 We
are social animals. It is our nature to want to belong. It is
Darwinian: We learn from each other and we survive by working in teams.
We help each other out. Our community, our tribe, adopts us, accepts
us, and teaches us what we need to know. Our very existence is in many
ways indistinguishable from that of the groups we belong to. For most
of humanity, life has enduring meaning only with others of our own kind.
In light of that incredible imperative -- physical, social, emotional, intellectual, moral, rational, instinctive -- to belong, it is amazing that we are different from each other at all. What reason is there to be different? Especially since, as ee cummings tells us, it's so much easier to be the same?:
to be nobody but yourself in a world which is
doing its best, night and day,
to make you everybody else
means to fight the hardest battle which any human
being can fight,
and never stop fighting
Linguists now believe that all human languages descend from a single
proto-language, and that (following something called the
Chomsky-Lenneberg Critical Period Hypothesis) the neural structures of
our brains are actually formed to reflect the languages we learn in
early childhood (which is why 'wild children' not taught languages
until after puberty are believed unable to learn languages at all, and
despite sometimes remarkable intelligence think in ways that the rest
of us cannot begin to fathom). So the language and culture we are
taught literally programs our brains, instructs and forms the tool by
which we think and make decisions and which governs how we behave and
what we believe.
Similar arguments have been made, by Daniel Quinn and others, that a
single human 'taker' culture with a remarkably, perhaps dangerously,
homogeneous value and belief system began to squeeze out all other
human cultures about thirty centuries ago, and is now virtually
ubiquitous on Earth.
Some recent scientific studies
have suggested that evolution on Earth has largely ground to a halt, a
consequence of the massive loss of biodiversity as our monolithic
species and culture squeezes out all other life forms on the planet, as
medical advances allow the weak-gened to proliferate as well as the
strong, and as continued intermixing narrows the diversity of the human
gene pool. We are in fact both 'punier and smaller-brained'
than our Cro-Magnon ancestors, for reasons not well known. Perhaps our
culture and homogeneity have lowered the barriers to human survival, or
perhaps our ancestors were just too strong and too smart for their own
good.
So with all of these forces working to make us more the same, what is
it that drives us to be different? What is it that has made
individuality, individual rights, personal freedoms, and diversity not
only acceptable but admirable, desirable, even worth dying for? Why are
Roddenberry's Borg Collective the ultimate alien bad guys and not the
model of human perfection?
Despite all our chemical and social programming we are not all alike, and with the possible exception of American neocons (I'm being sarcastic) we don't want
everyone to be and think alike. Is this Darwinian as well? Is the need
for incessant evolution, the constant trying out of minor (and
sometimes major) differences in the makeup of species to see if the
survival result is a little better, even more ingrained in humans, and
in fact in all life, than the need to belong and conform?
I think our reverence for individuality and 'different-ness' can be explained in a single Darwinian word: competition.
We compete with other species, and with others of our own species, by
using our competitive advantages. These competitive differences
determine our success at choosing a mate and our role and rank in our
community. If all ganders in a flock were identical, the process by
which the geese selected their mates would be chaotic, and the process
of determining the rank in the migration pattern would be anarchic. We
celebrate our differences because they determine our life partners and
our roles, what we do in our communities, and, as I've said before,
what we do defines who we are. So all of life is a continuous tension
between the imperative to belong, to conform, and the imperative to be different. Too far in one direction and we're a nondescript drone, a non-breeder. Too far in the other and we're a lone wolf, an outcast.
Ultimately, however, we are not much
different from each other. I believe humanity would be more resilient,
smarter, and perhaps living a utopian existence if there were much more
diversity of human cultures, values, beliefs and behaviours than there
is in the brave new world of 21st century Earth.
And that raises yet another question, one that is perhaps more
important than the question of why we tolerate and even celebrate
difference between individuals. And that question is: What can we do to
encourage even more
difference, more diversity, more distinctions that could re-jump-start
the process of evolution and perhaps at the same time save us from
pandemics like AIDS (which thrive on our homogeneity) by increasing our
species' genetic resilience?
The book I'm now writing, or which more accurately is writing itself,
is a future utopia with a much reduced human population and an absence
of physical suffering and deprivation, achieved by simply re-channeling
human energy and ingenuity from trying to sustain unlimited growth to
trying to optimize well-being of all life on the planet at an eminently
sustainable level.
What is interesting is that this utopian world also produces rapidly
increasing human diversity, as a byproduct of (i) a radically
decentralized politic and economy, and (ii) the freeing up of time from
the struggle to survive, allowing serendipitous, highly focused human
activities towards new scientific and artistic goals that were
previously unimaginable (or at least unimagined).
When I was younger, I was a great believer in centralization. One world
government, I was sure, would lead to global peace and prosperity and
quick solutions to global problems. It seemed to me to be more
efficient, to allow greater interchange of different cultures and hence
to produce pragmatic, innovative solutions that would probably not
occur to more parochial local authorities. The problem, as I've learned
since, is that centralization just doesn't work. What it accomplishes
is to isolate decision-makers from both the source of the issues and
problems their decisions are about, and the impact of those decisions.
Any efficiency achieved by reducing functional duplication is more than
offset by the cost of insensitive, undifferentiated and ill-informed
decisions and actions that the isolated central authority takes.
Despite examples to the contrary (the DMV and megalomanic condominium
councils come to mind) I now believe that governance of communities,
nations and corporations is best when it is as decentralized as humanly
possible, where the people making the decisions are personally affected
by them and face to face with others affected by them. My novel is
leading me to believe that decentralized organizations are also likely
to be more diverse, in fact astonishingly so. You've seen some of the
isolated New Guinea tribes on National Geographic.
You've seen the strange proclivities of inner city subcultures. Be
prepared for some surprisingly unusual characters, events and
innovations in The World That Could Be. This book is turning out to be a lot more fun than I'd expected, and an amazing mental exercise.
(Artwork above: Hummingbird Muses by Saskatoon artist Jonathon Earl Bowser)
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
