IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

The deepest and most important aspect of a human being is not sexual intercourse. Sexual intercourse is something that animals indulge in.

The one thing that separates us from all other animals is our ability to have a conversation. This ability allows us to analyze and transmit our experience, and to compare our experience with another's.

Without this, a human being is not human.

America is founded on this ability. It's in the First Amendment. Not only can we say anything we like, but it is guaranteed as the first and most important of our rights, along with our ability to worship as we like.

Most countries around the world deny one of these two rights, and in effect silence the human nature of their citizens in doing so.

Communist countries destroy the ability of each person to speak for themselves. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is about an eight year labor sentence handed down to a man because he told a joke about Stalin. Communism invariably destroys the ability of each person to speak. It's the true nature of communism. By destroying the individual's capacity for freedom of inquiry, communism destroys human being in its citizens. Among the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, only the state could speak, and did so through loudspeakers. Those who worked in the fields were not permitted to exchange words. Anyone who could read or write was destroyed. This is communism in its essence.

In Islamic countries, the right to worship as one pleases is systematically taken away. You have to believe, even if you don't. Otherwise, it is apostacy, and the penalty is death. In essence, Islamic countries destroy the human being of their citizens by denying them the ability to find the meaning of their lives for themselves. The right to speak is especially denied in Islamic countries to the women.

Catholics do this to a degree by having a Pope, a stinking sinner who declares for all what is true only for him. I'm not saying that the Pope should just shut up. He should be allowed to speak. But so should everyone else.

Jesus spoke with his disciples and with others, but he also listened, even to the poorest of the poor.

The Hindus allowed true humanity only to their Brahmin class (3%), and denied it to the lower classes, who were never meant to speak, but only to listen to their betters, so that they could better perform their duties. I find this appalling.

Buddhists think that by restating the same nonsense syllable over and over that we will arrive at an enlightened state by becoming effectively like a vegetable. I find this debatable. People should talk all day long and mumble to themselves when no one else is around to communicate with.

Aristotle thought that slaves should exist and that the glory of a woman lay in her silence. Appalling.

A free press, a free university, should unmuzzle the voices of the citizenry with a lively letters page, lively conversations, and the capacity for blasphemy and the jocular to proceed unchecked. Caveat: When one individual strikes down another's ability to speak by becoming obstreperous, or so grotesquely insulting that it effectively disturbs another's right or ability to speak, there is a line crossed that I find destroys and ridicules the human being of another person, and it's wrong to do this. It is a crime against humanity. This line is difficult to understand, but it's a line that we need to clarify and articulate, as each person seemingly experiences it differently.

We are moved by the disabled. Helen Keller could not hear, could not see, could not speak, and yet she found a way to communicate. When we see this in her, we recognize that she is human, and celebrate her human spirit, seeing in her a symbol of our own struggles to make our inner world known. With the poet Larry Eigner, disabled by cerebral palsy, he managed nevertheless to figure out how to type, and to write many volumes of poetry, and through this we find in him his humanity, which we honor in him and in us by reading him.

Language poets are wrong to think that language speaks through us (this is a flaw in the thinking of many language poets, and stems from Martin Heidegger the vile Nazi asswipe). We use language. It is human nature to think and speak for ourselves. Language doesn't use us. We use language.

Many people are confused by what humanity is, and what it isn't. Some think it's the ability to work (homo faber). Some think it's the ability to play (homo ludens). Some think it's the ability to know (homo sapiens). But this is all wrong. It's the ability to speak (could one of you Latinists help me with the new nomiker, please -- homo ___?), and to understand others, not only in the present, but through other languages, and in distant histories, and to write thoughts down that may be read a thousand years hence. This is why the humanities are about reading, writing, speaking, and studying history and languages and literatures. The humanities are about what is essential to humanity, and what our true humanity consists of: the ability to make meaning through individual communication with others. This is why we don't accept plagiarism. It's why we don't accept the forced essay, and believe that political correctness is always already wrong.

All animals before us were incapable of speech. Those animals who seem to be able to mimic some of our abilities are treasured. When the dog tilts his head to one side, it seems as if he's listening. And when he barks, we see in this a forerunner of our own much more enriched capacity to communicate. The dolphin can jibber jabber, and this resembles excited speech. Some parrots can tape record messages, and play them back to our delight. Monkeys can give us simple sign language which asks for a Snicker's bar, or a peanut. But they cannot tell us how they feel about the death of Christ. Only human beings have the capacity for true intercourse, which is what the humanities aims to aid and abet: a conversation, with each person discovering for themselves what they think on a wide range of topics.

Any country or religion that either hinders this process, or that allows only a few within its domain to practice it, isn't truly human. They are bestial societies that ought to be gently but firmly directed in the direction of freedom. Only verbal freedom, unrestrained, but with a wish to listen to others, is truly human. Everything else is animalistic.