Social diversity

“ And this, diversity is so important, this contribution of diverse elements is so necessary to the complex strength and prosperity of the whole, that one must view with alarm all federal interference and tendency to greater centralization.
And not less to be dreaded than monotony from the governmental point of view, is the obliteration of variety in social life and in literary development. It is not enough for a nation to be great and strong, it must be interesting, and interesting it cannot be without cultivation of local variety. Better obtrusive peculiarities than universal sameness. ”

“ Let us for a moment consider the character and extent of the impulses which the influx of the newcomers imparts to the social organism. The nature of these impulses is two-fold; the increase of numbers adds power to the community, and the diversity of interests which is an inevitable concomitant of increased population, brings wealth, culture, and all the higher gains of human effort. ”

“ Since now socialization only occurs among human beings for the sake of such purposes, we shall discover the laws of social forms only by collecting such societary phenomena of the most diverse contents, and by ascertaining what is common to them in spite of their diversity. ”

“ Diversity in social work may today be more conspicuous than likeness but under the diversity essential likeness can still be traced. Despite all appearances to the contrary it has its own department of human affairs and its universal [Pg 25] common interest inherited from charity and to this department of human affairs, to the service of this interest, it brings a method adopted from science. ”

“ This implies originality, independence, diversity,—the outcome of which is not a tame common likeness in the elements of a community, but differences which when properly harmonized give strength to the social structure. These leading spirits organized their likenesses and differences into a little republic, based upon integrity, and by mutual service tending to the common good realizing what was best in the ability of each. ”

“ This does not mean that the world will not continue to be organised on the basis of nationality; it means only that the present national divisions are not permanent. The law of natural variation will operate in producing diversity in the complexion and culture of communities; and the race will contain to the end an infinite variety of social types. ”

“ But these diversities in natural conditions, not merely thus directly produce diversities in social development, but, by producing diversities in social development, bring out in man himself an obstacle, or rather an active counterforce, to improvement. As families and tribes are separated from each other, the social feeling ceases to operate between them, and differences arise in language, custom, tradition, religion—in short, in the whole social web which each community, however small or large, constantly spins. ”

“ As all stages of social development, from the stone age up, are yet to be found in contemporaneously existing communities, so in the same country and in the same city are to be found, side by side, groups which show similar diversities. ”

“ President and brothers, I owe you an apology for detaining you so long with this unsubstantial matter, this unwritten poetry of the profession. I am inclined to believe, however that the actual intellectual and moral tone of a given period, as well as the social status, has no truer index than its current anecdotes. Every new and formative community is marked with distinctive individualities. In the onward sweep of development and civilization, and in the largeness of population, individuality becomes fused [228] in the general mass, and loses its salient characteristics. ”

“ The more a fairly unitary folk-type emerges from the racial fusions, and the more other factors than descent come into prominence—such as common interest in internal order and external defence, or a remarkable personal ability on the part of individual leaders of the lower classes—the greater the tendency, on the one hand, towards the abolition of traditional differences, and, on the other, towards an increased recognition of personal achievement as the basis of social standing. ”

“ And it seems to me that the influence of this social net or environment will explain what is so often taken as proof of race differences—the difficulty which less civilized races show in receiving higher civilization, and the manner in which some of them melt away before it. ”

“ When we take a sufficiently wide and intelligent survey, we realize that the tendency of a community to slacken its natural rate of increase is an essential phenomenon of all advanced civilization. The more intelligent nations have manifested the tendency first, and in each nation the more educated classes have taken the lead, but it is only a matter of time to bring all civilized nations, and all social classes in each nation, into line. ”

“ Beginning from the family unit and its various extensions, the human race has developed, with varying degrees of success, societies based on the clan, the tribe, the city-state, and most recently the nation. This progressively broader and more complex social milieu provides human potential with both stimulation and scope for development, and this development, in turn, has induced ever-new modifications of the social fabric. Humanity’s coming-of-age, therefore, must entail a total transformation of the social order. ”

“ As a means to this end we advocate, not such social equality between these races as would disregard human likes and dislikes, but such a social equilibrium as would, throughout all the complicated relations of life, give due and just consideration to culture, ability, and moral worth, whether they be found under white or black skins. ”

“ In place of natural selection, group selection, and sexual selection, we have had at work, within each people in increasing degrees, various forms of social selection—military selection, selection by the towns, selection by the church, political selection with its exiles and its colonial system, and lastly economic selection, which has become exceedingly influential in recent years among ourselves. ”

“ But apart from such causes it seems to be a general—I will not say universal—law of social growth that an independent political community, even if originally the same in race, religion, and habits as its neighbours, tends to draw apart from them, and to form an individuality of its own, creating a national type and impressing that type upon its members. ”

