Consciousness may have evolved to sort out the essential from the incomprehensible of all that exists, to analyze the world into concepts and find a system to organize its chaos. Our intellectual heritage is a restless longing to understand how things fit together and where they are, a longing we have given shape to in rules and labels, weights and balances, categories and categories. It has worked well for us, this instinct to divide to contain, has given us music, the laws of planetary motion, and democracy. But it also passes under every ism we have ever invented, under every ideology and every genocide, under every algorithm that reduces to variables and adds them to sell the sum of who we are, under all the parcels of ideas that we trade every day and mistake for trading in real encounters with each other.
Two centuries ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) offered a powerful, powerful solution to this dualism.
In an essay from the fall of 1836, written shortly after his stirring meditation on how not to waste your life, Hawthorne proposes a revision of our usual system of dividing humanity – one that might humanize us again with the simple realization that what binds us is incomparably stronger than what divides us or what divides us. You write:
A new class of society will be created. Instead of the rich and the poor, the high and the low, they should be placed in a category, – First, by their grief: for example, whenever there are any, whether they are in a good house or a hovel, who mourn the loss of relations with friends, and who wear black, whether the cloth is coal or superfine, they should make one category. Second, all who have the same disease, whether they are sleeping under damask canopies or on straw pallets or in hospital wards, should form one class. Thirdly, all are guilty of the same sins, whether the world knows them or not; whether they sink into prison, look forward to beatings, or walk respectfully among people, they also make a class. Then proceed to unite and divide the whole world together, as no one can seek to be freed from sorrow, sin, or disease; and if they can, yet Death, like a great parent, comes and sweeps away every single dark portal, — all his children.
What a wonderful way to remember that down where spirit meets bone, we all face the same struggle: to feel safe, to feel seen, to escape some definition and some wonder at life's endless confusion.
