Ubuntu and the Holidays

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!! 

This is the time to be happy, jolly, and all that good stuff that usually follows the month of December. Even if the holidays aren’t celebrated by your family, it’s hard to avoid all the festivities of this time of year and not get caught up in other’s happiness. You might tip your waiter extra and help out a person in need. You feel their pain and hope and want to help. And essentially, that’s Ubuntu. It’s a Southern African word from the Bantu language that has no direct translation to English. It’s close to, “I am what I am because of who we all are.” The closest meaning is that we are human through our connections to other people.  It’s “the essence of being human,” of not being able to be human alone and the need of others and interconnectedness to survive. It’s empathy and experiencing others emotions as your own to understand them as mentioned in the Rifkin RSA video. And it’s not the just the survival of one, it’s the survival of the entire world and how one thing is going to affect everyone. In short, it’s the bond that unites the human race through every possible barrier.

To me, Ubuntu took on a “united we stand and we divided we fall” kind of aspect. Taking it to extreme measures, or not so extreme since the world already seems to be in a dire situation, we could say that without mankind uniting as one, without Ubuntu, there is no hope for the human race. There is too much hatred and bloodshed. However, there is always the desire, the hope for change. And in fact the world experienced a recent increase in empathy when the whole world rushed to the disaster in Haiti. Humans are capable of empathy and if we can reach out to everyone as a family, it could change the world. This thought is from the Rifkin RSA video which illustrates that that we need to comes together as a biosphere to truly help the world. The boundaries that people have put up about politics, religion and race have to taken down to consider each other as fellow humans. To an extent there is Ubuntu, but it needs to widen significantly to remove those barriers.

From the beginning of this Humanity Unit, I’ve wanted to learn what makes certain people hopeful in the face of death and loneliness. And now I’ve discovered that Ubuntu is that one “can't exist as a human being in isolation.”  We need interconnectedness to survive as humans and to make the world a better place full of hope. We can spread the holiday cheer to the needy and show that they are part of this extended family. That they’re cared for and not alone. Happy Holidays.

The Virtual Life

I like the Internet.

I really like my laptop, which is my connection to everything. It's an escape, a distraction, entertainment, everything I need when there isn't another human to occupy me. But I don't think I would suffer too terribly if I missed it for a couple of days. However, there are people that depend so completely on the Internet that their life would be incomplete without it. I recently read a post by Ezra Klein and later a post by Roger Ebert that revealed to me something I never really thought about before: That sometimes someone's complete loneliness can only be relieved by the computer. There are unique situations where, as mentioned in Ezra Klein's article and Roger Eberts', a disability or just personal issues and loneliness that  forces the Internet to be "their window to the real world." It's true that loneliness could be helped by the anonymity of the Internet but there also people who argue that one can't be "fully human" through the Internet. There are conflicting emotions with this line of thinking. On one hand, there are some circumstances beyond our grasp that definitely require on the complete dependence on the computer. I'm referring to the man, Jason Rowe, written about in Klein's article who can live a virtual life through a game. On the other hand, human beings are social creatures that need interactions with others.


For me, I need to talk to people on a regular basis, and that's the truth for most of us. Then there will be those periods where I want to be by myself, in my room, with no one to disturb me. But that's not loneliness, it's a desire to be alone.

Personally, I can relate to Roger Ebert's article which states that lonely people desire companionship, love and recognition, etc. from other people. Actually, everyone desires these things from other people  but lonely people don't have much interaction with others. Their portal to the world is through the Internet where there's somewhat of a fulfillment of that need to be recognized. There are some times in my life where I feel I can talk to no one. But the truth is, I could talk to anyone, I just choose not to. So what is loneliness? A self-inflicted choice or something else entirely?