I'm warning you, my readers, that I will probably attempt and fail to think deep thoughts. The coming of the Jewish High Holy Days, roughly a week straight of contemplating whether I've been a good person before God this past year, always put me in a gray mood.
Not to worry, however. Rather than spill my sins on the page, I'm here to tell you yours.
Well, actually, what I'm going to tell you is what technically isn't a sin but should be.
I want to tell you, my readers, of an ill in our society that is bizarre in its sheer profundity - so ubiquitous that many have mistaken it for human nature. I myself have only a very little first-hand information to tell me it isn't. Here is the revelation - our society, culture or nature has nearly no tolerance at all for diversity.
Now that I've gotten every member of the ALANA Caucus jumping up and down in agreement with me, I can explain precisely what I mean. I do not mean diversity of race, sex, class or any other factor outside of a person's control. Our society is well-known as one of the most tolerant on earth concerning those factors. Our profound flaw shows up as a lack of diversity in personalities.
Try the following experiment. As you walk down the street, perhaps to class or to get a meal, attempt to identify people their stereotypes or snatches of conversation. A few extremely obvious groups emerge easily - members of Greek organizations, followers of different religions and athletes. Now begin looking a little deeper at every single person you pass or meet. Look for repeating patterns and you will find them. Sometimes you don't even have to look - sometimes you just see four people walk down the street with one outfit and two personalities between all of them.
I don't know what everyone else feels about this phenomenon, but it sickens and terrifies me. I don't even understand why it does. I simply have an instinctive revulsion towards even the slightest uniformity in human beings. But this horrifying illness of our kind expands outwards from the individual.
Even once we leave dorm life, people choose to live in dwellings built to extremely similar specifications despite the relative cheapness and ease of producing designs that at least appear different. One only has to vary a small number of things in a small number of ways - a dozen variables with a dozen possibilities each, for example - to produce a large enough variety of clothing, dwellings, vehicles or tools that affect the image each person projects outwards to the world could that could appear profoundly unique, and yet we do not even try for this.
Once I lived in a town where the local developers had attempted to fix this commonality. I genuinely never learned that each house was a permutation of a template until I asked about the "custom" designs. Once I moved away from there I never saw even such pseudo-uniqueness again - just the continuous and creepy repetition.
Instead it appears we endeavor towards things that are uniform. We participate in activities that impose a group identity on us. We clothe ourselves according to these group identities, we listen to music based on them and we even vote based upon them. We automatically dislike the things our group dislikes - witness the senseless tribal hatred of Red Sox fans for the Yankees and their fans.
We somehow yearn to give up individuality and difference for the easy life of an ant like all other ants. However, the formative things that give us such powerful identities are stupid and arbitrary - as little as where we live or what friends we made in early childhood. Why can't we live as individuals?
I, personally, refuse to believe that this blight arises from some mythical "human nature" or that - even if it does - we can't fix it. We fix or suppress a thousand things reported to be a part of "human nature" every day, generally through measures known as "civility" or "common sense." It's the reason I haven't had to go kill a deer for my lunch today or kill a man for my wife today.
Surely we've got it in us to stop thinking as a "we" and begin thinking as an "I." Surely a person can wake up in the morning, put on clothes that they like, speak the thoughts they've always wondered if others think, listen to the music and speakers that speak to them uniquely, make the friends that like them uniquely, and, in the end, be the person whose God-given identity and evolution-given genetic code are unlike any others in the world.
The High Holy Day season has put me in the mood to make a religious proscription that the ancient sages missed, perhaps because they could not fathom the possibility of its necessity. You will not make yourself in the image of another person. That is abomination.
Eli Gottlieb is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at egottlie@student.umass.edu.
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