The challenge of diversity

Humanity attempted to manage, to control, these fears by creating myths as explanations of these phenomena, as well as rituals to propitiate the larger forces which it felt to be behind them.

In a scientific age like ours, many of those early myths and propitiatory practices appear quaint, ridiculous. Yet, we haven’t entirely banished fear of the unknown. One primeval fear that continues to be fairly widespread is fear or suspicion of difference, of the unfamiliar or unknown.

How do we cope with this?

Doudou Diène, an ex-member of our Governing Board was also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination. Coming from Senegal, a nation of many different tribes and cultures, he was very aware of what he termed the “tension of difference”, the tension engendered when cultures or individuals with different values and beliefs come into contact with each other.

The outcome of such a tension, he learned, could be one of two things. Either a culture or an individual embraced the unknown, learned new values, perspectives, and consequently modified their own perspectives and beliefs. Or the culture or individual drew back into itself, fiercely reaffirmed its familiar identity, and rejected, even demonised, everything new or different by which it felt threatened. Diène noted that the latter response was far more common than the former…

The threat to our familiar identity and ways of perceiving seems to be one factor why we often reject the different, the unknown. But another, or additional, component may be our difficulty in dealing with diversity. Our normal minds excel at categorization, logic and analysis. But generally these minds are far weaker when it comes to synthesizing, to integrating new and disparate elements, and usually give up the attempt completely when confronted with apparent contradictions, like unity and diversity.

It’s why spiritual disciplines which seek to break the hold of the mind upon the individual often employ koans and other such ‘illogicalities’ to confound it.

This tendency to reject or be suspicious of diversity because we cannot deal with it takes many forms. Most commonly it is expressed in a retreat into simplistic solutions based upon either/or choices: “You are either with me or against me”.

Another response is to emphasise the need to preserve the ‘purity’ of a concept or belief from adulteration from different perspectives. Herein lies the roots of dogma.

Yet another response is to ‘round off the edges’ of diversity by making out that very different beliefs and perspectives are actually similar, a kind of ecumenism of the mind. 

All these can be witnessed in Auroville which, because of the extreme diversity of its inhabitants, tests our ability to deal with it to the limit. What is common to all these responses is they make the world a poorer place, devoid of the rich complexity necessary for living a fulfilling life. For they deal with diversity either by excluding everything that doesn’t fit with a particular narrow vision – the ‘purist’ approach – or by reducing it to binary choices, or they play down genuine differences.

But if the ordinary mind resists such integration, what can we do?

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother made it clear that only when we raise our consciousness to a higher level can we comprehend how to integrate what seem to us now disparate, even contradictory elements.

But until then?

Well, it’s worth noting that fear, distrust, of that which is different, of diversity, is not the only deep urge within us. There is also the opposite. One part of us also seems to crave novelty. It’s why we go on holiday to unknown places, why we abandon small village life for the exciting diversity offered by cities, and why we seek out new books, new films, new contacts.

The problem is that often we set bounds to how much novelty we are willing to absorb, for it should not be so novel as to threaten our fundamental sense of ourselves, our beliefs and our culture. It’s why, while some of us journey to exotic locations, they stay in global hotel chains where the décor and cuisine are standard, and thus comfortingly familiar, the world over.

In other words, to adapt the famous phrase of T.S.Eliot, it seems that “humankind cannot bear very much diversity”.

Nevertheless, if the impulse to seek some kind of novelty, diversity, is also within us, it may be possible to encourage it by creating the most propitious settings for it to manifest.

Socially, this may mean creating a secure environment which allows individuals to relax their need to defend their entrenched perceptions and start listening to other perspectives. The recent Dreamweaving exercise was one such attempt. While it wasn’t fully successful, partly because of time constraints, for many participating architects the opportunity to ‘weave’ new ways of thinking into their own way of seeing things was liberating, allowing them to embrace greater diversity.

Ultimately, one thing seems clear. Diversity, whether of natural systems, mindsets or human populations, is a vital component of life, driving creativity and allowing the flexibility to adjust to new realities. For an experiment like Auroville, which seeks to evolve its group-soul along with the development of its individuals, it is particularly important that we preserve our diversity for, as Sri Aurobindo points out, “the group-soul rather works out its tendencies by a diversity of opinions, a diversity of wills, a diversity of life, and the vitality of the group-life depends largely upon the working of this diversity, its continuity, its richness.”

As individuals and societies, then, our ability to solve our most pressing challenges, as well as to evolve to higher levels of consciousness, will depend upon our capacity to enlarge our understanding of the diversity of existence while simultaneously grasping its underlying unity and interconnectedness.