Being a member of a tribe is deep within each of us. Something to belong to; to share values with; to be defended by; to be a part of. Maybe it’s something we learn. Maybe it’s in our genes.
We recognize a member of the tribe by his or her look, by his or her demeanor, maybe by his or her smell. And we have a word that means that a person is perfectly a member of our tribe: dignity. That’s from the Latin word dignus which means meet, proper, perfectly adjusted to the situation, need, or circumstance. Appropriate.
The other day as I saw Michael Jackson dragged before a judge in chains in his sleeping attire I was struck by the complete loss of dignity. When a person has separated himself from his race, his gender, his age cohort, and his family with the cosmetician’s and the surgeon’s arts to what tribe does he belong? A member of no known race, androgynous, ageless, neither healthy nor sick. What is appropriate for such a person? The crime of which he is accused may be the sexual abuse of boys but his real transgression is surely leaving the tribe.
There’s been a flurry of posts about trans-humanism lately. Marcus Cicero of Winds of Change touched on the subject in his masterful post, Faith. Randall Parker, the FuturePundit, has a round-up of posts from his own blog and from Marginal Revolutions on the subject. Perhaps someday we’ll recognize all of the errant part- or fractionally-humans as parts of our tribe no matter how far they’ve strayed from what we know or what we recognize. Maybe engineering will strip that need for recognition from our very genes. But that day is not today. It is not today.
