Quid sit homo is Latin for “what is man?”
No really – I’m now asking – what is man?
An animal? An accident? Evolved? Created? Responsible for anything? Deserving of anything? Are people’s actions based on the same thing as animals? Are we different? If so, how are we different?
Why are we different? And what implications are there – ethically and practically – depending on what we decide?
We do ourselves a disservice to not examine big philosophical/theological questions like this.
More importantly, we do our children and our world a disservice by ignoring these big questions.
If you are like most – you have mostly ignored all of this.
Be encouraged. Be curious. Seek truth. And keep going.
The debates and disputes I have been recording in this chapter bear witness to a widespread concern—concern at times rising to the status of panic—that liberal instrumentalism, that willingness to defer ultimate questions as the price to be paid for getting along with one another, had left the democratic West unable to generate the energetic commitment necessary to resist the military and moral drive of societies that had clear answers to Quid sit homo? Suddenly, intellectuals throughout the democratic Western countries felt impelled to improvise an ethics and a metaphysics to suit the moment, in much the same way that their nations’ militaries were scrambling to create new weapons and hasten the production and distribution of existing ones.
-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)
