It was the night before the Lunar New Year. I was at a Lunar New Year celebration and had just played a game of Mahjong. A tasty buffet of Chinese style cooking followed. During dinner, the conversation turned to someone sharing the incredible number of attacks a particular large institution’s system fends off each day. For larger institutions the attacks are in the billions. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
If Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number, What About Personhood?
Not long after that conversation I was completing a passport application for one of my children. I felt annoyed–as I often do when I’m filling out paperwork–that I had to take the time to complete this paperwork–so full of dates and numbers– to prove that my child is who I claim she is. This made me wonder how we got here.
A Simpler Time. Perhaps.
At some point, we were simply humans living. We were born. If we were lucky, we lived life with our families and, eventually, painlessly passed on from this world. The people around us knew our identity. It wasn’t so easy to simply assume someone else’s identity. Then somewhere along the way something changed.
While You Were Sleeping Reimagined
Let’s say, for instance, for some unfortunate reason, you were in a coma for a number of years. You wake up one day (huzzah!). After some weeks spent in recovery, you go off into the world. Upon reentry, however, you find someone has used your social security number to steal your identity. Now, in order to maintain access to your most basic rights, including the right to stay where you are, the right to to work, and the privilege to travel elsewhere, you must prove who you are.
Thus, a government issued number originally intended to track workers’ retirement benefits–the viability of which is questionable–is now a tracking device that leaves so much so dangerously vulnerable in today’s digital age.
Isn’t Ironic? No, For Real This Time.
Ironically, the committee responsible for devising the social security system opted not to use fingerprints due to their association with criminality. Today, though, one-fifth of the world’s prison population are Americans within institutions that identify them by number. Similarly, our government identifies “nearly every legal resident of the United States” with a social security number.
That doesn’t make me feel good, and, at the same time, I recognize we are far from prisoners.
Citizenry & Humanity
I am an American. I have certain privileges because I am American. No matter where I go in life, my upbringing within this country that I do, indeed, love marks me, and it always will. It is not my aim, however, to make my country my god as does Edward Everett Hale’s Nolan inThe Man Without a Country.
At the end of Man Without a Country, for example, Hale quotes Hebrews 11: 16-17 (K.J.V.):
“But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.”
Apparently, Hale alludes to Nolan’s absolute love for his country, restored in full repentance for the carelessness of his youth, when he had been foolish enough to damn the place of his birth.
However, the point of Hebrews 11 is to provide examples of God’s faithful servants, many of whom rejected the country from whence they came in obedience to God’s will. In fact, within the Bible there are many instances in which fealty to one’s country, one’s king, is in direct conflict with one’s duty to God. In other words, our citizenry is one thing; our humanity is an other.
As a society, social security numbers give us greater control, but there is a cost to our humanity. Imagine, for example, if Moses’ social security number forever marked him as a murderer, or if Ruth had not been able to migrate with her mother-in-law and work in the fields to keep them from starving.
Question(s)
As an American, I believe we can continue to strive toward a more perfect union. This belief leads me to a question, actually three: (1) Is it possible to organize society in a way that honors the sovereignty of the individual, (2) what does that society look like, and (3) how do we get there?
