After the recent violence in London, the refrain was once again raised: we must never give up our humanity; we must hold fast to being human. Yet I wonder if this is precisely the illusion that keeps us trapped. Perhaps the time has come not to cling to ‘being human’, but to let it go.
The myth of Homo sapiens
Our species has long been defined as Homo sapiens, the wise ape, the one who knows. Yet what we call ‘wisdom’ is too often mere cleverness, calculation, and control.
Iain McGilchrist, best known for The Master and his Emissary (2009), has shown how our culture is dominated by the left hemisphere’s narrow mode of knowing: grasping, fixing, manipulating. In this paradigm, knowledge becomes power, wisdom becomes certainty, and life is reduced to a matter of management. This mindset leads to violence on our streets, ecological breakdown, and wars waged in the name of civilisation itself.
Fear, certainty and the politics of control
In the face of crisis, we often fall back into old patterns. Fear makes us hunger for strong leaders, seeking the one who knows. The rise of the right across the globe illustrates this.
In the UK, activist Tommy Robinson (co-founder of the English Defence League) has built a following on anti-immigrant and anti-Islam rhetoric. Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK Ltd, rose to prominence by demanding Britain’s exit from the EU. In the US, Donald Trump, twice-impeached president, embodies the promise of clarity, certainty, and control. Each trades on the promise that the right leader can eradicate the source of our fears.
Yet it is not only the right that falls into this trap. With the election of Zack Polanski – an environmental campaigner and long-time activist – as leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, a new kind of leadership is emerging: socialist, green, and explicitly populist in style.
Polanski is no authoritarian strongman. He offers a different possibility: mass participation, bold confrontation with inequality, a politics of ecological justice. And yet, even here, the temptation remains to invest in the fantasy that someone knows, that there is a singular leader, a righteous programme, a ‘good’ solution that can guide us through.
This is where the subtler danger lies. To become enslaved to the good is itself a form of captivity. To pursue good with certainty is to summon its shadow: unintended harms, silenced dissent, suppressed complexity. Even the most righteous intentions can perpetuate harm when they are pursued without humility, without doubt, without attentiveness to relation.
Beyond ‘knowing well’
The task before us is therefore not simply to replace bad leaders with good ones, or right-wing certainty with left-wing righteousness. It is to relinquish the very fantasy of sapiens, the one who knows, the one who does good. To become Homo unsapiens: the creature who confesses ignorance, who admits ‘we do not know’. Or Homo mystificatus: the creature who lives by awe, astonishment, and reverence rather than control.
Civilisation collapses not through lack of reason, but through lack of imagination. Mystical traditions across religions have long taught that unknowing can be transformative. In Islam, the Sufi path of fana – the annihilation of self – is a spiritual death through which the ego dissolves and something greater may live through us. In Christianity, the 16th-century Carmelite mystic St John of the Cross spoke of the “dark night of unknowing” as a doorway to union. In both, the way forward is not to double down on knowing or on good, but to pass through their undoing.
A new vow beyond sapiens
So let us not vow to remain human in the narrow sense of sapiens. Let us vow to become otherwise. To step beyond the strong leader, beyond the idol of good, beyond the fragile pretence of knowledge. To inhabit instead a creaturehood marked by humility, relation, and wonder. For it is only in such relinquishment that a new kind of politics – and perhaps even a new kind of humanity – can be born.
