Interesting piece in The Atlantic (January 2026) about Rob Boddice, an “academic who has stormed the field of the history of emotions and experiences.” His working thesis is that we cannot reliably say that a pain a person feels today, the way he or she experiences that pain and makes sense of it, is like the pain felt by someone centuries, even millennia, in the past. How a person understands the experience of pain depends on the time and place of the pain because the understanding can only be formed using what tools the culture has on offer.

There’s some fascinating work being done by Joanna Bourke on rape, where she argues that a woman of the 17th or 18th centuries would not have experienced bodily autonomy the way we do in this century but instead would have experienced submission of all kinds to men of all kinds (including God). If there is no concept in the culture of an emotional self or a psychological self, then the act of rape would be experienced differently from our time’s concepts of damage and trauma. To do this work means the historian putting aside current moral precepts when looking at the past so that the past can be understood in all its strangeness and alienness.

What Boddice and others are saying is that while it may be physically true that if you cut Shylock, he bleeds like any other human body cut in the same way, the experience and meaning of the pain caused by the cutting is tied to the place and time of the action. We cannot assume that how we would feel this pain and what we could understand about this injury is the same as it would be for Shylock (noting that he is a fictional character).

I read this piece about discarding the notion of a universal humanity in favor of trying to understand people as they were when they lived in the light of the Bondi Beach shooting of Jews on the first day of Chanuka. Again, the stale encomiums come out that antisemitism has no place in our society, that we mourn with the victims because of our shared humanity, and so on. There is much to like in the romance of these sentiments, but clearly they have no power to stop the violence or reshape the society so that it doesn’t happen again. And again.

So, while it is important politically and gesturally to express solidarity with the victims and support for those fighting against the evil, no one can assume that they share anything with the victims. Or, to take it a step further, with anyone else on the earth. One end result of Boddice’s idea is every human being is an island – maybe not entire of itself, but there are impenetrable boundaries when it comes to learning about the other and considering that other an offshoot of one’s own humanity.

We are mostly unknowns to each other – and, I would argue, mostly unknowns to our individual selves. How many dark unexplained pockets exist in my own being, not to mention all of those that exist in the others around me. I have often felt that humans, the nervous primates (a phrase from something I once read), get along when things are balanced enough that people do not need to fight other people to obtain the resources to live, be that toilet paper or life-saving medical care. It is a delicate and fragile situation, and when things go south, things get ugly
quickly.

Now, during disaster, it is true that amazing acts of solidarity and mutual aid occur, a selflessness that is beautiful. But that comes from the adrenaline of the situation – a certain degree of urgency seems to enable us to throw down for the moment our protective walls and rescue people from the roofs of their flooded homes or cook food for a people under siege. But once the adrenaline is gone, we sink back to our usual routines of self-protection and distrust, and we lose the chance to make those acts of solidarity part of the normal routine of a normal day rather then the exception to the rule.

I don’t think the nervous primates are built to be a common humanity except under very exceptional circumstances usually involving a disaster that upends all schedules and gives us a space to act as if we really had freedom and agency. It doesn’t take Rob Boddice to show us that we share little with our past ancestors when it comes to understanding our experiences; we just need to look around us to see that that incomprehensibility is part of everything that humans do in this very moment.

Is it possible to survive ourselves in the face of such unknowns? Looking at climate change, looking at the insanity of our politics, it’s hard to find a “yes” because finding a yes means letting go that we are a species linked by commonalities and instead doing the harder work of listening to each other’s strangeness and finding in that a reason to work together to achieve common ends. Hard to see that happening when the species sees “other” as a threat rather than an opportunity to grow in beauty and skill. Maybe in small local habitations this can happen, but we live in a world of 8 billion people and small will not do the job. It’s a mass society facing mass problems caused by a bunch of nervous primates trying to survive at the expense of others.

Which brings to mind an essay written by Christian Wiman of the Yale Divinity School in the December 2025 Harper’s about Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, about consciousness in both humans and the universe, which introduces, among other things, ideas about flow and the illusion of certain beliefs and types of believing, introducing yet even more chaos into an already chaotic mix. As Wiman says, “Perhaps the very nature of the reality, both physical and metaphysical, that McGilchrist depicts precludes ‘landing’ anywhere. Our time’s great spiritual affliction is longing without an object. Our salvation may lie in learning to love without one.”

Perhaps. It will be a close race.