I got an update from ancestry.com a few weeks ago – new information about my “community”. My first DNA results showed that I had some Italian, some Ashkenazi Jew, some Spanish, a touch of Native American in addition to the expected Middle Eastern roots. I was pleasantly surprised to have some physical connection to different peoples of the world but as time passed, updates to my “story” narrowed me down to Persian with a little bit of Northern Indian (that is Indian from Asia).
So I have some scientific proof of my origins, cool. Now what?
In recent years there’s been a move to better recognize our differences and then define our identity based on those. Are we going too far? Just because we can characterize who we are at a granular level, are we attaching too much value to that distinction? We also seem to measure the worth of a people based what they and their ancestors have contributed to humanity’s heritage – say we come across a primitive people in a remote, isolated land who have never had any contact with the rest of the world – are they humans? Do they deserve to be treated with dignity even though they’ve had no impact on science or the arts? Like the adage in English: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The notion that one must know about the culture of another in order to treat them with respect, to me, is backwards – being human is only the necessary and sufficient condition.
My world view is admittedly magnified through the lens of the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892), the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith. As young boy in Iran, probably in my first weekly Character Training Lesson class, I had to memorize “O well-beloved ones! The tabernacle of unity hath been raised. Regard ye not one another as strangers. Ye are the fruits of one tree and the leaves of one branch.” Sure, easier said that done, but that idea has been engrained in my brain, and while I’m sure I’ve accumulated biases along the way, I try to live up to the ideal of the “oneness of humanity”. Having said that, I saw that “tabernacle of unity” with my own eyes in 1992 at the Bahá’í World Congress in New York held at the Jacob Javits Center – a geometrically abstracted glass “tent” draped over steel columns designed by I.M. Pei. I heard voices of choirs from around the world sing in their local tunes and lyrics but with the same message of “oneness” – the key to solving all of the problems in the world, which at their base are spiritual in nature.
In practical terms I’ve noticed, regardless of identity, people feel that “oneness” when they see another human unable to breathe – whether it’s a group young soccer players trapped in Thai cave, or a handcuffed man under the knee of a police officer in America or Haitians gasping for air under the rubble of a collapsed building – and now humans in every part of the world desperately battling a deadly respiratory virus. It’s as if when we sense the weight of another’s suffering bearing on our chest, we see each other’s essence, we see each other’s soul – alone, single. As Bahá’u’lláh writes, we see each other with the “eye of oneness”.
So how do we sustain the empathy that only comes with pain? Perhaps more emphasis on the fact that humanity is one race and less on dividing ourselves into tribes. We can celebrate our diversity but not obsess about it. The other benefit of a focus on our shared humanity is that the descendants of the historically oppressed and descendants of the historically oppressor can see each other as one and heal the prejudices that still exists today. Reforming institutions, in my view, will not fully address the issues. Our problems are more basic than that. To clean the slate, we ought to start with first principals.
One of my favorite subjects at A&M Consolidated High School was Geometry and I had a great teacher, whose name I have regretfully forgotten. One of her homework assignments was based on what I later found to be an M. C. Esher drawing – you create a shape and then add a part to one side and subtract the same part from the opposite side and you keep going until you create a unique one that when repeated fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. We had to a make poster size drawing with that one shape, which I did. The next morning, I carefully rolled up the poster with the drawing on the inside face, held it in my hand and took my normal block long walk to the School Bus stop. When I arrived in class, I carefully unrolled the poster and discovered that a bird flying overhead had timed its flight with my gate and deposited a “gift” with perfect accuracy to catch the top of the roll and hit one of my shapes right smack in the middle – meaning all the shapes were no longer the same. True story. You may rightfully ask, what’s my point? I still like Geometry and when we had to do proofs, we had to state the axioms first – i.e. the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. The axioms had to be accepted as true otherwise the rest of the proof would fall apart.
Thomas Freidman writes, “the earth is flat” – we can literally see everything and everyone all at once. We all share the same Mitochondrial DNA – we need to get to work.
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