The danger of focusing on human differences

Bill Clinton’s Commencement Speech at Harvard – June 6, 2007

The former President explained much societal dysfunction when he asked a simple question:  Should we focus on what human beings have in common or should we obsess about their minor differences? 

The outcome of this simple choice determines innumerable personal and political agendas.  To the extent that we choose incorrectly, the resulting contentious rhetoric has the capacity to mushroom into oppression and violence that can displace, maim and kill millions of people.  It has done so repeatedly.

Many of our political and moral disputes stem from this basic low-level perceptual choice: whether to focus on differences or commonalities.  Here is how Clinton captured the issue:

So if you look around this vast crowd today, at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans, if you look at all the different colors of skin, all the heights, all the widths, all the everything, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don’t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling, but all the rest of us, spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent?

For at least six years, the air has been thick with violence, bigotry and oppression  because too many people are making the wrong choice up front.  The current Administration excels at choosing badly. The result? A de facto national policy that anyone who is different is suspicious. 

As eloquently …

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Conservatives: Stop having sex for the pleasure of it!

The Washington Post reports on a "controversial" meaure that would: increase funding for family planning clinics, expand Medicaid and private health insurance coverage of contraceptives, require hospitals to make emergency contraception available to rape victims, and allocate money for comprehensive sex education programs that teach youths about birth control as…

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On sharing meat and other lucky things

When are we likely to share resources?  At first glance, some of us might say that we share when we have more of something than other people around us.  It’s not that simple, however.

In “Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Heuristics in the Law,” Leda Cosmides and John Tooby discuss moral heuristics and the evolution of the legal system.  It is a well-written article throughout, though I’d like to focus on one aspect of the article that I found especially interesting.  I’d like to focus on their discussion the circumstances under which people are willing to share and when they are not.

Cosmides and Tooby note that the “hunter-gatherer life is not an orgy of indiscriminate sharing, nor is all labor accomplished through collective action.”  On the other hand, the hunting of large animals often is a social activity and the meat, whether caught by a few or by a large cooperating group, is often shared throughout the social group.  These transfers of meat are “not characterized by direct reciprocation in any obvious way.” Cosmides and Tooby go so far as to suggest that the sharing of meat may be closest to that predicted by Marx’s belief that hunter-gatherers “lived in a state of primitive communism, where all labor was accomplished through collective action and sharing was governed by the decision rule,’ from each according to his ability to each according to his need.'”

The widespread sharing of meat appears to challenge the evolutionary model, which would hold that “selection …

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