If you live in the After Age, chances are you live in a society with a greater amount of diversity than it has ever had before.
Because of economic and technological changes, people who were once separated by thousands of miles – and unaware of each other’s existence, appearance, behavior, culture, and beliefs – find themselves living next door to each other, doing business together, or otherwise in contact. This is not new, but the frequency and degree to which it is happening in the After Age is shocking.
But our diversity in the After Age is not just about once distant peoples bumping into each other because of immigration or trade. Diversity grows from within as well. The hard-earned freedom and equality of the After Age mean anyone is freer to choose a life and lifestyle that is better for them, instead of what is expected based on history or custom. Our freedom to be who we want to be is increasing differences within societies even without immigration.
Cooperation among human beings, individually and in groups, is the foundation upon which the progress of the After Age is built. Its future depends on that cooperation continuing, if not increasing. Rising diversity is a serious challenge to this because of the friction it causes between groups of people. In a nutshell, it is harder to cooperate with people who are not like you.
The problem of other people, and other people’s people, must be acknowledged, confronted, and overcome, or at least made manageable, if the full potential of the After Age is to be fulfilled. The good news is that successfully managing this problem is 100% possible. Indeed, we are already doing an OK job of it – not great, but OK. We just need to get better at it. For better or worse, we are going to get plenty of practice.
In the sections that follow, I will provide you with some new ways of thinking about diversity, what it is, how to live with it, and how to manage the related problem of prejudice in your own behavior. These ideas are meant to be actionable, practical tools for living in diverse societies, not solutions. They treat both our growing diversity and our imperfect response to it as facts of life, ones that are not going away, whether we want them to or not. We do not need to be perfect to be great.
Our diversity is a burden on all of us. Diversity is not, of itself, good or bad. It is simply a quality of things. A diverse bag of marbles, a diverse menu, a diverse group of people.
Diversity is, furthermore, a relative quality. It is possible for the same group of people to be very diverse according to one point of view, and not at all by another.
Finally, diversity is a moving target. As our perception of what is and is not a meaningful difference between people changes, our opinion of what constitutes diversity does as well. On an individual basis, our own awareness of group differences changes all the time, or fades away completely.
However, diversity within a society is a burden, especially diversity from the three biggest dividers of humanity: race/ethnicity, religion, and language/culture. These divisions and others create unequal treatment, miscommunication, tension, suspicion, jealousy, and resentment that reduce trust and cooperation and even lead to violence. This in turn can weaken a society’s ability to perform its responsibilities and maintain itself.
Again: There’s nothing new here. We have been behaving this way since before we were human beings. We are, and we will be, OK despite it. But greatness requires a bit more consideration of the issue, from all of us.
There are a few ways societies deal with this problem, which I will simplify into three basic approaches: One, they don’t have this problem, or not much, because they are not very diverse. Two, they reduce diversity by expelling or eliminating part of their population. And three, they learn to accept their diversity and still function – indeed, to flourish.
The first option is either available or not. If you live in a relatively non-diverse place, congratulations, you don’t have to deal with the burden of diversity. Everyone’s the same. Yay. At least, for right now – but see the introduction to this section. Also, I would double check with the people around you. “Your people” may be more diverse than you think.
The second option is, historically, very popular, despite the fact that it is obviously immoral, and is destructive not only to the targeted group but to the rest of the population as well. It has all the drawbacks that violence and destruction have always had. Also, you have to be successful in expelling or eliminating the targeted group, or you end up with a permanently fractured and embittered population at war with itself. And of course, any survivors of your purge will now be your enemy, wherever they end up. Nonetheless, it remains very popular because it is simple to understand and easy to act on.
The third option is typically where societies end up after the first option is gone and the second has failed. It is really the only option and always has been. It is also the only road to greatness, even if it appears at first to be an unhappy, mediocre compromise. That road begins with acceptance: acceptance of diversity, and of the inescapable burden it brings.
Accepting that diversity burdens society, and by extension, you, is essential. Diversity’s burden may weigh heavy or light depending on the circumstances and depending on your point of view and lived experience. But to pretend it does not exist is dangerous. Pretending there is no burden does not allow for the possibility of easing that burden, since there is no point addressing a problem that you don’t believe exists.
