But then, I have never met anyone who is much like me, even superficially - not even my brother, who is obviously the most similar.
It might be supposed this is because I am exceptionally strange; but the fact of my experience is that I have never met any two people who were fundamentally alike.
Every single person I have ever known at all well, man or woman, was unique; and unlike any of the others in their nature.
All my family and relatives are each absolutely distinctive; all my men friends and colleagues, all the girls I knew at all well. None could be confused with another.
(Although, admittedly, there are people who it seemed impossible for me to get to know; as if they had a shell, or might be putting on an act all the time.)
And this is not just The Human Condition, but apparently applies to animals - in my rather limited acquaintance. I have got to know quite a few cats, and each of these was absolutely distinct - and dogs seem to be just as individual, from a smaller sample size. I am confident I would find the same with any kind of knowable animal I made the effort to get-to-know - although there would doubtless be many kinds of animal I couldn't know.
In sum: Uniqueness is the norm in this world.
And Yet!...
Pretty much all of the socio-political, scientific and religious schemes and theories concerning human beings; operate on the basis that people are interchangeable units, that can be swapped for each other.
Or, at best, that all human beings can be fitted into a small number of categories - within-which they again become interchangeable units.
In conclusion: this defect of nearly-all socio-political, scientific and religious theory is solid experiential evidence that None Of them Are True.
All are, at best and most charitably interpreted, merely ultra-simplified models of superficial aspects of reality.
This includes Christian theories and theologies.
At their hearts, all such schemata share a literally-demonic indifference to actual people, actual beings - evident when any of these models are regarded as being the truth about reality.
And this fact of the uniqueness of every person is why the modern dogma of equality is so misguided, to put it in the mildest way. Equality actually devalues the notion of a human being, reducing it to mechanical level, a thing rather than a being.
ReplyDeleteYes, and people who seem normal have put a lot of effort into appearing normal; people who are nice are trying hard to appear nice. It took me a long time to realise that some people don't have much imagination. Some people don't remember any of their dreams. As a daydreamer I must appear very lazy to them!
ReplyDelete@William and Ron - Something I didn't mention is that it is probably useful to explain how it is that these simplified models that assume people are interchangeable were so popular as to have been universal.
ReplyDeleteMy best answer would be that this was from a particular phase in human consciousness. From what I know of hunter gatherers, they recognize each person as unique.
But it was later, in the classical and medieval era - which was also the era when the major religions were formed - that people were understood either as essentially the same, or by a few hard-edged categories (e.g. castes and classes, clans and races etc) - and this kind of agrarian society was organized on such assumptions.
great post. i think the uniqueness can only be seen through relation, and it's because we are in some ways responsible for creating it, or at least teasing it out. we don't just meet a person, we create a person, sort of. if we don't do this process of creation, of creatively relating to someone or something else, then it's just background, and thus indistinct.
ReplyDelete@Laeth. That sounds right. It also strikes me that the relationship needs to have at least something of love. After all, those we love are always unique individuals. It is those we reject or are indifferent about that can seem to be merely members of a class.
ReplyDeleteThis, apparently, is how "They" regard "Us" - e.g. Normans and Saxons. And behaving like that - by regarding others as interchangeable members of a class - also creates an evil situation of denial-of-uniqueness, including in oneself.
The fact that "civilization" (i.e. all all large scale human societies) can only operate on the basis of denial of uniqueness is an intrinsic evil - something we therefore need to recognize and repent -- even though we cannot - this side of salvation - eliminate it.
Such depersonalized thinking is something that - no doubt - we must be ready to set-aside permanently in ourselves and agree to eliminate forever; in order to want to choose salvation.
Three years of chicken keeping have taught me that even chickens have unique personalities. Every one is distinct in its own way. Not just physically, but otherwise. People tend to laugh at me when I mention this. After all, they're "just" chickens.
ReplyDeleteA good post. The insight reminded me of Berdyaev's insistence on the ultimate significance of what he termed "personality." I scribbled a bit on that over at my place.
@Frank - Being classed as a chicken does say something as compared with being a duck or a dog. Yet chickens are individuals. So we need to ask which is primary - the personal identity or the class? To me, once asked the question answers itself that individual uniqueness is primary - in the eye of God, hence ultimately. And this has many implications which I've hardly begun to consider.
ReplyDelete