Thursday Thoughts: Inhuman, All Too Inhuman

I was thinking this morning about The Tales of the Morgs, and I started wondering about why I could write so easily about the Morgs and but only with more difficulty about humans, particularly "modern" humans. The obvious answer that occurs to me right off is that since I made up the Morgs, nobody can say what I say about them is "unMorglike". Only I can tell myself whether they are going off-model, as it were.

Of course, there is something about "inhuman" characters that is particularly appealing, especially to children or uncomplicated persons. Little people like Bilbo, animals (even stuffed animals) like Pooh, creatures like the Scarecrow or Raggedy Ann, are frequent heroes in children's literature. Imaginary races, like Hobbits in general or Harry Potter-type wizards and even Vampires, can be so appealing that there are people who identify with them in real life, even going so far as to dress up and pretend to be these creatures. So-called "furries" can carry their admiration for animals a bit too far.

I think part of these impulses go back to the fact that we associate being human, especially adult humans, with a peculiarly guilty state. Whether tracing it to the Fall of Man, or the destruction of the earth through greed and carelessness, or an imagined paradisal state of innocence when we were children, we feel that humans, when they reach the Age of Reason, are bad news. Some of us would rather not be part of that club, so we eschew membership and try to identify with something else, something less fraught with consequences.

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." This, of course, is not to solve the problem, but to erase the equation altogether. And like most erasures, you can still see the outlines underneath. We can't become Hobbits, or Wizards, or Bears, or Living Toys, or even Morgs. But we can see the virtues they can embody, and strive to imitate those. We shouldn't be contented to lavish our love and care only on pets rather than children.

In short, it's hard to be a human, especially an adult human. But it should not be abandoned, it is folly, to simply count yourself out of the group. Doing so does not make one inhuman; it simply makes one a once-human, human remains, a creature aping another state that you cannot, by nature, belong to. I like the Morgs. I like writing about them; it is a way to write about the human condition at arm's-length, as it were, in 'laboratory conditions'. It is when I am writing about humans, especially adult humans, that I am balked and wary.