Accepting that diversity burdens society does not mean rejecting diversity and it certainly does not mean diversity is bad or should be eliminated. In fact, the opposite: Diversity is who we are, and we should embrace it. But we should be honest about its drawbacks, too.
There are many things that inconvenience us or make our lives more difficult but that we nonetheless accept as part of life. Indeed, accepting diversity, despite its burdens, is to live by one of the fundamental agreements of the After Age: By making the effort to allow others to live their lives the way they wish, you best guarantee that they will do the same for you.
Everything good in the After Age comes from our ability to cooperate and coexist with each other. Even better things are likely if we can extend that cooperation beyond old boundaries of race, religion, and so on. Remember how much convenience the After Age has brought us, like longer lives, more freedom, and greater material comfort and safety, and then ask whether its burdens are really so much to bear.
Resistance to diversity is one of the burdens of diversity. To have an identity is to have an identity to defend.
We fear people who are different from us entering our society and changing it. This is true when people cross a geographical border. But it is also true when people cross a social border, some rule or boundary we have set up in our societies for what is considered acceptable behavior.
Where these borders lie is different for everyone. But for each of us, when they are crossed, we feel threatened. To put it a different way, resistance to social change is a feature of every society, because it is a feature of every person. Everyone has their boundaries they don’t like to see crossed, an understanding of their world they do not want changed or disrupted.
Our fear is not irrational, either. Society matters. Community, shared culture, shared identity, these things matter to human beings, whoever we are. They are intrinsically valuable to everyone who is allowed to enjoy them. And, as I have explained, diversity burdens this valuable shared identity. If we did not react when this identity was threatened, what would be the point of having it in the first place?
Ironically, this resistance to diversity is one thing that unites us as human beings. Over the years I have been writing this book there has been a rise in nationalistic, sectarian, and other ethnocentric movements in democracies around the world. It is a worrying trend. But it is also oddly comforting, because it underlines how much we all have in common.
Every country and people in the world is under pressure from an increasingly crowded, interconnected world. Hardening one’s identity – racial, religious, national, or whatever – is a common reaction to this universal insecurity, like a turtle retreating into its shell. It is not the most constructive response, and certainly not the most sustainable long-term. But it is very familiar. Its frequency around the world reminds me that we are all very alike, which in turn gives me hope we can eventually move past this initial reaction towards better cooperation.
In other words, by being so consistent in the way we insist on the differences between us, we bind ourselves closer together as a species, even as we try to drive ourselves apart. It becomes more difficult to see one instance of intergroup hatred as a unique expression of specific circumstances, and more like a chronic problem with the human condition that needs to be dealt with in a practical manner, for example in the way we deal with sewage, or traffic, or infectious disease.
If you feel your ethnic, national, religious, or some other identity is under threat, I hope you will consider how universal, and generic, your defensive emotions are before getting all up in arms about it – figuratively, or literally. The fact that this is behavior shared by everyone else, including members of the group(s) you feel are threatening you, not to mention many senseless animal species as well, should make you reconsider your motivations. Are you really motivated by the love and defense of your unique, special, and glorious motherland, people, or creed? Might it instead be something more primitive and simple? From there you might start thinking about what, exactly, you are so angry, frightened, or defensive about to begin with. The borders around our identities change all the time. And yet we defend them, sometimes violently, as if they were eternally fixed in place. How does that make any sense?
On the other hand, for anyone who condemns those described above for their behavior, I would ask: Are you sure you would never do the same? Are you sure you haven’t already? The remarkable similarity of divisive ethnic, sectarian, political and other movements around the world should make anyone who thinks they would never engage in such behavior think twice. Clearly, this is in our nature. Somewhere in you is the potential to do the same. Given the pressure we are all under this century, there’s a decent chance you will live up to that potential. Rather than thinking of bigotry or xenophobia as something other people do, start thinking of it as one of the burdens that our diversity places on all of us. We need that acceptance.
We cannot choose the parts of human nature that we want, we have to take it all. We must learn to live with the flaws of human nature, and yet create a better future than the past. And we have.
Just because diversity burdens our shared identities does not mean we must choose between the two. That is the paradox here, yet another we must live with in the After Age.
Where everyone bends, no one has to break. Our diversity burdens society and each other. Showing that you are aware of this burden, and bearing your part of it, goes a long way towards easing it.
