Still thinking about humans

I'm still thinking about "more human than human" especially after such great comments from everyone. Thanks!

I sat in the airport this weekend thinking about it, not just because of White Zombie, but because I thought it might be a worthwhile thing to think about.

At first, I rationalized that figuring out what "more human than human" means would require defining "human" first. But I also quickly realized that defining what makes a human, human in the first place would require a really long answer... say, dissertation length.

But then I rationalized that the reverse might be just as productive. If I were to examine the answers to what "more human than human" looks like, those answers might reveal the assumptions on which those answers are based. After all, in order to answer the question, you have to have some idea what "human" is in order to imagine what could transcend the human to become "more".

So I started thinking about it. The music video features a lot of kids in costumes, with the most frequent costumes being a pumpkin head and a robot. While in the live show, the huge creature wandering the stage is more alien looking. (I posted the best clip I could find from Youtube - and yes, that's actually the best one)

The first thought that came into my mind when I saw the thing in the stage show we attended was that it looked a bit like a homunculus. Not a lot, but a bit. More so like the sensory homunculus that is supposed to represent the brain's designated spaces for bodily sensations.

What both homunculi have in common is an overly large head, and the sensory homunculus has very long arms. I think that's what caught my attention the most with the big monster/alien thing at the Zombie show. But that's beside the point.

Zombie's answer to what is more human than human is an alien or a monster. And that got me thinking that the monster just might be more human than human.

Part of what makes the monster monstrous is exactly that it is "more". It's not more "human" than humans, but it's certainly "more" than human. Monsters either have more limbs, or eyes, or larger heads, or even just larger bodies overall. Their bodies tend to be "more" than human bodies are, which is what actually makes them monstrous.

Then I got to thinking about the novels I've been reading and realizing that many of the clones and cyborgs in them are monstrous in just this way - they are "more" than human. So maybe Zombie's answer of "monster" to the question of what is more human than human isn't so far off. Maybe what really makes us human is what unacademic advisor and rebeckler suggest in the comments below, that it is our frailty and our failings that make us human. To be "more human than human" is simply a construction we hold up that fails to provide us with a guideline about what it means to be human because it expects more from us than we are capable of. And that more is itself monstrous.

But I think in proposing that, I'm waxing philosophic in a way that would not be useful in a literary dissertation. But it's fun to think about, and has served the function of organizing some of my thinking about the topic and about the books I'm reading. In helping me organize my scattered thoughts, there is indeed much good.

I still am not sure about the robot in the music video though... that might be another post. Any thoughts?

Oh, and in answer to my question/suggestion last week: yes, a couple of days of sunshine and warm weather have made me feel less cheated about our short summer. Now I'm ready for fall and winter to arrive.