Our humanity outweighs our differences

There are many ways of dividing and subdividing the human race. We have males and females, young and old. We can divide people according to their countries of origin, and subdivide them according to regions of origin within the country.

We often assign people to various categories of social or economic class: lower, upper, middle, upper middle, lower middle, etc. We can make cultural, religious, and ethnic distinctions among people, and we can make distinctions based upon any number of physical characteristics, including height, weight, hair color, facial features, skin color, and body type.

We sometimes categorize people according to their respective sexual orientations: homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual. We even divide people according to their dominant political ideologies, such as liberal, conservative, neo-conservative, democrat, republican, labor, libertarian and independent, to name a few.

A person’s membership in a group often influences the positions he or she takes on issues of controversy. For example, the citizens of Iraq have, according to the media, experienced fundamental disagreements concerning key issues addressed by their new constitution. Positions concerning these disagreements have generally lined up according to citizens’ membership in one of the three major ethnic groups inhabiting the country: Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds.

Some groups, such as Israelis and Palestinians seem to have intractable differences and longstanding rivalries with one another, based upon conflicting claims of divine right over tracts of land. Much is made of the importance of one’s identity as an Israeli or Palestinian. This was painfully demonstrated last week when some people were evicted from land and homes in Gaza, while other people qualified to be granted land and homes, based solely upon their identification with one or the other group.

The Thai culture seems to promote the making of very fine distinctions among people, resulting in a highly stratified society in which everyone holds a position of importance or unimportance in relation to every other person in the society. These distinctions are based upon such factors as age, education, occupation, apparent economic status, and a host of other factors, combined in a way that can seem baffling to outsiders.

With so much emphasis upon various divisions, groups, and subgroups, the human race often appears very fragmented. We might feel quite alien from groups which, on the surface, appear so very different from us. With so many divisions, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that, as humans, we actually have much in common with one another.

All of us, of course, share a common biology. We each experience sensations, such as heat cold, hunger, thirst, and pain. Our prenatal development from a single fertilized egg to an embryo and a growing fetus followed a common path. Once born, there was a predictable and unvarying sequence in our growth and development. As infants we rolled over before we were able to sit without support. We stood while holding onto objects, then crawled, then began to walk, in exactly that order. We learned to communicate with others by using a complex language, the likes of which we do not find among the nonhuman inhabitants of our planet.

We are all social creatures. We form strong bonds, first with members of our family, and later with our friends. We exhibit bias in favor of members of groups to which we belong. We exhibit a vague mistrust of outsiders. We experience a range of emotions, such as liking, love, happiness, frustration, sadness, disappointment, anger, fear, agony and ecstasy. We laugh, cry, eat, drink, sleep and dream. We sing and dance to celebrate. We mourn the death of a loved one. We universally recognize basic emotions communicated in the facial expressions of another human, regardless of that person’s country of origin or cultural background.

There is a good reason for this similarity. We are all related. If we go far enough back into our human history, we find that we are, in fact, one family. Archeologists tell us that we are descended from a group of humans that originated in Africa in the distant past. In that sense, we may all consider ourselves Africans, members of our family tree having migrated far and wide to populate the globe. Many of our differences are the result of groups of our ancestors having lived in prolonged isolation from other groups, and having developed separate identities, cultures, and biological adaptations to meet the challenges of survival in a range of environments existing across our planet.

Divisions among humans will undoubtedly change over time, but never disappear. Disagreements and conflict among groups, likewise, seem inevitable. As long as we are human, I suppose we will favor our own groups, and look upon those who are different with a degree of suspicion and mistrust. By viewing our differences within the context of our much more fundamental shared humanity, however, we might learn to approach our divisions with greater sensitivity, appreciation, and tolerance of the interesting diversity present in our human family.