Bearing the burden of diversity means changing your behavior and your life to accommodate it. How exactly we change depends on who we are and where we live. But the principle is the same everywhere: We must bend towards each other so that none of us must break.
To bend means to demonstrate that you are aware of another person or people, and are willing to accommodate them, and indeed inconvenience yourself in doing so, even if only in a small or temporary way. In exchange, we should expect, and demand, the freedom to otherwise live our lives the way we see fit. It is a worthwhile trade, I think.
Making the effort necessary to get along, that is, to bend towards others, is generally more important to other people than the language you speak, the religion you practice, or the color of your skin. It is the greatest signal of respect for people different from you because we all know it takes effort. Making an effort to accommodate another person who is different from you can, if only for a moment, eclipse hundreds of years of hatred. You might think that does not matter, but it is these brief moments between individuals that make up the fabric of society, and determine its fate.
I won’t pretend this burden falls equally on everyone all of the time. But the inequity of the burden does not negate the principle itself. If we believe in our society, we carry our individual responsibility to support it regardless of what others might or might not do. Is that unfair? Some of the time, yes. (I said cooperation was difficult and unfair.)
Our present and future greatness is about the many of us who accept this burden, not the few who do not. If enough of us do, the bickering of those that do not will be drowned out, like a kind of herd immunity. Indeed it may be the acceptance of this obligation, or not, that most clearly divides the people of the After Age today and will most closely predict its future.
If the idea of people “bending towards each other” sounds vague, unrealistic, or naive, you are not paying attention to the world around you. Most people are doing this all the time. From the moment we entered this world, we have been trained to get along with others. When we do, it feels good. Certainly, it is not the only thing that drives us, but its power cannot be denied. In fact, its power is equal to, if not greater than, our fear and suspicion of each other.
Just because this instinct and training can be distracted by minor differences or passing emotions does not negate its power. While fear and suspicion are a fire that must be fed, our ability to cooperate is like the grass that grows beneath our feet: unnoticed, unremarked upon, but ceaseless, tenacious, and self-perpetuating. We trample it, and yet it keeps growing back. In other words, when we are not tearing down our societies, we are ceaselessly building them up, usually without even noticing.
It should be assumed that the process of bending towards each other will mean some sacrifice from all of us. It is not neutral. It is changing us and changing our societies. We are bending towards something, even if that new standard is not fully defined. Things will be, and have been, lost. New things emerge. New rules of behavior, new obligations, new rituals, new taboos. This is not surprising: The After Age is a new thing, too, and it is still creating itself.
But the core things we value from our societies and from other people will not disappear, even if they are temporarily obscured by change. Human beings build societies like a bird builds a nest: we use whatever we have at hand. If what we have is a diverse group of people, then that is the material we will use to create our society. But the nest still serves the same purpose it always has.
Accept your hypocrisy. There are two sets of moral rules each of us carry around in our heads. Rules about what is right and wrong, fair and unfair, reasonable and unreasonable. One set is for people like us. The other set is for everyone else.
The reason is simple: Some people matter more to us than others. When bad things happen to one of Us we are filled with compassion. When the same bad things happen to one of Them we have less compassion, or are indifferent, or worse, we figure they deserved it for some reason. When one of Them commits an atrocious act, it is a crime. When one of Us does the exact same thing, it is completely justified. We are all hypocrites.
Some people would say this is not hypocrisy, but simply what it means to be part of a group. I agree. Also, it is hypocrisy. If you live in the After Age, you benefit enormously from the principle, enshrined in government, in law, and in the unspoken fabric of our culture, that every person matters and is, on some level, worthy of equal treatment. Yet when it comes to how we live our lives, some people matter more than others. That sounds pretty hypocritical to me!
In diverse societies this hypocrisy is a universal discomfort, one everyone must struggle with every day. We share a society, a nation, and a planet. We are expected to live alongside each other, to be in some sense one. And yet we are not – not at all. How is that supposed to work?
One way to deal with it is to embrace a view of the world where only some people matter. This standpoint is at least not hypocritical, as long as you stop believing in everything else that brought us to this miraculous moment in human history: democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and so on. In that case, your motto would be, “It’s us vs. them, and that’s how I like it.” Unfortunately, this attitude fits our natural tendencies like a glove. That is one of the reasons it is so appealing: It feels right. Of course, a lot of things feel right but turn out to be a disaster.
