UNITY, NOT UNIFORMITY

Dr. Anthony Savari Raj

Associate Professor of Philosophy &

Head, Department of Arts

MUJ

Invited as we are to the banquet of life from different regions, religions, languages, genders, aspirations and even temperaments, it may be interesting and important to consider what it means to live and enjoy a life of diversity and harmony in our times. As we know, to exist is to co-exist, and a mutual acceptance of one another, guided by a sense of diversity and inclusion may be a meaningful way forward for all of us.

Let’s imagine ourselves in a garden. A garden with a variety of flowers is more enchanting than the garden with flowers of the same kind. If all the musical notes are going to be uniform and same, would there be any harmony?  Unity, therefore, need not be uniformity, and we feel more connected to each other not in spite of our differences, but because of our differences.

Now, global citizens as we are, let’s consider the global garden, in which all of us find ourselves at the moment.

One of the novelties of our times seems to the increasing meeting of people, cultures and world-views. Scholars tell us that we indeed live in a second mutation period. The first mutation period (6th century B.C) witnessed the birth and the blossoming of three important civilizations of the world: the Chinese, Indian and the Greek.  After centuries of splendid isolation, there seems to be now a cross-cultural wind blowing. There is a growing realization that in our contemporary cross-cultural human situation, no single culture, religion, discipline or world-view is sufficient even to face – let alone solve – any of our human problems single handedly.

We witness more concretely, for example, the interdisciplinary mood that is emerging in the academic arena.  No more biology and chemistry in splendid isolation, we have now biochemistry. Similarly, biophysics, exenomics, ecophilosophy, bioinformatics, genetic engineering, and the list is endless, which indeed  give witness to the fact that no single discipline is sufficient to capture the mystery of life all by itself, and that the universal range of human experience cannot be reduced to a single human phylum, however ancient, modern or alluring it may be.

And yet, we find ourselves still in a paradoxical human situation with an equally powerful tendency towards a radical divisiveness, fanaticism and absolutism of all sorts, with the destructive monomorphic attitude: Truth is ONE, and I ALONE have it. The manifestation of this monomorphic tendency seems to range from the slogans of “one truth,” “one God,” “one empire,” or “one king,” in times past, to the more contemporary slogans of “one culture,” “one religion,” “one race,” “one language,” “one ideology,” “one party,”  “one science,” “one democracy,” “one world market,” or “one technological civilization.”  What ultimately this implies is unity is uniformity and a homogenization of life and experience.

Sharers of this paradoxical situation and also the common global garden, the challenge and task before us,  individually and collectively, is to minimize our experiences and  practices of absolutisms, exclusions and fanaticisms of all sorts, and maximize and prioritize values of mutual learning and enrichment. “Unity in diversity” has been so much stressed and inculcated in the past. Our times indeed equally demand a discernment of “diversity in unity” with a greater spirit of openness and receptivity to “not in spite of differences, but because of differences.”  After all, it’s only in receiving, conceiving can take place!