Everything We Study Centers on Our Collective and Ever-Increasing Humanity

One in a Series of First Lectures

As we open our books and our minds to a new class this semester, I want to set out a broad universal-view as your starting point, and as my starting point. Everything we will study in this time together will center upon our humanity. What is our humanity? What is the definition of "humanity?"

Our humanity is the sum total of all of our emotions and how we express those emotions. By all of our emotions, I am not talking about you only assessing your own, and each of the others assessing only ones own emotions. No! Since we are social animals, because we are capable of empathy and sympathy and we can each extend our understanding to approach each other, and each others' understandings, and have some sense of what the other might be feeling, then to say "all of our emotions" means the sum total of all emotions of all human beings, of all human beings that have ever lived up to this point.

Additionally our humanity includes every method we have for expressing and sharing our emotions. Our arts and our fashions can be seen as methods of expressing emotions. How we talk and interact with each other expresses emotions. Even our graphs and our physical sciences express emotions.

So humanity as the sum total of all our emotions, encompassing all the emotions ever felt by any human being and every way we have of expressing and sharing those emotions. Our humanity includes thinking back to the experiences of families that lived in caves some 30,000 years before our time. Our humanity includes the stage performances of actors following some Utopian script of a playwright, or musical score and choreography. This includes real-life hatred and anger, bigotry, and radical racism, and faking an orgasm. The pride of a child showing a simple crayon drawing to grandparents is as much a part of our humanity, as the frustration of a person lost in the wilderness unable to catch fish for food.

Suddenly, you and I can agree that this definition of humanity and this opening lecture can apply to any class that might be offered in an educational setting. The learning exercises in storytelling for literature and the study of language arts (foreign languages and grammar and public speaking, etc.) all are more topically interesting by playing out the human emotions. Each of us (learner and the learning leader) take the lessons more to heart if we see that we can share in the emotions, and we have relationships to the emotions being examined.

For art classes and the study of music, the application has to be quite obvious: music is the expression of emotions, art evokes emotions.

Further than that, history classes, social studies and political science can be re-defined and given an interesting light when we think of each case study as an expression of humanity: Nixon, Catherine the Great, Alexander the Great, King Tutankhamen, Joan of Arc, Confucius, Bolivar, etc.

Physical sciences are also given a rejuvenating perspective when we recast them as expressions of emotion and as refining the methods for expressing those emotions. Geology is the study of minerals and rocks. We have advanced in our study of soils, ground nutrients, bedrock, volcanic formations, and the bonds between sediments over the centuries. At one time Western science divided all matter into earth, wind, fire and water. Today scientists are agreed on more sophisticated views of matter, and we pursue our interests in this field while following the leads of our emotions, following what inspires us to tease out one chain of questions, or another chain of questions, thoughts and excitements.

Through math we can express our joys at doubling or tripling the recipe for a massive batch of chocolate-chip cookies. If that is not our emotion over mathematics, then possibly we find our challenges in trigonometry, or astro-physic applications of Euclidean models. Or some might feel amazement at y=mx+b formulas graphed upon a two-dimensional plane. Again these offer examples of how every study we may take can be sharpened and provided more meaning, become more meaningful when we identify our emotions entangled in the study, any study at all.