In this Forum interview, Professor of Philosophy Ian M. Church sat down with Leon Rapoport to discuss his thoughts on the nature, psychology, and intricacy of what it means to be human.

What does it mean to be human?

While I’m not terribly interested in giving a strict definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, I think there are some descriptions that generally will apply. Being a human means being a deeply social creature—one that is informed by culture and our ancestors in ways that we can barely imagine. It’s sometimes said that humans are rational animals, but to paraphrase the 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell, “I’ve never seen the evidence of that.” We can be painfully tribalistic. We can be beautifully loving toward the orphan and the stranger. We can be arrogant and jaw-droppingly stupid. We can be shockingly brilliant and reveal the fundamental nature of reality. We inquire, we explain, we search, we find, we love, we hate, we grieve.

Human psychology has evolved significantly over the course of the past couple thousand years, and, one could argue, it has done so at an accelerating rate. Are we, as a species, becoming more human, or are we losing our humanity?

The psychological profile of your average human has indeed changed over the years. As humans become more literate, say, they become measurably worse at recognizing faces. It also seems to diminish our ability to remember some things because the books can remember for us. So we essentially outsource our cognition to the books, which rewires our minds in important ways. That’s an important psychological change. Does that mean that being highly literate has made us more human or less human, or is it just different? I certainly think it’s just different; it’s just a part of what the human project looks like while literate.

Similarly, as technology continues to accelerate and advance, it’s going to impact our cognition and impact our psychological profile even more. Will that then make us less human? I don’t think so. There might be some detriments, some harms, that we will need to watch for. We can have those conversations about whether or not social media, for example, is rewiring our brains in ways that are just not healthy, but I think that’s a different question from whether social media makes us less human. Something might be pathological but still fully human. What we need to do is think deeply about how to thrive as human beings in our ever changing technological age.

In your past research, you often place significance on experimental philosophy as compared to more abstract and theory-only philosophy. Could you comment upon why, when other philosophers generally do not see it as such, you believe philosophy should be analyzed through a more empirical lens.

I think what I’m doing here is, in a very Hillsdale-ish spirit, very traditional. It’s only with the modern university where we have siloed off philosophy from the sciences, but throughout most of the history of Western thought, philosophy has been closely aligned with and conversant with the sciences. The kind of research I’m doing isn’t suggesting that we give up on pure theory or anything like that, but it’s saying that the theorizing that we do should be aware of and conversant with what’s going on in the sciences. From Aristotle to Descartes to the members of the Vienna Circle, many philosophers have been deeply concerned with both philosophy and the sciences. Such an approach is, I think, befitting the liberal arts. And it’s that traditional mode of doing philosophy that I’m trying to help recover.

Religion is one of the most fundamental characteristics of humanity throughout all of history. Given your research on the experimental philosophy of religion, what are some key things you discovered that people generally do not realize?

What I can do is give an example of something that was surprising to me, though  I suspect that it may not be surprising to many other  people. One of the things that was really surprising to me is just how important context and narrative are  for our processing of grief and for our reckoning with the suffering that we experience in this world. In some of our earlier research, we found that people’s perceptions of the pointlessness of suffering diminished dramatically when given just a brief story about that suffering in particular. In subsequent research, we’ve tried to sniff out why context played the role that it did. Maybe the story was too optimistic? Maybe the story was a distraction from the grief? Maybe the story contained a hidden theodicy? 

None of these attempts to explain the result that we were  seeing were entirely satisfactory. Even when an incredibly negative story was told, when there was nothing redemptive about it, it still dramatically reduced the perceptions of pointlessness in our participants. My hot take now is that I think there’s something really important to narratives when it comes to the human experience, which fits well  with a  wider literature on this topic. The basic idea here is that I think humans are fundamentally narrative-driven creatures; if we can embed our suffering—embed our grief—in the context of a broader narrative, it will allow it to be more bearable in some ways. It might all seem less pointless.

Who is your favorite philosopher, and why?

This changes all the time. I don’t perfectly agree with any one philosopher, and I don’t think it’s befitting of philosophy to be the disciple of any one thinker. Even so, one of the philosophers that I’m most appreciative of right now is David Hume. I think his genuine concern for intellectual modesty is greatly needed at this time. I see him as a champion of common sense in many cases, standing above and against arrogance and dogmatism, which is something I think we need to hear. He is someone we need to wrestle with in our current arrogant age.