The source of the word "humorist" is one who regards human beings in terms of their humors, you know, whether they're sanguine or full of yellow bile, or whatever the four classical humors are. You stand back from people and regard them as types. And one finds, especially by the time one reaches one's fifties, that there are a limited number of types of people in the world, and you went to high school with every single one of them. You can visit the Eskimos, you can visit the Bushmen in the Kalahari, you can go to Israel, you can go to Egypt, but everybody you meet is going to be somebody you went to high school with.

This lack of a sense of history has allowed us a kind of romance with race and ethnicity that is fanciful. I did a documentary some years ago about America and teenagers and the past and all these kids who were announcing themselves as wanting to recover their history, as though it was some reassurance, when everything I've ever read about American history is an embarrassment. It's filled with tragedies of all kinds. The notion that we would study history in order to feel better about ourselves is just ludicrous. But we have this romantic sense because we know it so little, our past really seems noble. I don't look to Aztec Mexico for any reassurance about my identity. I'm aware that Aztec Mexico was a decadent society; its bloodlust was so extreme that its ultimate sexual energy was its pursuit of death. There's nothing in that history for me that leads me to the romantic calendars that you see in Mexican restaurants with the Aztec, almost naked with the feathers coming out of his head, and the Aztec princess at his knees. Nothing of that is convincing to me. History is a terrible, terrible burden which we need to confront, but I don't think the search for authenticity begins there.

Noting that we're all human beings can be worthwhile, but it can also be a verbal white flag for abject moral surrender. Put another way: All the great political and moral conflicts have been between human beings. To date, civilization's greatest battles — rhetorical or otherwise — have not been with Styrofoam, dog hair, gerbils, or toe jam. Nazis are human beings. Murderers and pedophiles are human beings. To say that humanity somehow exonerates rather than confers accountability is to say that humanity is in fact meaningless. Joe Blow killed a child? Well, he's just a human being — cut him some slack. Sure, Jack the Ripper was a rough chap, but he was a carbon-based life form.

Winning the race to happiness is problematic, but so is knowing where to start and finish and which direction to run. Philosophy is no help. "Very little is needed to make a happy life," said Marcus Aurelius. Tell it to the kids on a rainy day, Marco, when the DVD player is on the fritz, the Game Boy is out of batteries, and the SUV won't start. "Happiness is activity in accordance with excellence," said Aristotle, who must have been a better golfer than I am. The Epicureans would be expected to know something about pursuing happiness. Epicurus said, "Pleasure is the beginning and the end of living happily." I'll get the gin, you find some olives and vermouth. But then Epicurus went on to say, "It is impossible to live pleasurably without living wisely, well, and justly." Fine, for people who pursue their happiness by eating oat bran, reading St. Peter's Epistles, and not ducking out of jury duty. Solon of Athens declared, "Until he is dead, do not yet call a man happy." And then what do you call him?

Happiness isn't impossible to describe. But, paradoxically, no one can listen to descriptions of happiness for long. Compare Dante's Inferno with Dante's Paradiso. Dante's beloved Beatrice would have died of boredom if he had tried reading to her from Paradiso rough drafts. On a less exalted plane, let any huggy-lovey couple show you their honeymoon slides.

Nature provides no moral messages for our complex and confusing lives. But this evolutionary argument for construing the "essence" of humanity as the sum total of our variation within the discrete boundaries of our species does provide an important insight into what might be called the biological meaning of human equality. If all living humans form one distinct historical entity, not a set of stages in a continuum leading backward into our evolutionary ancestry, then we cannot order our variation into any ranking of worth based on "higher" or "lower" stages.

A person becomes a full human being by genealogical membership within our evolutionarily discrete species, and not by possessing "essential" traits that we may happen to judge as more valuable than others: the strength of Mark McGwire or the brains of Albert Einstein. In this sense, we must regard the birthright of humanity as being truly inalienable in the most literal way. A person born into this biological entity cannot sell his or her membership for a mess of pottage or for all the world's gold and power. Every human being contributes equally to the full variation that defines our essence. In this sense, the most mentally limited person remains as fully and completely human as McGwire or Einstein. This truly biological view of human essences can only elevate the familiar words of Tiny Tim to more than a saccharine pronouncement at the end of kiddie Christmas specials: "God Bless Us, Every One!"

If we accept this common argument of natural historians, and insist that the "essence" of humanity can be defined only by the overt variation among the more than 6 billion human beings on earth, then how can we characterize ourselves at all in a world of evolutionary continuity? If we descended smoothly from the apelike common ancestor of humans and chimps, then how can humanity achieve any clear definition? Doesn't all life form a single glop of continuity, extending all the way back to primordial bacteria?

Because I believe in original sin, because I know that I'm capable of craving a cold beer in a village of starving kids, because I know that selfishness vies for space in our hearts with compassion, I believe we need government. A government that forces us to care about the common good even when we don't feel like it, a government that helps channel our better instincts and check our bad ones. I don't think government is good, just necessary.

[W]e can take comfort from the things that have survived for 2,000 years and are likely still to be around when another thousand have passed: wine and song; dogs and ball games; parties and horoscopes; sandals and earrings; the Greek and Latin classics; lovely young ladies and obnoxious aunts; courage and hope and fear of death; the love of parents for their children.

Is not the desire of the everlasting hills that they be saved from their everlastingness, that something new happen, that the everlasting cycle of human cruelty, of man's inhumanity to man, be brought to an end?