Does Humanity Change?

In Maui's song, "You're Welcome," in Moana, Maui sings something similar to a line in another Disney song. In response to Moana's apparent speechlessness at his awesome presence, Maui sings "I see what's happening. . . You're face to face with greatness, and it's strange. You don't even know how you feel. . . It's nice to see that humans never change."

That last sounds an awful lot like a line from "Fixer Upper" from Frozen: "We're not saying you can change him, because people don't really change." I blogged about that line and about how people actually change all the time. Having already blogged about that, I didn't think it would make sense to blog about Maui's version of the falsehood, but his version has a contextual difference that completely changes the meaning of the line.

While the trolls in Frozen were singing about one person, the line from "You're Welcome" refers to humanity in general. Maui wasn't saying that Moana hadn't changed. He had never met her before; he had no way of knowing whether she had ever changed or not. However, he had met other humans before, presumably ages ago, and their reactions to him had apparently not been much different from how he thought Moana was reacting. I believe that when Maui said that "humans never change," he was referring to humanity as a whole. The strange thing is that, even though I know that individual humans can and do change, I'm less sure that humanity itself does.

We are all human, and human nature seems to come with the species. We all have the same natural impulses, albeit in varying strengths, and thus we all have a lot in common with the humans who lived hundreds, or even thousands of years ago. Human nature doesn't seem to be much different now from how it has been since the fall of Adam and Eve.

However, our spirits are different. Each spirit represents an individual, and each individual is unique. Any group of, say, five spirits will be very different from a group of five other spirits. In that sense, humanity changes with each generation, but how big is that change? Human spirits have many things in common with each other, despite each spirit being unique. We have similar emotional needs and desires, just as we have similar physical needs and desires. While each person is a unique individual, our hearts are all, arguably, the same.

So, while each person is different from every other person and each person changes many times over the course of their lives, it could be said that human nature, including both the natures of our bodies and of our spirits, doesn't change. At least, it doesn't change enough to claim that people today are much different than they were a hundred years ago, even though they are all, or almost all, different people. Personally, though I disagree with the trolls' claim that people don't change, I think I agree with Maui's claim that humanity itself probably doesn't.