Making the World Safe for Difference

Nothing so well demonstrates the truth that traveling narrows the mind as the number of visitors to antique or hostile lands who return to proclaim their discovery that the people there are just like us. To be sure, likenesses should not be denied. But neither can they support sweeping affirmations about universal rights in the family of man. The likenesses that are most believable are either animal or metaphysical. We human beings are much alike in terms of animal needs, and we are all—or so most of us think—children of God. But such equalities are in the one case so basic and in the other so elevated as to have little bearing on the way we decide how to order our relations with one another.

Difference, not equality, is both the spice of life and the stuff of political morality. Nobody prizes his equality, except the person who has previously been deprived and views equality as a transitional point on the way to becoming different in a way he thinks superior. What makes life precious is difference, not equality; particularity, not universality. We do not identify ourselves as human beings first, but as sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, tribesmen and neighbors, Christians and Jews, brokers and writers, and supporters of the Giants football team. We thus feel put upon by the general rules of the political order because we are none of us people-in-general.

RJ

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Richard John Neuhaus

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Nothing so well demonstrates the truth that traveling narrows the mind as the number of visitors to antique or hostile lands who return to proclaim their discovery that the people there are just like us. To be sure, likenesses should not be denied. But neither can they support sweeping affirmations about universal rights in the family of man. The likenesses that are most believable are either animal or metaphysical. We human beings are much alike in terms of animal needs, and we are all—or so most of us think—children of God. But such equalities are in the one case so basic and in the other so elevated as to have little bearing on the way we decide how to order our relations with one another.

Difference, not equality, is both the spice of life and the stuff of political morality. Nobody prizes his equality, except the person who has previously been deprived and views equality as a transitional point on the way to becoming different in a way he thinks superior. What makes life precious is difference, not equality; particularity, not universality. We do not identify ourselves as human beings first, but as sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, tribesmen and neighbors, Christians and Jews, brokers and writers, and supporters of the Giants football team. We thus feel put upon by the general rules of the political order because we are none of us people-in-general.