For everyone who is made uncomfortable, if not repelled, by that position, we must soldier on through our hypocrisy. We must do the work of figuring out how to live with each other despite the fact that we are emotional creatures that form attachments to some people and not others, not perfectly rational robots.
The most important thing any individual can do in this situation is to simply acknowledge that when it comes to “our people” we are hopelessly biased. We should not try to rationalize our way out of this bias, or try to find an excuse why it is really true, or try to deny it completely. We should just accept it. Acceptance is a steady wind that can blow us towards tolerance and (more) equal treatment of people different from us.
Just knowing that your hypocrisy exists will empower you to see the world differently – and more clearly. Awareness of our hypocrisy makes understanding other people’s motivations much easier. This makes the world a more understandable place, which is an obvious benefit to anyone living in it.
As I said above, we all carry two sets of books, two sets of moral rules in our heads. One for Us, the other for Them. Keep those books within reach. That way you can refer to them whenever you are confronted with difficult decisions in a diverse, interconnected world. What does one moral code say that the other does not? How big of a difference is there? Can you reconcile the two?
Anyone who is capable of compassion for people not like them struggles with this inborn hypocrisy. Thankfully, that is most people, even if, sometimes, we behave otherwise.
Prejudice is inevitable, bigotry takes effort. Diversity is a big topic, and its existence in the society around you, or lack thereof, is something out of the control of the individual. But prejudice, a frequent side effect of it, is not. Whether we are dispensing it or receiving it, prejudice is something we all deal with everyday living in diverse societies. This section is about how we dispense prejudice, not how we receive it, and how you might change the way you think about your own prejudice for your and everyone else’s benefit.
For a long time, prejudice against other groups of people for various reasons was not just accepted, but expected and encouraged. In the After Age, such behavior is no longer welcomed, at least publicly (usually). This is a considerable improvement, but we could certainly do better. To do so, we have to go a step farther and take an honest look at what we are doing when we discriminate against each other. As with diversity itself, refusing to acknowledge the nature of the problem makes it impossible to manage or overcome.
Prejudice is a core human trait. To expect yourself or anyone else to rid themselves of prejudice is like expecting them to rid themselves of their sex drive. Prejudice, like sexual desire, exists in virtually everyone and can arise in us without us being consciously aware of it, even against our best intentions. To believe otherwise is to be like a zealous monk who whips himself every time a sexy thought pops into his head.
This is why I find accusations of racism or sexism or any other expression of prejudice to be beside the point. I know for a fact that I am racist and sexist, and many other “-ists” as well. I also know that, in all likelihood, you are too.
I suppose there are a very few lucky people who hold no biases against other people. People who have, somehow, miraculously, not absorbed the hundreds of different prejudices of society around them. People who judge others “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”. Those rare individuals, if they exist, are few and far between. Most of us are damned with suspicious, judgmental minds.
In other words, the capacity to discriminate is universal. But that does not take any of us off the hook. Prejudice, when it comes out of our heads and into the real world, harms other people. It harms the fabric of our societies, societies which are becoming more diverse every day, in a world that is more interdependent every day.
Is it possible to remove prejudice from our minds? I strongly doubt it. Most of the thoughts, and virtually all of the feelings we have pop into our heads uninvited. They are, furthermore, frequently contradictory, inconsistent, unstable, and incoherent. So not only do we have very little control over our thoughts and feelings, but it is often impossible to tell what they mean, or how much we believe them, or what we believe, period.
Given that mess, how would we root out something as ingrained as suspicion of differences in other people? So widespread and varied that it exists and has existed in every human culture in the world? Behavior so fundamental we can see it happening in chimpanzees and insects? People spend their entire lives in therapy trying to change a bad mental habit. Overcoming bias would require the same on a global basis. Meanwhile, we have an urgent problem on our hands: We are diverse, and becoming more so. How do we get along?
There is an alternative, one that works on the same problem, but from the outside in. It is not as idealistic as doing the work to truly uproot our prejudice, but it is more practical and thus more achievable. It is not to change what we think, but how we act.
