On Being Human · A Conversation with Adler

Come read with me — quietly, slowly, deeply

You can find more essays in this series in the Conversations archive

Morning light spills across my favourite chair. I curl my feet under me and balance a small, grey volume on my lap — first published in 1952.

Outside, the farm is waking: damp earth, birds in the trees, my phone face-down beside a mug of coffee.

Inside the book, Mortimer Adler is introducing the Great Conversation — a 2 500-year-long dialogue between minds who have never met and are still answering one another across time. I feel oddly privileged to be joining in.

I remember dipping into these pages as a young adult. It’s interesting to read again and wonder how much these words may have quietly shaped me through the decades.

Adler quotes Stringfellow Barr, speaking about technicians who can’t tell the difference between “a good poem and sentimental doggerel,” and about “cultured” people who push buttons without understanding what’s behind them. He worries about what the lack of liberal education might mean for future generations and societies.

What strikes me most as I read is how easily these passages could have been written today.

The line that won’t leave me alone this time isn’t about curricula or school systems at all. It’s this:

Nobody chooses whether to be a human being or not — only whether they will remain ignorant and undeveloped, or seek to reach the highest point they are capable of attaining.

He says that the objective is “the excellence of man as man” — becoming as fully human as we’re capable of being.

In 1952, access to information, learning, and formal education was already expanding at a pace that felt unprecedented. Reading that sentence now, with the internet in my pocket and almost anything a few clicks away, it feels even more pointed.

Because here I am, in a century of smartphones, AI, and shortcuts for almost everything, trying to work what it means to be human in the 21st century — not just up-to-date, not just employable, not just “coping” — but what successful even means now.

• What does it mean to be successful in this century?
• What does it mean to be human, apart from what we produce or perform, underneath the algorithms and deadlines?
• What would it look like to be a successful human being, not just a successful profile, bank balance, or story about your life?

In 1952, still reeling from depression and war, yet perched on the edge of an enormous technological and economic boom, “success” still carried the shape of decency and contribution:

— a job, a safe and comfortable home, enough to eat,
— education as a doorway into a broader, more responsible life.

I remember my mother telling me that when they were growing up, “teenager” was not really a category. You were a child at school, you left at twelve or sixteen — only the very fortunate studied further — and became a working, contributing adult: to the home, the family, and to society.

What was a privilege for them has become baseline for us. For many of us, those early marks of “success” now sit under the heading of basics — until they are ripped away. Success has swollen into something noisier: performance, opulence, metrics, how impressive your life looks while the world quietly burns.

So when Adler draws that sharp line between “remaining undeveloped” and “seeking the highest point you are capable of,” I hear it in a different key.

It is no longer simply: Am I learning and growing and becoming someone I will be proud to be? Am I living and shaping a life I won’t regret?

Now I find myself asking:

Am I allowing my era to define what “developed” means — what a successful human looks like — or am I consciously choosing my own standards and expectations?

And what does that actually ask of me, here, on this farm, in this year?

Learning to be human

Adler keeps circling a distinction I first met in lecture halls in the late 1990s and have been living with ever since: schooling is not the same as educating, and “educated” is not the same as schooled.

One trains people to fit into an economy.
The other asks what it takes to grow a person.

Being human is not the same as developing the humanity we’re capable of.

To become better humans and lead better human lives, Adler argues, we need to learn how to move in more than one world at a time:

• the world of ideas and the world of practical affairs,
• the worlds of poetry, history, science, and philosophy — and the ways they speak to one another,
• the world of real problems, as opposed to neat little tasks.

In and between these worlds, the work of a liberal education is to learn how to tell different kinds of knowing apart, how one problem might bear on another, and how to find and test possible solutions instead of simply swallowing someone else’s answers.

I can feel my younger self nodding. On paper, I’ve done a lot of this.

I’ve studied education, philosophy, psychology, and science.
I’ve worked in business and tech and consulting.
I’ve lived in the city, in a village by the sea, and now on a small farm.
I’ve had to think about illness, money, death, faith, politics, ethics — all the adult subjects I once believed lived only in books.

And yet I can still see how quickly I slip into living as if only one world counts: the world of outcomes.

Did I get through my to-do list?
Did I answer the messages?
Did I manage the current crisis?
Did I anticipate the next rollercoaster?
Did I produce something visible?

Those are technician questions.
They’re not wrong. They’re just not enough.

Because when I look back over my life, the moments that made me more human weren’t the “nailed the outcome” days.

They were the days of slow noticing.
The days of listening to a place until it began to speak back.
The days of realising I wasn’t here to impose a plan on the land, but to live with it.

Adler’s line keeps nudging me:

Nobody decides whether to be a human being or not…

The real choice isn’t whether to be human.

