Woke people like me often emphasize that we humans are all basically the same when you look under our skin. In this column I want to focus on how different we are.
Exhibit A, Temperament: The guys in my men’s group recently took a version of the Myers Briggs Personality Test called the Kiersy Bates Temperament Assessment. The assessment reveals if you are an extrovert or an introvert, a thinker or a feeler, etc. There are 16 temperament types possible. The test verified what we already knew. We’re different.
Exhibit B, Gender: Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, right? Ever since Adam and Eve we humans have tried to figure out how to live with another person who both powerfully attracts us and simultaneously drives us crazy. One marriage counselor quipped that when two people get married, the two become one. The question is, “which one?”
Nowadays, it’s not a binary question anymore. In addition to male/female there is now the “T” in LGBTQ+. President Trump is trying to simplify the complexity by requiring legal documents to return to binary. Difference is not the enemy. The enemy is my own insecurity with living in a world of difference.
Exhibit C, Ethnicity: I’ve been associated with a Thai church for over 30 years and I’ve been to Thailand 14 times. To go along with the analogy in Exhibit B, Thais are from Jupiter and Farangs (aka Westerners/Americans) are from Saturn.
I wrote a column years ago with the headline, “If you’re comfortable, it’s not multicultural.” Just like in a marital relationship, certain aspects of Thai culture are so attractive to me. That’s why I have kept taking that 14-hour flight to return to the land of smiles.
And certain aspects of Thai culture drive me crazy. We share a basic humanity, but I will never ever get to the point where I think like a Thai.
Exhibit D, Psychological History: One of the guys in my men’s group and I share the exact same temperament profile according to the Kiersy Bates assessment, but the two of us find ourselves coming down at quite different places when it comes to some issues in life. I’ve met with my men’s group brother every week for 30 years now and we marvel at how we’re the same in temperament but so different in some of the ways we lean into life.
The difference stems partly from the fact that he and I grew up in very different families.
Exhibit E, World View/Religion/Ideology: He and I, you see, learned to view the world differently because of the way we grew up. AI tells me that a worldview is “the lens through which we interpret and understand the world, is important because it shapes our beliefs, values, and actions, impacting our relationships, decisions, and overall understanding of reality.”
Going with that image of my worldview as a lens, I’m far-sighted. I’m in my 70s and I still do not need glasses to drive, but I can’t read the newspaper in which this column appears without wearing glasses.
More to the point of how the lenses of my worldview influence what I see and what I don’t see, if I look at reality through the lens in a microscope, I will be enabled to see a vast array of tiny critters that folks looking through the lens in a telescope will miss, but I will never see the stars. I will never see the breathtakingly beautiful pictures the Webb Telescope is giving us.
Regarding the old science vs. religion debate, I wear bifocal glasses in which the bottom lens enables me to read books and the top lens allows me to figure out who that person on the other side of the room is. I need both lenses to understand what’s happening in the world around me.
You see the analogy, science is a lens that is responsible for many things, like drugs which have increased the length and quality of our lives. Science is smart but it’s not wise. Science is incapable of knowing how to use drugs like opioids as a blessing instead of a curse.
Exhibit G, Focus: A famous psychological study, known as the Gorilla Experiment, asked participants to count how many times a team dressed in white passed a ball. During the video, a person dressed in a gorilla suit walks through the scene.
Despite the gorilla’s conspicuous presence, roughly half of the participants failed to notice it, highlighting the limitations of human attention and the ease with which individuals can overlook even highly salient stimuli when focused on a specific task.
AI tells me, “While all humans share a vast majority (over 99.9%) of their DNA, there are small, but important, differences in the remaining 0.1% that contribute to individual uniqueness and variations.”
Differences don’t have to be polarizing if we do the hard work of understanding, accepting and valuing what makes each of us unique.