When I first posted this over-long piece on Facebook, February 3, 2017, it was suggested that perhaps I should start a blog!  So, finally, I have, and it seems fitting it should be the first one published.

The following is drawn from several papers I wrote between ten and thirty years ago, but whose subject continues to be germane, and that is our relationship with the disjointed social structure of our world.  One of the scariest things I have seen happening in the world is the fragmentation of society based upon the absolutizing of some element of personal, ethnic, religious, or cultural history.

There was a time in this country and elsewhere in the world when we tried to ignore minorities of all kinds and to assume, mistakenly, that somehow community could exist by attending only to the needs of the majority.

That was an unjust assumption and it was rightly doomed to failure.

And so we said that we need to affirm our diversity and try to bring everyone into the mainstream, into the larger community.  The civil rights movement, for example, began as a “dream” of social and cultural integration, moving the disenfranchised toward the prevailing culture.

It was important and right-headed.

And we assumed that this would somehow result in the unification of all the disparate elements of society into a harmonious whole.  But what has happened, which surprised even the activists, is the fragmentation of society—not just here, but everywhere—into dozens of “definitional communities.”

A new interest in one’s roots and heritage has arisen—and that’s good—but what has come with it is an almost pervasive compulsion to belong to some group or groups with a “point of view,” a cause, or a special history.

Suddenly there seems to be a sanction for idealizing some element of one’s life— ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, political commitments, economic status, ability or disability, ethical commitments, religious persuasion, theological posture, and on and on —and making that the primary basis of self-identity rather than our common humanity.

The American dream of the cultural melting pot has become a cultural tossed salad.  And these “communities of identity” are not only all around us but in the world at large until we find ourselves faced with the specter of communities without community, of diversity without connectedness.

None of this happened overnight, yet it took us by surprise. And we are anxious about the ability of increasingly divergent groups to work and live together.

Wherever one looks—from our cities and towns to rural communities, from genocidal impulses to tribal rivalries, to nationalistic or religious wars virtually anywhere on the globe—one sees a world that seems hell-bent to repeat the story of the tower of Babel: we no longer understand one another.

We can, of course, celebrate our differences, and we should—there are distinctives worth preserving—but we surely need to be about underscoring our connections, not just our differences.  Somehow in this world, in our world, we must find a way to live in the tension that affirms diversity within community rather than diversity instead of community.

We all share space on this planet.

We have common experiences.

We all use language.

We have emotions in common—we love, we hope, we fear.

We all respond to the aesthetic.

We all are connected with institutions that birth us, nurture us, and bury us.

We all recall the past and anticipate the future.

I am, for example—among other things—an American, white, heterosexual, male who identifies with the Christian tradition.  I’m not ashamed of any of those and I wouldn’t change any of them if I could.  But if I absolutize any of those such that I forget that I am also a citizen of the world, a human being, an inhabitant of the planet, and only one of the many children of God with whom I share more commonalities than differences, then I have fallen victim in microcosm to the pervasive malady that is killing people all over the globe and threatening to blow our world apart.

That said, one of the hopeful signs I have seen recently involves the Women’s Marches that occurred all over the country and the world.  I saw (literally, since I joined the march in Asheville with a male friend) people from any number of “definitional communities”— ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, economic status, religious persuasion, and, yes, even political affiliation—join in common cause for women’s rights identified in many raised signs as human rights.  While this amazing movement is, of course, identified with a current political crisis that divides us, it also symbolizes and actualizes our ability to find community within diversity.

My hope for you and for myself is that we will continue to be about finding the threads of “connectedness” running through the diversity that confronts us globally, nationally, and locally and that in our own corner of the world we will find ways to be part of the answer instead of part of the problem.

I am indebted to several fine discussions of this issue, including the following:

Maya Hasegawa, “Separatism, Separation, and Diversity,” Liberal Education, 77:1 (Jan/Feb ’91), pp. 16-17.

William Bryan Martin, “Cultural Pluralism, Institutional Character.”  Unedited draft of an unpublished address, Association of Southern Baptist Colleges and Schools, Samford University, July 24, 1992.

Adam Yarmolinski, “Loose Canons: Multiculturalism and Humanities 101,” Change, 24:1 (Jan/Feb ’92), pp. 6-9, 74-75.