Vive la Différence

Humanity progresses when we embrace our differences as a strength

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It occurred to me that looking at society as a system, something made of different parts working together for common purposes, would be an interesting thought exercise. It could convey the basics of a social contract to those who may not understand the meaning of social responsibilities and civic duty. Society is a single system made of many individuals. As an analogy, consider the internal combustion engine. When running well, your auto’s gasoline or diesel engine has dozens of parts working in harmony to power the wheels. These parts are divided into subsystems: ignition, fuel, combustion, cooling, lubrication, and electrical, each having a unique role. Under the hood, the materials from which the parts are made- metals, plastics, ceramics, rubber- also vary according to their function. The cooling subsystem uses a different liquid than the fuel subsystem.

We might say an automotive engine is a model of diversity.

Granted that this type of analysis is reductionist because it ignores the fact that the humans who are part of societies are unique individuals, not standardized parts. Unlike humans, machines do not have feelings. People may curse their car and call it names when it won’t start, but attributing anthropomorphic qualities to an insentient object is an eccentric human trait. However, I believe that describing society as a system allows us to quantify human behavior as either contributive or disruptive to society's health. Living in groups, humans developed guidelines to enable peaceful coexistence and the pursuit of personal interests. Laws, morals, ethics- these are forms of social ground rules we’ve created as civilization’s rubric. Hammurabi's Code, the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh, of which the book of laws, the Torah, is part), the various forms of the Christian Bible, ancient Chinese law, and English common law are all examples of different civilizations’ efforts to establish social order. Beyond the prescribed laws of governments and the moral codes of religions, there are guidelines that exist in practice, norms and customs, often unwritten, but passed on by oral tradition.

In truth, we humans are social animals, and our history, written and unwritten, is about our efforts to live a good life within our group and to coexist with other groups. Because we are unique individuals, there are differences between us, a fact that is both the strength and weakness of our species, homo sapiens.

Vive la Différence: Humanity Progresses When We Embrace Our Differences as a Strength

My hypothesis is that diverse populations have a greater opportunity to progress materially and intellectually than most homogeneous groups. I am not a psychologist, sociologist, or scientist. I have an undergraduate degree in history, and that is the lens through which I consider the world. Again, let’s consider a simple narrative as the entry point to this concept, our children.

Children learn from a variety of adults- parents, extended family members, teachers- and from other children. They are taught the right and wrong of behavior by parents, introduced to play by other children, and, depending on the society, receive some formal education. From the beginning of their lives, children interact with a diverse cast of people. It follows that any prejudices they might exhibit as they grow older would be learned behavior.

As adults, we accept the fact that we cannot have detailed knowledge of everything that affects our lives. Many of us drive automobiles; most of us are not mechanics. If our car needs service or repair, we take it to an expert. In this technological age, a computer is the basic tool of many jobs, just as smartphones are ubiquitous sources of both personal communication and entertainment. However, not many of us understand how computer hardware works or what software code looks like. Since these are everyday items for many of us, we must acknowledge that they are the products of other people’s creativity and that we are the beneficiaries of a diverse distribution of abilities among humans. In ordinary terms, we accept that most people cannot dunk a basketball or play violin in the New York Philharmonic… And that’s okay.

Different strokes For Different Folks

A heterogeneous society, a social group containing persons of widely different backgrounds and life experiences, whether religious, ethnic, linguistic, educational, cultural, or material, is more apt to be a society that, over time, progresses and endures. Ideally, it would be a society that self-corrects, that adjusts to changing circumstances, and strives to do the greatest good for the greatest number. For the greater part of our history, we were, while creeping forward at an irregular pace, such a society.

It is also true that many of the technical advancements that occurred over our history were initiated for commercial gain. The names of the great American inventors and their inventions- Robert Fulton’s steamboat, Clermont, Peter Cooper’s locomotive, Tom Thumb, Samual Morse’s telegraph, George Westinghouse’s air brakes, Cyrus McCormack’s reaper, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Thomas Edison’s myriad inventions, the Wright Brothers’ airplane- speak of a society that rewarded the curious. Just as Eli Whitney pioneered standardization in manufacturing, Henry Ford developed the assembly line as an effective means of mass production.

The government also played a role in the discovery and development of various technologies. Government grants have supported medical science research (until recently, that is). The Internet sprang from the efforts of scientists working on projects for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a Defense Department agency.

All of this is evidence of a progressive society built by a diverse population. By convention, the people who populated North America before Europeans began immigrating here are the Native Americans. The rest of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Europeans represented different societies: English, Irish, German, Italian, Polish, and many others. The import of blacks as slave labor brought another culture into the mix, as did the Chinese immigrants who came in the 19th Century. These different cultures combined into something uniquely American, a Land of Opportunity that offered not only the chance at a good life, but also the opportunity to learn from those of different backgrounds.

The Danger of Conformity

We are a nation founded on an idea, not on a particular ethnicity or religion…. Or, at least that was the original intent of the authors of our Constitution. We treasure our freedoms and rights, no matter our political preferences. Yet a virulent strain of intolerance courses through our society, as if some of us believe others should not share in those freedoms and rights. Racial animus casts a shadow over much of American society. Religious bias often descends into violence.

As a political strategy, divide and conquer aims to create division among opponents and turn groups against each other. For authoritarian leaders, and for oligarchs and plutocrats, it serves to distract attention from their activities by focusing on out-groups like immigrants, non-whites, Jews, and whoever else provides a convenient distraction. Ever wonder, for example, how many Americans identify as transgender, and what threat they pose to society?¹

Control of traditional and social media enables the dissemination of divisive propaganda. The object is to mold a conformist society, where we are all free to believe the same things, and to disparage those who hold different beliefs. Pushed to the margins are not only people of color or those of different religions, but also artists, scientists, and others in the vanguard of exploration and progress.

There is a mass ambivalence, a sort of social schizophrenia, that exists in a society that prattles on about liberty while working to limit it. Ideology, whether it be secular or religious, is often a stumbling block to progress. Its inherent characteristic is to stifle curiosity and critical thinking, replacing them with belief. True Believers have no motivation to engage in inquiry- they’ve already been given the answers. Such reactionary stances are an obstacle to progress in many domains.

The embrace of conformity is an expression of human fear and insecurity, a fear of what is new and different, and what is born of a diversity of ideas, ideas derived from a diverse population that included persons who dared to discover something better. Perhaps we might understand the irony when we make a video call on our mobile phone and pause for a moment to imagine that it may have been an immigrant, or a black man or woman, who designed the hardware or authored the software code that made this little miracle possible.

[Edited by BPG]

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1. About 0.95% of the nation’s adult population identifies as transgender, according to Household Pulse Survey data collected from May to September 2024. This is equivalent to approximately 2.3 million adults. (USAFacts.org)