You can’t help noticing them because they stand in contrast to their human background. They are the tattoos of the mind, and they are superimposed on whatever we all are as members of the same species.
We know we share a commonness of species because of our ability to breed fertile offspring. We know we share some basic human abilities and needs. We know that in a crowd of grasshoppers, elephants, people, and chimpanzees, we can readily pick out the people because of their distinctive shape, posture, and movement. We know that even if we cannot understand one another’s utterances, we can recognize those utterances as language with grammar and syntax.
But then there are those tats. And they come in many forms. Some are colorful and stand out more brightly than others. Some are cut into the skin. Some are noticeable because of their position in a usually exposed area of the body. Tats. Yes. Some of them are burned into the brain, becoming part of mind and manifesting themselves in behavior. Mental tats. Cultural tats. Brands of a code adopted over generations or adopted within a generation, they aren’t an overnight whim etched in skin during a brief drunken visit to a roadside strip mall storefront. No, these are the tats that enable us to distinguish people from people in a crowd of people. They also enable us to distinguish one crowd of people from another crowd.
Tats of the mind take many forms: Religious, political, social, philosophical, and cultural. There is a similarity between tats of the skin and tats of the mind: Both are difficult to remove, and both fade into something slightly different.
Go look at your tats in the mirror. Don’t have any on your skin? Do what you can to see those on your mind.
We know we share a commonness of species because of our ability to breed fertile offspring. We know we share some basic human abilities and needs. We know that in a crowd of grasshoppers, elephants, people, and chimpanzees, we can readily pick out the people because of their distinctive shape, posture, and movement. We know that even if we cannot understand one another’s utterances, we can recognize those utterances as language with grammar and syntax.
But then there are those tats. And they come in many forms. Some are colorful and stand out more brightly than others. Some are cut into the skin. Some are noticeable because of their position in a usually exposed area of the body. Tats. Yes. Some of them are burned into the brain, becoming part of mind and manifesting themselves in behavior. Mental tats. Cultural tats. Brands of a code adopted over generations or adopted within a generation, they aren’t an overnight whim etched in skin during a brief drunken visit to a roadside strip mall storefront. No, these are the tats that enable us to distinguish people from people in a crowd of people. They also enable us to distinguish one crowd of people from another crowd.
Tats of the mind take many forms: Religious, political, social, philosophical, and cultural. There is a similarity between tats of the skin and tats of the mind: Both are difficult to remove, and both fade into something slightly different.
Go look at your tats in the mirror. Don’t have any on your skin? Do what you can to see those on your mind.
RSS Feed