This distinction between thoughts and actions is the difference between prejudice and bigotry. Most of the time, we are either ignorant of the prejudice we feel towards certain people, or are aware of it, and try to ignore it. Sometimes, however, we are aware of our prejudices, or are made aware of them, and then embrace them. This is bigotry. When it comes to living and getting along in the diverse, interconnected societies that are so common in the After Age, it is bigotry that is the real problem.
The distinction between prejudice and bigotry is the most important distinction we can make when living with people that are different from us. As I have explained above, prejudice exists in our minds, and we cannot control what we feel or, mostly, what we think. What we can control is how we act. Bigotry, ultimately, is an act, because it is a conscious, deliberate decision.
The difference between prejudice and bigotry is like the difference between being so angry at someone you want to punch them, and actually punching them, or the difference between being attracted to a beautiful stranger, and grabbing their ass. Just as we are capable of knowing the difference between violent feelings and violent actions, or between sexual attraction and sexual assault, we must learn to distinguish between prejudice and bigotry. Prejudice is inevitable; bigotry is wrong.
Bigotry can be anything from being slightly colder to people of a certain group, to putting them in concentration camps. Both are conscious acts. In both cases, we allow our bias against certain people to overcome our obligation to treat them as we would want to be treated ourselves.
I would like nothing better than if we all cared for everyone equally, with no regard for creed or color. And I encourage anyone to make a conscious effort in pursuit of the ideal solution of overcoming prejudice from within. I do not think it is possible to do so, but I could be wrong, and at the very least you might learn something about yourself. Good luck.
In the meantime, I will settle for everyone keeping our nasty, or merely ignorant, impatient, angry, fearful, dismissive, or otherwise, opinions to ourselves, and maybe a few friends who know better than to take us seriously. As an individual, controlling how you act instead of what you think or feel is a much easier task to pull off. Focusing on how we act, rather than what we think or feel, may not do much for our own prejudice. However, it starves society around us of the bigotry that causes so much discord, and provides room for an alternative to grow and gain strength. This is not the perfect solution, but we do not need to be perfect to be great.
Bigotry does not have to be incorrect or unjustified to be wrong. Bigotry may come from personal experience or national history, from paranoid delusions or the most rigorous scientific study. Bigotry is founded on prejudice, and it would be naive to claim that all prejudice is unjustified.
Many people get tripped up on this. Those who have discovered, or think they’ve discovered, some truth or justification to their prejudice use that truth to justify bigotry. They focus on it, and everything else becomes irrelevant. They forget that the world is chock full of truths, and that some matter more than others.
Ultimately, where bigotry comes from is not as important as its effects, especially when it comes to how you and I should behave in the world. Bigotry harms others and destroys the fabric of society. That fabric is what allows us to live lives infinitely more peaceful and prosperous than our ancestors, and opens the door to a future even more promising. That is why it is so destructive.
As an individual, keeping this bigger picture in mind helps resolve conflicts between our opinions and life experience and the demands of others who do not share them. You do not have to find a solution to our collective disagreements. You just have to get along with other people, one day at a time, for the rest of your life. Simple.
Bigotry is an individual sin, not a societal one. Everyone on Earth lives in a society with history, and anyone who knows anything about history knows it is filled with horrible things done by one group of people to another group of people. Murder, mayhem, and oppression pop up in every scene, at every location around the world, from the beginning.
History has its baggage, and like an airport luggage carousel, more tumbles out every minute. Whether it happened hundreds of years ago, or just yesterday, history’s baggage has a direct effect on the way we live today and the way we treat each other. It is the source of most of the prejudice we have.
That said, neither history nor society is to blame for our bigotry, yours and mine. Only we are, you and I. History may be a cause of our prejudice, but bigotry is a conscious act, and all of us have control (most of the time) over our actions. Because bigotry is an act, it is first and foremost an individual failing, not a societal one.
Societies will always generate reasons for one group of people to discriminate against another. It is a flaw that is not going to go away, ever. It is up to us individuals to resist.
If we treat bigotry as a symptom of some greater historical or social problem, we are giving others and ourselves permission to behave the same way as well, since we are products of the same flawed society, a society that is (mostly) beyond our control. But if we treat bigotry as a personal failure, then we are all empowered to do something about it. It is front and center in our lives.
