There’s way too much animosity and hatred in today’s world, especially against people whose differences from us just rub us the wrong way. But beneath our superficial differences, it’s ultimately more beneficial to recognize our similarities and what we share than to focus on our mutual alienation. In an age of disagreement and conflict, the idiom that we’re all “brothers (and sisters) under the skin” has much to recommend it.
Medical expertise recognizes it as fundamental that human physiology functions mostly the same way in all of us. Aggregately, humans share the same few blood types, react to stimuli similarly, eat, sleep and excrete, and procreate through comparable copulatory exertions. We mostly love our children and care for them. Not much difference there.
True, humans exhibit differences in immunity to infectious diseases and differentially endure a variety of frailties (everything from spina bifida to sleep disorders and autoimmune reactions.) But we all share the same skeletal structures, the anatomical arrangements of our various tissues, the levered movements of our limbs, and so on. Our brains are inside our heads, and we generally walk on our feet instead of our hands.
The variable human genome contains something like three billion base pairs. But any individual’s genome is about 99.4% identical to any other. We imagine that our wide variations in hair color, height, weight, sex, and a thousand other reference comparisons suggests that we’re dramatically different. But we’re not.
So whence comes the urgency to find and disapprove of the more superficial differences between and among us?
Part of it must come from the life-saving benefits of wariness and caution we experience when it comes to the appearance of potential danger. Truly, we can be a violent species. We kill animals to eat—and murder one another, for a lot of reasons.
Cultural norms within a community (a religious affiliation, an ethnic/linguistic identity, etc.) provide relief from having to check everybody out all the time, anticipating conflict and stress everywhere. From home turf, foreign, unfamiliar cultures can seem strangely threatening, even when there’s no threat at all, simply through our personal ignorance of another’s personality, purposes, and motives. As the psychiatric joke runs, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” We operate as if both these descriptions are true.
So-called “tribal” memberships become justifications for excluding or mistrusting others. Tom Lehrer satirized this in his song Brotherhood Week. “Oh, the white folks hate the black folks, And the black folks hate the white folks. To hate all but the right folks, Is an old established rule.” (For the full lyrics, see www.opensiddur.org.) To be able to laugh at the stupidity of hatred is at least, perhaps, a progressive step.
Today we’re suffering through two elections and leading up to a third next year (B.C., the US federal election, and Canada’s federal election). The caustic barbs fly back and forth, and indignation runs high. But there’s real danger in indulging this ugliness too far. Civility evaporates, and citizens dangerously replace disagreement over policy with frat-boy pejoratives, insults, and worse, threats.
Americans talk of “another civil war.” Religious nuts want to bomb the bejeezus out of other sects.
We fail to “love our neighbour as ourself,” or “turn the other cheek,” as perhaps we should. After all, we’re all the same, only different.