“ If a nation is composed from stocks not too diverse, or if the original stocks have fused by intercrossing and have produced a fairly homogeneous people; and if this nation has enjoyed a long period of natural evolution undisturbed by violent influences from outside, conquests or invasions or immigrations on a great scale; then the social environment will have been brought in the main into harmony with the innate qualities of the people, and it will mould the individuals of each generation very strongly, accentuating and confirming those innate tendencies. ”

“ As the community expands, taking in new families or tribes or nations, reaching out to new regions, learning new industries, developing new ideas of man, of nature, of the gods, of duty, inventing new industries, discovering new truths, and developing a new language, all these fresh acquirements of the community become the possession of its individual members. ”

“ Importance of social environment I take the explanation of the differences that distinguish communities to be this: That each society, small or great, necessarily weaves for itself a web of knowledge, beliefs, customs, language, tastes, institutions and laws. Into the web woven by each society (or rather, into these webs, for each community above the simplest is made up of minor societies that overlap and interlace each other) the individual is received at birth and continues until his death. ”

“ And what my entire body of work over the last 20 years has been devoted to is getting blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, young, old to work together, starting when I was a community organizer. And my own life embodies that diversity. That's what America's about and that's what this campaign has been about. ”

“ In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, laws that are basic to both personal and community life have been reformulated in the context of a society that embraces the whole range of human diversity. New laws and concepts address the further needs of a human race that is entering on its collective coming of age. “O peoples of the earth!”, is Bahá’u’lláh’s appeal, “Cast away that which ye possess, and, on the wings of detachment, soar beyond all created things. ”

“ The truth seems to be that with an increased population and the multiplicity of interests and influences at play on [Pg 281] men, we may expect a greater diversity of mental types in the future than could be found at any period in the past. The supposed uniformity of society in a democratic age is apparent, not real; artificial distinctions are replaced by natural differences; and within the one great community exists a vast number of smaller communities, each having its special intellectual and moral characteristics. ”

“ In cities where the professional and well-to-do class is large they have formed society—society as discriminating as the actual conditions will allow it to be; I should say, perhaps, society possessing discriminating tendencies which become rules as fast as actual conditions allow. This statement will, I know, sound preposterous, even ridiculous, to some persons; but as this class of colored people is the least known of the race it is not surprising. These social circles are connected throughout the country, and a person in good standing in one city is readily accepted in another. ”

“ All I wish to enforce is, that the three common causes of the social and moral differences of individuals are to be found in race, organization, and circumstances—that none of us are entirely proof against the influence of these three conditions—the ethnological, the physiological, and the associative elements of our idiosincracy. ”

“ Already our experience with the social group as a unit in the social complex, leads us to suspect that the mere social unit has little distinctive value as a culture unit. Thus, if we turn to one of these centers, select the social unit appearing to have the most typical culture, and then move outward, we find the culture changes from one social unit to the next, not abrupt, but gradual or transitional. ”

“ The problems presented by the differences between the various races of man, and by the differences between social groups in the same races, are, of course, entirely distinct, and each requires separate treatment. ”

“ That means that every community, through the very character of the environment which it imposes upon the individuals that compose it, tends to determine the personal traits as it does determine the language, the vocation, social values, and, eventually, the personal opinions, of the individuals who compose it. ”

“ The origin of these divisions we have found in the hard and fast walk which mark off social groups and classes within a group: like those between rich and poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. These barriers mean absence of fluent and free intercourse. This absence is equivalent to the setting up of different types of life-experience, each with isolated subject matter, aim, and standard of values. ”

“ There a circumscribed population of negro race has had a political and social and religious organisation and the elements of higher culture impressed upon it by Europeans, in the belief that it would be possible to construct a social environment which would mould the people. ”

“ It here means the exceptionally gifted and efficient minority, no matter what the position in which its members may have been born, or what the sphere of social progress in which their exceptional efficiency shows itself. ”

“ Let me repeat, therefore, with all possible emphasis, that the problem of progress is not primarily one of increasing light-heartedness, pure and simple, nor yet a problem of racial unification or of political centralization; it is rather a problem of so developing the structure of society that the individual may have the fullest opportunity for development. ”

“ Vast new possibilities open to the race; the traditional life of mankind, its traditional systems of association, are challenged and threatened; and all the social thought, all the political activity of our time turns in reality upon the conflict of this ancient system whose essentials we have here defined and termed the Normal Social Life with the still vague and formless impulses that seem destined either to involve it and the race in a final destruction or to replace it by some new and probably more elaborate method of human association. ”

“ Unity and difference here too weave their eternal web, the greater social scheme which none of us who are part of it can ever see in its entirety, but whose infinite subtlety and harmony we may more and more comprehend and admire. As a community grows in civilisation and culture, its traditions are no longer clear and definite ways of thinking, its usages are no longer uniform, its spirit is no longer to be summed up in a few phrases. ”