I know it seemed odd to start my blog last week with a reflection on grieving as being part of what it means for humans to flourish. Now I want to talk about birth. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, spring has arrived, and with it comes Easter, a holiday recently celebrated which symbolises new life and hope. Well, I should say spring is struggling to emerge from the cold heart of winter where I live. Even though we are well into April, the cheerful yellow of daffodils, which herald the promise of tulips, cherry blossoms, magnolias and other spring delights yet to come, has barely emerged after what has been an unusually cold and long winter.
What is even more fundamental to being human than death is birth. A person has to be born before they can die! One of my favourite philosophers, Hannah Arendt, has written a book entitled The Human Condition. In it, she talks birth as being the starting point for what it means to be human—not all of us are mothers, but all of us are born of mothers. In fact, she argues that ethics and philosophy that starts from birth rather than death, is a philosophy that celebrates new beginnings. Although she was a secular Jewish philosopher, she would often quote the ancient Christian theologian, Augustine, from The City of God, “That a beginning might be made, man was created, before whom nobody was.”
Irrespective of one’s religious persuasion and one’s view of how people came into being in the first place (creation, evolution or a combination of both), the fact is we are all born as babies into this world with the potential to flourish as human beings. Each human being born into this world represents the possibility of a new beginning, of something new coming into the world that never existed previously. We are all unique and have something new to contribute to the world. That is pretty exciting if you ask me!
Also, given that as a German Jew Arendt had to flee Nazi Germany from the impending Holocaust, the fact that that she could write about a philosophy centred in hope for new beginnings represented by birth is amazing. Her hope was that despite the totalitarianism of fascism on the right and the totalitarianism of communism on the left which marred her world, something new would emerge. Since then, although she did not live to see the fruition of her hope (she died in 1975) not only fascist regimes have fallen, but communist ones as well. Walls do come down! And this is the hope many of my friends in Israel and Palestine that I mentioned in my last blog also hold on to in their current situation.
Secularists, atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and people from other religious persuasions all have a concept in their traditions, whether they emphasise it or not in practice, of what it means to flourish as a human and which recognises the dignity and worth of each human being. Arendt called this fundamental condition natality.
In future blogs I will write about what it might mean for politics and ethics if we start from a position of birth, or natality. The fact we are all natals, people born into this world as babies, helpless and dependent on our families and communities to survive and thrive, is something every person from every country, culture, religion and language in the world have in common. If what we have in common transcends all these barriers, how might a politics that celebrates birth, bring us together despite all our differences?