My Tribe.

One of the difficulties with being human is that every once in a while the world around you provides you with overwhelming evidence that you too are human, even in the ways that you would prefer you weren't. For me this tends to happen when I realize that my reactions are emotional, irrational, and that I have covered this up by telling myself a nice story that isn't necessarily entirely true.

However, recently I have come to the realization that I am more tribal than I had thought. This is unfortunate since what I consider the most important aspect of civilization is the expansion of the moral circle, or the circle of compassion. This circle is essentially the dividing line between who you consider fully human, and therefore worthy of the same rights, privileges and protections as yourself, and those who aren't fully human and therefore aren't worthy of the same rights, privileges and protections. So, for example, within my circle is my wife and my sister and my mother, but outside of my circle are cows. I think it's absolutely wrong for someone to kill my mother for meat, while I am completely fine with killing and eating cows. On the other hand I think my mother should be allowed to own property, live with maximal freedom and make decisions about the government under which she lives, but I absolutely think we should not give the same rights to cows.

The course of the progress of humanity has been the expansion of this circle, originally from family members (and then probably only some of them) out to a band, then a tribe, then a nation, until there is the view of universal human rights. Many people are serious about expanding this circle beyond the species of homo sapiens sapiens to apes and cetaceans. I think it's a good method of telling how morally modern someone is by seeing where the circle ends. For many people the circle ends with your country, so that it's an enormous crime for Americans to be bombed while at work, but it is OK for residential neighborhoods in the Middle East to be bombed in order to try to prevent further attacks on Americans. Citizenship is actually a legal example of this border between fully human and not.

Some people think that the circle occurs at the edges of your religion, and so that people of other religions are "of the devil" and must be fought and obstructed and stopped. In history it has been very common for an elite of some sort (nobility in medieval aristocracy, philosophically trained in Plato's Republic, racial for much of the history of the USA) to consider themselves as superior to others based on this elite status.

Anyway, I wish that my circle would simply extend to all humans, and I think in an intellectual manner it does. Unfortunately I have found that I have an emotional bond to a group of people to whom I feel that I am a part, that is superior to other groups of people, and to whom I feel an automatic emotional bond that increases my acceptance of them, makes me feel automatically that I want to support them, makes me wish for them to have increased power and influence beyond those of other people. This is my tribe.

My tribe are the scientists. This doesn't just mean those people actually doing science, it also means those who use science, read about science, learn about science, and use rational thinking to make decisions. My tribe thinks that believing something based on faith is something you should be allowed to do because people are human, but it's a really silly method to actually decide the truth about anything, and should be useless at convincing anybody else about a subject. My tribe believes that human beings can do amazing things, and can make the world better. My tribe believes that learning is fun, that creating is fun, that knowing how migratory birds navigate is worthwhile even if it provides nothing useful for humanity.

My tribe contains at least 90% of the Rush fans in the world. My tribe wears a lot of corduroy. My tribe are not hippies, if anything they might tend to fascism because they know they are better and smarter than all the morons in the rest of the world. My tribe has no leader but has icons, like Feynman, Pinker, Dawkins, Einstein, Stewart. My tribe talks a lot. My tribe has a tendency to mock. I believe my tribe has done more good for humanity than all the other tribes combined, and they are the reason why I am hopeful.