The second day of olympics coverage and an interesting conversation with my beloved kept me up WAY past my bedtime, and caused me to be very tardy to work today–9:45.
The olympics coverage has been excellent, though for once, I wish I had cable (MSNBC, CNBC, and Bravo) so that I could watch some of the other events. I’d really like to see some of the equestrian stuff, and I’ve heard good things about fencing this year. Matt Fagenbush (sp?), one of my autocross buddies, is a competitive fencer, and after he explained the sport to me (3 blades–foil, epée, and saber), seems like it’d be amazing to watch.
* * *
So that had me up late, as did a conversation with Whitney that brings-up and excellent blog topic: Should we treat all people equally? I pose the question not so much for an answer, but so that each reader might examine his reaction to the question.
Let’s look closer. “Should we treat all people equally?” will invoke one of two responses:
-
Politically Correct/Pie in the sky: Of course we should. All people are God’s creation. All people have the same rights. All people deserve to be treated the same way
-
more common: Of course we shouldn’t. All people are different, and each must be treated individually. I’ll not treat a felon the same as a minister, nor a prostitute the same as a nun
Since my conversion to Christianity, I’ve hoarded the former view–All people are equal, similar, homogenous on some level, if only in that all are sinnners. However, it’s easy to disprove this assertion. All people are NOT equal: Citizens may vote, non-citizens may not; adults may drink, children may (should!) not; Laypeople can have sex, Catholic clergy may not. Equality is illusory.
Yes, we can subdivide and subdivide, saying “Well, within the group of WASPs living in Central Kentucky from 1940-1970, they’re all the same on issue ‘X’”. Consider, though, how disingenuous such subdivisions are. When we have 100,000 autonomous groups, isn’t it easier to just ditch the idea that people are all equal and admit to ourselves, they’re not.
I do not posit this as an excuse for racism, elitism, or sexism. All three of those muddle the above two positions with a third position:
- The stereotyper: Of course we should treat all people within “groups” equally. People within large racial/ethnic/socio-economic groups all behave the same (in general), hence they all deserve the same treatment. It’s just easier that way.
In the above, what we’ve got is incomplete division: The stereotyper finds massive groups of society that he can treat as a single, individual unit. In a way, this extends natural human behavior: We’re amazingly good at perceiving, grouping, and filtering information, and the only way to do that is to create abstract structures in our mind for storing data. If we had to store every piece of minutiae about everything in our lives, we’d be helpless. By grouping, we can store more information without storing more actual data.
Example: Imagine perceiving a building as each individual brick in the facade. Calling to mind the building would require a Herculean mental effort. Perceiving a whole city would be impossible.
So, basically, human beings try to group and “factor-out” as much information as we can so that we can hold it in our brains. However, when dealing with people, this can get us into trouble.
I mean, I could go on and on here, but the point of our conversation was a tacit agreement: One must treat people as individuals. Not necessarily equally, but with simple human respect.