It’s what being human is going to mean to me — how far I’m willing to develop my humanity, and what I’m prepared to let that cost me.

Process in an outcomes world

Living on a farm has quietly taught me a lot about that.

The soil doesn’t care how many productivity books I’ve read or how well I colour-code a planner.
Seeds don’t sprout because I’ve built a clever system, no matter how “leading edge” or technically brilliant it is.
The dam doesn’t fill because I’m motivated, or outcomes-driven, or very clear on my quarterly goals.

Things grow when the conditions are right, and when I keep returning — not just “showing up” in the slogan sense, but turning up in a particular way:

watching, listening, learning,
changing what I do based on what I see,
accepting that I’m part of the pattern, not in charge of it.

Seventy-odd years ago, Adler was already uneasy about a world obsessed with outcomes and technology — with what our tools can do — and almost indifferent to the slow work that makes us capable of using those tools wisely.

Reading him in 2025, it feels even sharper.

We live in a world where:

• we can generate an answer in seconds, without thinking our way through the question
• we can share an opinion, without doing the heavy lifting of understanding
• we can gain the appearance of knowledge by scrolling, without ever building the inner structure that real understanding requires
• we can do, and even achieve, without considering the true implications of our actions.

We talk about “consequences” all the time — usually as something to avoid, manage, or spin — and still somehow sidestep accountability.

Outcomes ask: What did you get?
Consequences ask: What did it do?
Accountability asks: Who am I becoming because I keep doing this?

That’s where Adler’s language about being “undeveloped” or “seeking the highest point you’re capable of” bites.

Because it’s entirely possible to rack up excellent outcomes and still be, at the level of character, malnourished — brilliant at surviving, terrible at being human.

That’s a whole other essay waiting in the wings.

More than a technician of survival

When Adler quotes Stringfellow Barr on a world splitting into

• technicians who are brilliant at making things work, and
• “cultured” people who have opinions about everything but no grasp of how the world actually functions,

I recognise both temptations in myself.

On some days, I want to retreat into ideas — read, knit, disappear into beautiful images — and ignore the bank balances, the politics, the broken systems, the hard phone calls.

On others, I want to fix only what is right in front of me and never think beyond the next repaired fence, the next invoice paid, the next supper on the table.

Neither, on its own, is enough to make a life I can respect.

To be “fully human,” as I hear him now — and as my own life keeps teaching me — is to keep learning how to live in both worlds at once:

to read old words and apply them to Thursdays with load-shedding, medical emails, and tired teenagers;
to think carefully and act in real conditions;
to care about truth and about bread on the table.

It’s less about being impressive and more about being integrated — letting what you know, what you value, and what you actually do move closer together over time.

That kind of development doesn’t show up neatly in outcomes.

It shows up in small, stubborn ways:

in how you respond when someone is careless with your time,
in whether you tell the truth when a soft lie would make you look better,
in whether you treat the person in front of you as an obstacle to manage, or a human being you’re briefly entrusted with.

Nobody decides whether to be a human being or not.

But every day, quietly, we are deciding what kind of human we are becoming — and whether we’re moving closer to, or further from, the best of what we’re capable of being.

Joining the conversation with purpose

I’m reading because I don’t want to live only as a technician of survival, or as a soft blur of opinions with no backbone.

Sitting at my table, with his book and my coffee and the farm waking up outside, I’m trying to take my small place in that 2 500-year conversation — not as a scholar, but as a real, flawed human being:

— asking whether these ideas are relevant in my life right now,
— and if they are, what they demand of me now,
— testing them against muddy boots and hospital waiting rooms,
— letting them sharpen the questions I ask about “success” and “development” and “a life well lived.”

There are no ready-made answers.

There is the possibility of a better grade of question — and the courage to actually live with those questions, instead of outsourcing them to the loudest voices of my age.

You don’t have to read Adler to join this conversation.

You are already in it.

Every time you decide what matters more — money or time, image or integrity, speed or care — you’re answering questions humans have wrestled with for centuries.

So maybe, this week, the invitation is simple:

• Notice one place where you’ve been living purely as a technician — solving, coping, producing.
• Ask yourself Adler’s question in your own words:
  Am I choosing to remain undeveloped here, or am I willing to grow — even if it’s slow and inconvenient?
• And then, quietly, take one small step towards the kind of human you’d like to become in that area.

If you’d like a quieter, land-based companion to these questions, you’re welcome to wander the Quiet Archive — my morning reflections from the farm.

If you’re in a season where those questions feel heavy and you’d like structured company as you face them, you can read more about working with me on the Coaching with Jo-Anne page.

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Old book on the table.
Modern life outside the window.
The Great Conversation continues — and you are not only invited, but needed.
Welcome.