Sameness is the Wrong Approach
Erasing Individual Distinctions isn’t the Way to Get Along
Recently, I wrote an essay about how Americans still have much in common, in which I made a point about friendship: to be friends, you don’t have to have anything in common with your friend other than the fact that each of you cares about the other person.
I’d like to use that as the jumping-off point for today’s discussion (although this decision might seem counterintuitive given the direction I plan to take it).
You don’t have to be the same as someone to like him or her. In fact, I would argue that sameness can’t be the fundamental basis for your relationship. A friendship based on sameness is a friendship of convenience. A friendship of mutual admiration and loyalty and regard is a true friendship. The test of your friendship is when you begin to go out of your way for each other, when friendship is inconvenient but you make it a priority anyway, when you recognize that you have different interests – and you compromise (which means sometimes putting their interests first and yours last).
With family, this is even more the case. Family requires sacrifice, and it often requires putting other family members interests before your own.1 You don’t have to be similar to your family at all (in fact, you don’t have to even like them) to have commitments and obligations to them.2 Except for your spouse, family commitments are – by their very definition – the ones you didn’t choose, and the ones you need to honor whether or not you have any similarity with your family members.3 Family obligations certainly aren’t based on anything as superficial as sameness.
I have friends and family members who have very different interests than I do. Sometimes, I do activities with them that I would never do if left to my own devices or if I was the one making the decision. Almost everyone does this (or should). We do it because we care about our friends and family and want to spend time with them.
But some people have a problem with difference. Whether they’re simply intolerant or they “just want everyone to get along” (which in their mind requires everyone to be alike), lots of people have trouble accepting that other people are going to be different, do different things, have different tastes, vote differently, live differently, etc.
But, if we actually want people to get along (or even just to cooperate or coexist or doing anything together), striving for sameness is a terrible solution. It’s never going to happen and it will make most people miserable.4
This is especially true outside of relationships with close friends and family. It is impossible to treat organizations or societies in the same way that we treat our loved ones, and trying to organize nonfamilial institutions like families often produces disastrous results.
One such organization is a team, which can develop family-like cohesion and deep friendship between its members (and which functions at a much higher level if such friendship and cohesion develops), but which cannot be set up on the premise that “everyone will just be friends and get along.” If you assume friendship, or force it, you often don’t achieve it, whereas a team that can function effectively even if its members aren’t close friends can often foster the very friendship that makes it stronger.
Which brings me to long-distance running. Running is an individualized sport, and I think competitive running provides a useful lens for exploring individual variation and artificial sameness.