“But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn’t yet, or used to be Human once and isn’t now, or ought to be Human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”

 
—Mr. Beaver in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

             In an age where our cities and our countries are clogged with people, it would seem to be a simple thing to find a Human.  And yet it is clearly becoming more and more challenging to do so, and in some places (particularly higher academics) Mr. Beaver’s warning can actually be taken in a near literal sense.  The reason is simple:  over the past century increasingly fewer people have really accepted what it means to be Human, to be made in the Image of God.  Others are actively desecrating their Humanity with astonishing zeal, and doing so in numbers too great to be ignored.

             Human beings, in the best sense of the term, are an incredibly complex mesh of contradictions.  They are rational, and yet they feel deeply.  They are physical creatures, and yet they contain a strong element of the supernatural that physics alone cannot explain.  They are bound by a moral law, and yet have the ability to choose to transgress that law.  They turned their backs on their All-Powerful Creator whose Nature includes absolute justice, and yet they can still have a relationship with that Creator through the Cross.  Even more incredibly, they still have the chance to deny Him

             Unfortunately, the Twentieth Century has seen the demotion of Humankind.  The rise of Darwinism and the misuse of genetics and the behavioral “sciences” produced a newly idealized unMan, resulting in an increasing desire on the part of many to believe humans are little more than an animals.  The masses of people logically and progressively came to see themselves as nothing more than a larger evolutionary herd to be managed as one might ranch full of beef cattle.  Though hardwired to search for meaning and Truth, people now found themselves denied a significant existence beyond physical chance, and so turned to subHuman precedents to find a replacement. 

             The sickness is simple, but the symptoms diverse and complex.  When people refuse to believe in Humanity and to act on those beliefs—the way they were meant to act—they and the society they live in begin to ape the lower forms of life with which they now identify themselves.  Let us quickly consider the three excellent categories Mr. Beaver has provided.

             First, there are those who are going to be Human, but aren’t yet.  They promise to be Human, and claim that they will be soon enough, and yet they never seem to follow through.  How many times in the past century have we heard the promises of a “new” sort of man?  How many clarion calls to secular idealism have been broadcast, asking people to give just a little more of their Humanity in order to promote a new and better human race?  Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood consumed the Humanness of the men and women who performed their sterilizations and abortions (not to mention that of their victims), promising in return that such sacrifices laid at the feet of the god of Modernism would result in “better” humans.  Adolf Hitler did the same for Germany, offering them the Aryan “man” and a new dawn of German supremacy in return for the Holocaust.  In reality, anyone who listened to either found themselves becoming less and less Human with each barbarous act they took part in or condoned.  If only the German people had felt for their hatchet.

             Secondly, we have those who used to be Human, but aren’t anymore.  People may be born with a bent towards evil, but no one is born a murderer.  A murderer has made a choice, destroyed a bit of himself to become what he is.  This of course happens on a less dramatic scale in the lives of millions of people every day.  The nurse who becomes hardened to the baby’s struggles in partial birth abortions, the HIV positive individual who continues to have sex with dozens of people, the wife beater who does it so often he convinces himself that “she deserves it,” the professors who have told lies so often in support of their agendas that they begin to believe them, or even the Average Joe who has become so addicted to his comfort that he won’t even vote on a moral issue.  Each choice eats away at their Humanity a little more, leaving only a husk of dried up self-righteous morality and animal desires. 

             Finally, we have those who ought to be Human and aren’t.  There are certain stations that, frankly, require a Human’s touch.  This includes virtually any position of authority, especially those that involve control over other people.  It is a person’s Humanity that gives him boundaries that he will not transgress, even when no one is looking or when he can get away with it.  This is why Washington insisted in his Farewell Address that Americans must retain their religious principles—their Humanity—if they wished to retain their freedoms.  We see this all too clearly in one who took the worship of the unMan to new levels of depravity:  Chairman Mao.  If not for him, untold millions of Chinese men and women would be bouncing their grandchildren on their knees as you read this.  It is this sort of person, in this sort of position, who historically has done the greatest damage to the very thing they promised to preserve:  Mankind. 

             For decades now we have lamented “man’s inhumanity to man.”  We have observed as millions of a generation of children have been murdered in the name of morality and convenience, while many of those allowed to live fell further into the abyss of relativism and nihilism.  All of civilization, but America in particular, would do well to heed Mr. Beaver’s final injunction, and feel for our collective intellectual hatchets when we encounter such people.  The descent into inHumanity must be arrested.   The more subHuman this country becomes, the more likely it is to begin committing the very atrocities of which it is routinely accused.  Abu Garib will become the rule, not the exception.  So, it is up to those who remember what it means to be Human to stand, and in doing so reach out to and raise up those who have forgotten.