Incredible Diversity

This happens roughly every other year—whenever I have an unusually long wait at an airport and, as a consequence, see unusually large numbers of people. I suppose you have to be at a major city’s airport. Detroit certainly works, and I’ve seen the same both east and west and in Chicago too. One sees every race, age, and every conceivable body type, male and female—and for each of those categories, in addition, I also see them in quite ordinary American dress and in traditional garb from all over the world. It’s amazing. I first had this feeling—namely that humanity is extraordinarily—and physically—diverse when perusing one of Jared Diamond’s books (I think it was Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed); there I saw photographs of all kind of people from around the globe thickly clustered, and the impression was striking. Now airports are enough to bring the feeling back. Hasn’t always been so. In the heydays of my travelling (1970-80), the fabulous diversity was beginning to appear. Now in a community like Detroit it is the norm, especially in summertime, when families visit from all corners of the world. Reminds me of a fascinating discussion of human nature Mortimer Adler presents in Ten Philosophical Mistakes. He invites us to consider animal species. Looking at each, he says, you would note differences. But…

The dominant likeness of all members of the species would lead you to dismiss as relatively insignificant the differences you found, most of which can be explained as the result of slightly different environmental conditions.

He then invites us to make random drop-in visits to look at human societies.

You would come away [from such a venture] with the very opposite impression from the one you took away from your investigation of the populations that belonged to one or another animal species. You were there impressed by the overwhelming similitude that reigned among its members. Here, however, you would find that the differences were dominant rather than the similarities.

Adler was, of course, not talking about physical differences—but they’re also present. As above, so below.

Astonishing Diversity

Not just the Christian Science Monitor, which has long specialized in looking at the entire globe, but these days also in the pages of the New York Times and in images on television news shows (we rather like the new World Focus) we see many images of Asian and African cultures. On World Focus our presenter is usually Daljit Dhaliwal, herself of Asian roots; we got to know her back in the days of BBC’s often hapless world news on PBS. By way of an aside, we knew Daljit by name before she had a chance to introduce herself—because Brigitte likes fascinating sounds, and Daljit Dhaliwal had been one of those. Just for fun, sometimes, Brigitte will remind me of Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, prime minister of Sri Lanka in the 1990s. And Brigitte is one of those who’d never dream of speaking of E. coli. No! She will produce the full Escherichia coli name at the drop of a hat and glory in each and every one of its rich, almost mouth-watering seven syllables. End of aside.

In any case, what with Africa in what appears to be a centuries-long turmoil of transition to the regions of Modernity, a process that unfortunately for humans always involves unutterable horrors of bloodshed, oppression, disease, and mayhem—plus our current culture-clash with Islam and our tense confrontation of Asia as an emerging economic behemoth—it is very easy to become aware of human diversity. The fifties and sixties were quite different. The signs of cultural mixing we sometime encountered back then took the form of ordinary white suburban youngsters dressed in odd robes approaching us in airports with “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare.”

After the news I went upstairs to do some reading, presently A History of Private Life, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Paul Veyne, ed., 1987)—a book that merely reinforces what surrounds me in the news if not in the flesh, namely that it’s always been so. The book documents a transition between what its French authors are pleased to call pagan antiquity to early Christian times. Greek, Roman, and the Israeli experiences are included. The authors deal with multiple layers of society that, in those times, often lived very different lives. The focus is on private life and hence illustrates diversity down even at the level we call real life, thus life lived at the personal level. Astonishing.

I woke up with that phrase this morning: Astonishing Diversity. I do believe that we go right on thinking after the body slumbers off—or rather, it seems to me that we detach, depart for celestial regions and then, in the morning, resuming our bodies, we kind of check in to see what the status at departure was—and there, in our brains, the traces of the last thoughts still glimmer, the fire not quite extinguished, and so we wake up as we fell asleep.

Unbelievable diversity—but at the core a single nature. This because we are quite able to put ourselves into the shoes of the most arcane past and present modes of thought and feeling with a little effort and imagination. Something stirred in me, and then I remembered that Mortimer Adler had somewhere addressed this very subject. Adler was the editor of the Great Books of the Western World, an enterprise begun jointly with Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago. Adler has been, still is, treated with disdain by some of academia’s aristocracy—perhaps because, as a popularizer, he gained wide recognition. Too bad. In my humble opinion Adler did more for real culture than most of that elite has done as a body.

Anyway, despite the ordered disorder of my so-called library, I soon had the volume in hand: Ten Philosophical Mistakes. In one of those essays, “Human Nature,” Adler defends the unity of human nature against its outright denial. This denial Adler assigns to existentialism, quoting Merleau-Ponty as saying that “it is the nature of man not to have a nature.” Adler’s defense may be stated this way: That which humans have in common, and that which makes the radical difference, is that all humans have the same potentialities—but these potentialities, while given to every human, may be—and are—developed in astonishing varieties. All other species are narrowly and genetically determined and therefore are essentially unchanging, but humans have a single potential which flowers in amazing ways. This supports Adler’s other characterization of the human condition, namely that humans are different from other creatures in kind, not merely in degree—a subject on which he produced a book-long exposition titled, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes.
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Books mentioned at Amazon:

A History of Private Life, Volume I, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
Ten Philosophical Mistakes
The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes