The Humans We Become
All books · Human philosophy
Where do new possibilities come from?
By Justin McDermott · Complete manuscript · Unpublished
Bodies, habits, histories and circumstances shape the responses available to us. Relationships, stories, practice and institutions can widen that range. The Humans We Become asks what we make easier or harder for one another to become.
Read an extract
There is a well-known story about a scorpion that asks a frog to carry it across a river. The frog hesitates because a scorpion can sting, but the scorpion points out that stinging the frog in the middle of the river would kill them both. The argument is sensible, the frog agrees, and halfway across the scorpion stings anyway. As they begin to sink, the frog asks why, and the scorpion answers in one form or another that it could not help what it was because this was simply its nature. I have always liked the story, but the older I get the less satisfied I am with its ending, perhaps because human beings have spent so much of our history trying to decide whether our nature is a sentence or a starting point.
We inherit a great deal before we have any say in it. We arrive with bodies that protect themselves, appetites that pull us toward what seems useful or rewarding, and systems that react to danger before a considered philosophy has had time to assemble itself. We enter families, languages, cultures and histories that are already underway. Other people teach us, often without meaning to, what counts as safe, shameful, admirable, dangerous, loyal, weak, sacred or ridiculous. Long before we can choose the stories by which we live, we are already living inside stories supplied by somebody else.
Yet there is something about being human that makes the scorpion's conclusion feel incomplete. We do repeat ourselves, sometimes painfully. We make promises in calm moments and abandon them under pressure. We become angry before we have decided whether anger is useful, jealous before we have decided whether anything has actually been taken from us, and frightened before we know whether the thing in front of us belongs to the present or to an older memory. Even so, we can sometimes notice the reaction, reconsider it, imagine another outcome and act toward a future that does not yet exist. That additional capacity does not make us separate from nature, but it may make the expression of our nature less fixed than the fable suggests.
The Central Claim
This book treats human freedom partly as a question of repertoire: which responses remain imaginable and usable when pressure arrives. We inherit much of that repertoire through bodies, habits, families, cultures and histories. But we also alter it for one another.
Human beings lend each other futures. We see someone apologise without collapsing, disagree without abandoning, love without possessing, use authority without humiliation, or leave a role that once looked permanent. A response that did not feel psychologically available can become imaginable because another person, story or institution has shown that it can exist.
Extract from The Humans We Become. © Justin McDermott.
Inside the book
The inquiry moves between the person and the conditions of a shared life. It considers how familiar responses take shape, how new ones may become possible, and what responsibility follows when our ways of relating affect another person’s room to grow. Its questions reach into friendship, belonging and the institutions through which we organise life together.
How bodies, habits, histories and circumstances shape our responses.
The part relationships, stories and practice play in widening possibility.
What we make easier or harder for one another through shared life.
Who it is for
Begin here if you are drawn to questions about relationships, responsibility and our shared future. The book offers a philosophical entry point for readers thinking about who people can become and the conditions that help new possibilities emerge.
Its place in the Compass
This book widens the Compass project from lived experience, meaning and care to human possibility. The Storm Within offers the personal story at the project’s beginning; The Needs We Carry looks more closely at the responsibilities of support.
Explore Dream State: The Storm Within · About the Compass project
A shorter way into the writing
Leave Competition to the Arenas. A shorter reflection on friendship, belonging and the scoreboards we carry home.
Read more or get in touch
This is a complete, unpublished manuscript. Publishing enquiries welcome. To request a reading sample or discuss editorial interest, contact Justin about The Humans We Become.
Browse all five books · Read the Field Notes · Meet the author