Beware of False Humanists

“At the same time, I cannot find a single discovery in the history of science that has been made by following the conviction that everybody is different.”

I have yet to meet anybody with three feet. Nor have I been successful in meeting someone with more than five fingers on each hand. I have also noticed that all the people I have observed during meal time take the food into their mouth and do not attempt to suck it up through their nose. With boring regularity, most people—apart from those who are injured—have two eyes and two ears. They excrete in the same way and speak in the same manner. Even if they speak in a completely different language, they use verbs and nouns and similar sentence constructions. Nor have I ever met a person whom I might suspect of not being a human being but, rather, a representative of some other species, no matter how far neglected that person is. And yet almost daily I come across people who with complete confidence emphasize that “Everybody is different!” Those claiming this, I call the “false humanists.”

Are they perhaps thinking about such details as the length of both feet, or the color of a pair of eyes always fixed immutably on each side of one (and only one) nose, albeit sometimes bigger or smaller, flatter or bonier? I do not think so. I believe that such statements are formulated for a variety of reasons. One of them is thoughtlessness, which is not worth bothering with. Another might be the defense of a person’s individuality. However, it is a poor individuality that can only be expressed through otherness. Another reason for expressing this “insightful” truth may possibly lie in a need to negate the precepts that allow us to understand the functioning of the human being.

But who possibly needs this? It is irrelevant, but only at first glance. Let us take a look at what happened to the representatives of those professions that agreed with the statement that everybody is very similar to each other, and even if they differ, it is still possible to place them in a few groups to which they roughly fit. Shoemakers were replaced by shoe factories making shoes that fit the majority of feet. Those who order bespoke shoes do it rather from a need to be different than being induced by their own otherness. Similarly, the defining of a few typical body shapes eliminated the once-ubiquitous master tailor. Even dentists, saving us from excruciating pain and its concomitant afflictions, do not take advantage of teeth’s otherness but carry out their repetitive work in accordance with their position as highly-paid craftsmen. Indeed, even the surgeon slicing with great confidence through our abdominal coating derives that confidence from the deep conviction that underneath he will find a person’s stomach in the same place as it was in all his previous patients, and the same goes for the appendix, liver, and spleen.