In 1851, Herman Melville published his most famous novel, Moby Dick. It is the story of the obsessive pursuit of a white whale, Moby Dick, by a ship’s captain that ultimately results in the destruction of the ship, the captain and all aboard but one who lived to tell the tale. In many respects, the book is a description of what happens when human beings lose sight of their humanity or, more simply, surrender it to something else.
At their most basic, relationships between human beings for millennia were, and to some extent still are, characterized by a human-human interface. This is the result of one person interacting directly with another for the accomplishment of a particular task. This may expand to become a “team” effort to achieve a particular goal, or it may be a matter of dispute resolution. As time went on, it became clear that more and...