and evolutionary use of the term has the same meaning as “humankind” and marks us out as a particular life form that is different to other kinds of animal and vegetative life. The power of the human species is considerable over the non-human world. This is mainly because our intelligence has consistently invented and deployed tools and technology which means we have come to dominate the earth, and our imagination has shaped religious and political meanings around with which we form competing interests and social movements.
Our tools mean we are not a simple species but always function as a hybrid species – part human and part technology – in a constantly changing mix of human and non-human components. This hybrid humanity must infuriate non-human life like lions and microbes who could easily “take us down” in a fair fight of simple life forms, but who have consistently encountered us in hybrid forms in which we merge our humanity with spears, guns, horses, cars, vaccines and antibiotics. We operate routinely in these human-machine interactions (HMI) of various kinds. Our mechanization give us exponential power and unfair advantage over non-human life forms both large and microscopic, which tend to remain simple in one form except for bacteria and viruses-our most threatening predators, which can change form relatively fast.
Technology will not just change us where we are but also change where we can be. Humanity will be enhanced in time and space but also relocated across time and space. For example, because I am on Twitter or Skype, I can already be visibly present elsewhere, speaking and responding in thousands of different places across time and space. This is radically different from my great grandmother who could only ever really be visible and engaged in one place at one time, or in two places at two times when someone far away was reading a letter from her. This all means that the power of humanity as a species is about to increase dramatically because of a revolution in human-machine interaction which will see new forms of hybridity, beyond our current imagining. Our human power will become even greater but what about our wisdom and the way we use this new power of humanity? In short, what about the ethics of our behaviour in our new hybrid humanity? These are some pertinent questions we all, as humans, need to think and ponder upon.
— The writer is former DG (Emigration) and consultant ILO, IOM.
