Dear Friends,
It seems to me… diversity makes complex systems robust and enduring. We see this in many areas of the human condition. The Briggs Meyers personality’s for instance. There are 16 types, each has their strengths and weaknesses, if we were all ISFPs, the world would end just as if we were all ENTJs. It is the diversity of personality types that allows humanity to do the multitude of jobs, and meet the random emergencies, that must come up in any living complex system. The same holds true of intelligence… the most hated psychological factor. If everyone was a genius, who would clean the toilets, if everyone was diminished, who would invent the Polio vaccines of the future? Complex systems thrive, when the individual members are diverse in a myriad of ways, yet remain interdependent and interconnected.
Every human being has value that is intrinsic to the definition of human being. We all have a place. Even the most retarded, malformed and diseased among us, if only to humble us by showing us our true condition. “There before the grace of God go I.” To deny another his or her intrinsic humanity is to deny one’s own. Because if someone, anyone, is not intrinsically valuable, than neither are you or I. We have innate value in our ability to reason, empathy, sympathy, humor, knowledge of the future and most of all, the spark of divinity that God himself carefully ignited in each of us, and has tenderly kept lit our whole lives. Those who have the hubris, arrogance and lack of self awareness… to quash that which God himself tends, judge themselves unworthy by their actions.
To those that would eliminate the slow, malformed, diseased and other unwanted qualities by eugenics, I would ask, how much genetic diversity, is the right amount to erase from the human genome? Perhaps the human genome would function fine if we took out 10%? Maybe we could clean out the diseased 20% with only positive effects? Why stop there? Once the diseased 20% has been eradicated why not make everyone tan well? Eliminate the 2% of genes that make people burn. But that is foolish, when we could use that technology to make everyone hansom and beautiful! Just clean out another 25% and everyone born after that would be beautiful! By taking ever more genes out of the human genome, we could eliminate many ailments… and shorten our lives, like we have dogs.
Complexity is all around us, in our societies, economies, ecologies, and in our very bodies. From charm quarks to the operation of the cosmos reality is a complex system. In a complex system, diversity within a set of parameters creates robustness, but if there is too much diversity, then any emergent phenomenon is quashed, because interdependence and interconnections break, which collapses any emergent phenomenon back into the chaos of potential. Introduce more and more diversity to an emerged system, and it will hang together, until a “long tailed event” occurs. That event will shock the system, and if it does not fall back together because there is too much diversity, it will fall apart. Complexity requires some rules, remove them, and the dancing landscape becomes a temblor.
Diversity is not created by silencing diverse voices… silencing diverse voices is something else. It is that diversity of voices that provide the guard rails for society. When some voices are silenced for whatever reason their lack allows society to list. As removing genetic diversity from our genome is a sure path to extinction, we see that too much diversity is not good either. Wisdom is accepting the innate value of every human being. If we understand these things, then we can understand that race is a form of diversity too, one that incorporates genes, attributes, abilities and other characteristics. Therefore, if one race is generally smarter, and another is adroit, while still another is faster, that does not change the intrinsic value of anyone or any race… It adds to the robustness of the Human Race.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
