Cloud

When I see us, what I see first is just apes.

But then I'm as much a visual sort as the rest of us, so it isn't surprising that the form of our bodies would grab my attention first. Much in the way that the grey wolf was stretched and stunted by selective adaptation into all sorts of distinctly similar perversions, so do I see the modern human as a shaved and straightened cousin to the fuzzier lot still climbing trees in Africa. And so, much as some behaviors of the modern dog can only be understood in the context of the needs of wild pack hunters, I am little surprised when I can find explanations for human behavior that are similarly reliant on the needs of our highly self-involved tree-dwelling cousins.

This perspective has limits to its usefulness, however, as all do, for as a human I can tell myself that the experience of love is a biological imperative to promote monogamous coupling and secure resource access for offspring during our characteristically extended childhoods, but nothing about that experience feels much like it's driving me to buy Cheerios for a five year old. To understand ourselves as people will require a perspective cast in the distinctly human cognitive framework, described as myths and metaphors and characters and relationships; the biological truths of our species are necessary as a guiding framework for this perspective, but are inadequate on their own to provide us with a useful description of our society.

I've learned to see something else, above and beyond the limited human frame. Call it our culture, or our tradition, or the collective unconscious; it is the accumulation of our creative capacities over time, transcending any particular human and most people, and a human raised without it will hardly act like anything you'd call a person. It spreads as dramatically as a demagogue spouting visions for the future, and as subtly as using a word someone's never heard before in context so they can figure out what it means. This is the complex of memes that we all participate in and maintain, that cloud of evolving ideas which has become so much more relevant with the growth of networking technology, and it is the only place anything like our moral codes or social values can be said to objectively exist.

I think this is an important perspective to reference when considering the right and wrong of human and social behavior; important, because it is our choice of perspective that determines what course of action our values will dictate, and understanding ourselves primarily as participants in the evolution of a body of knowledge will naturally impel us to choices which promote our ability to so participate: choices to be open, and curious.