Furthermore, so much of bigotry is simply human behavior that has very little to do with the specifics of the prejudice itself. When someone screams racial epithets at the supermarket, or joins a terrorist group targeting members of another religion, it has more to do with what is going on with that person than with the specifics of their prejudice.
To be clear: prejudice is absolutely a product of society. Hatred, hostility, and suspicion between groups, which is adopted by members of those groups, is the result of social and historical forces. But this is a book about how you can help us to be great, not how we ought to be great. As I said, society is (mostly) out of your control. Your own behavior is not.
Lying. Stealing. Cheating. These are all things we know we are not supposed to do. Bigotry has never been on that list, because hatred of people not like us was accepted, if not encouraged, as being part of a group. This has to change, and it is, slowly. The best way you can contribute to this change is to see bigotry like any other bad behavior rather than something beyond your control. We don’t blame other people when we lie or steal. We shouldn’t blame our bigotry on anyone else, either. It is our own responsibility.
As an individual, viewing bigotry as a personal failure makes it more manageable. Rather than being tied up in huge social forces beyond our control, it is centered on us, on our behavior in the moment, day to day, person to person, in our lives. And the judge of our behavior is no longer history, but ourselves.
Judge the individual. I judge. I am a judgmental person. But I know I’m not alone. We all judge each other. It is not hard for judgment to veer into bigotry since it is often fueled by prejudice. The secret to reducing the amount of bigotry we bring into the world is, if and when you judge others, judge them as individuals.
There is an obvious problem with this approach: It is pretty much impossible to pull off completely. Our prejudices are always there, affecting our judgement. The ones we know about, the ones we have no clue about. Still, as difficult as this principle is to pull off, it has a couple things to its advantage.
One, it is universally true. Judge others as individuals. It’s hard to argue with and it’s hard to think of exceptions. I guess you could argue we shouldn’t judge people at all, but let’s be realistic: We are going to anyway. Besides, some people totally deserve it.
Two, it is always available. We can at any moment, in any interaction, ask ourselves whether we are really judging another person on who they are, or who we expect them to be. You can’t always know the extent of your own bias, but you can always take a second look at the person standing in front of you.
Still, it is hard. My lazy mind would prefer to come to conclusions quickly. Judging everyone as an individual means judging everyone, individually. That is tiresome. It is easier when we are in direct contact with people we see regularly, but the modern world exposes us to dozens or hundreds of strangers a day, both in person and via information technology like TV and social media. It is tiring to not group individuals based on stereotypes and prejudices when we are made aware of so many other people on a daily basis. Focus on the people around you first.
This is advice for individuals, not for governments or organizations. A government does not have the flexibility to treat each citizen as an individual. It must deal with us in bulk, and judge us in bulk. Its decisions and obligations are not the same as us individuals.
Treating others as individuals, which is how we ourselves would prefer to be treated, is the best way to live with people who are different from you. It should come as no surprise then that the best way takes more effort. Nothing worth doing ever came easy.
Diversity is our destiny. Human diversity, which flourished over the tens of thousands of years we spread across the globe, is emerging as our Achilles Heel as we reconnect in the After Age. It is not a problem limited to certain neighborhoods, or certain cities, or even certain countries. As the economies, cultures, and populations of the planet become more interconnected, the world itself starts to resemble one large, crowded, extremely diverse society. What happens inside an individual person, neighborhood, city, or nation struggling with diversity is a mirror and a prelude to what is happening to the world at large. In other words, there is no escape from this challenge but to face it head on.
Diversity imposes a burden which takes effort to manage. As an individual, you can do your part by acknowledging the burden of diversity, while committing yourself to living with it. Keep in mind that our diversity, whatever its challenges, is a side-effect of other, wonderful things that have made your life infinitely better than your ancestors. There are few things in life worth doing that don’t take effort. The work we put into learning to live with each other will pay magnificent dividends, and already has.
A society where people of different backgrounds, beliefs, practices, and cultures coexist comfortably, are treated equally, and mutually tolerated, must be considered our greatest achievement. It is proof that we can master the fear, mistrust, and anger that has caused so much grief and destruction in human history, and hobbles our progress today. A civilization that can pull that off can pull off anything. Whether such a civilization is possible is yet to be seen. Certainly, perfect harmony is not, but perfection is not required to achieve greatness.