When I teach poetry I eventually give my students an assignment called the "telescope poem." They have to take a simple object and flesh out all the connections the object has to the world. If it's a piece of paper, the list of connections could run back through the stationer to the mill worker to the logger to the tree in Oregon. I did this because I wanted them to learn that none of us is what we are without the help of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people we don't know and, oftentimes, could care less about. The assignment was really a sermon, an adjunct to John Donne's "No man is an island, entire of itself."
I'm reminded of this assignment as I prepare this talk. I'm consuming electricity generated by Public Service workers I don't know (and probably never will), which runs a computer with silicon chips made by California workers, which prints out a draft of this talk on paper milled somewhere from pulp tress felled some where else. Just a moment's thought brings out the wild, almost numbing array of threads that bind us all together. (And if, as Carl Sagan says, we are all made out of the leftover materials of exploded stars, then the connectedness goes out to the cosmos.) This is a wide-bottomed thought -- the oneness of all -- and it comforts us.
Yet it shouldn't, at least not entirely. We are not really one people on this planet, though we are all connected. We can perhaps talk about "oneness" only if we reduce all the fierce complexity of human life to vague, usually emotional or biological, correspondences, like Shylock's speech in The Merchant of Venice. This is not a oneness that stands strong since it's achieved as much my denying differences as recognizing similarities. We should not comfort ourselves by such denials.
John Donne, I think, had it wrong; we are all islands. Our lives on this planet are more like archipelagos than a multi- colored tapestry; living together is "connect the dots," not weaving. While humans may be social animals, they are not communal animals. They like the comfort of company, but they do not like subordinating their search for pleasure to a more common, and therefore less personal, purpose. As Hobbes pointed out in Leviathan, humans seem to be engaged in a restless search for power over the world in which they live in order to secure for themselves those commodities that will lengthen their pleasure (and thus their lives). This "selfishness" is not bad, but it does make getting co-operation on common interests tough. And sometimes the struggle is so taxing that we wish we could forget the "illusion" of our differences and get to the "real" common nature we somehow obstinately refuse to accept.
But the fact of the matter is, we are very and unalterably different from one another, and those differences are a source of the human race's vitality. Blend these differences down into a mush of idealistic oneness, and we will lose any possibility of connecting with, and therefore understanding, one another.
Ultimate Questions
Those Who Are Still Among Us