Our Common Ground
Essentially, different societies represent alternative possibilities and differing levels of complexity in the organisation of human beings. However, all human societies share the common ground of humanity. As such, any society that sees itself opposed to other societies has become alienated from the common ground and is therefore a perversion of the humanity it is part of. Negating the commonality has a vicious circle effect. Being denied your affiliation to what you naturally are by another member of the common field you belong to generates a resentment, perhaps eventually a hatred of the one who is denying you your ontological right of mutual identity, and this bitterness will be reflected back in an exponential snowballing way that has been responsible for all human ills and tragedies throughout the history of civilisations.
Embracing our common ground would be the first step to resolving this inherent fault in all societies. However, why has this simple solution to all problems never been effectively carried out? Why is humanity such a problematic concept for human beings?
To answer these questions, we need not look any further than the current ideological makeup of today’s democratic societies, where we find a deeply embedded creed that warns us that we cannot embrace the common ground without surrendering our individuality and renouncing freedom.
However, this is simply not true: our common ground doesn’t negate our differences at all, it merely gives us what it is – a common ground that unites us despite our differences; a common ground that mitigates our differences; a common ground that affirms our similarities.
The only thing we would lose in an affirmation of our mutuality is our right to negate the common ground that exists between us, because negating what we affirm is an absurdity. In commonality-affirming societies, differences, repulsions, and attractions will continue to exist, but the negative force of our repulsion would be mollified by the positive reality of human fraternity. The common ground is the safe space enveloping all of our differences; a soft, warm blanket that we can be wrapped in whenever we should be aggravated by the deeds or beliefs of others.
Not only is understanding and meaning found through differentiation, it is buried in positive reference associations. This is obvious in the question of race and is applicable in all other differentiating circumstances as well.
Having a common ground is not only a good idea, to be able to quell conflicts, it is also a necessity, in order to make co-habitation possible, and, in fact, it is also required to make individuality and plurality possible as well. Humanity cannot exist without individual human beings, and individuals cannot co-exist without common grounds. Likewise, differences cannot co-exist without commonality; individuals need common grounds to meet each other in, and our most authentic and real commonality is our humanity.
But while this may seem like common sense, the truth is that separating and segregating ideological narratives dilute the understanding that most human beings have of their humanity, thinning it out into a liquified transparency that can have no effective influence on the will of those propagating profound human divisions at the social and national levels that do nothing but enforce the adage that man is a wolf to his fellow men. And while humanity is anaesthetised to itself, an enormous loophole is created allowing free space for a plethora of anti-human practices.
It is true that embracing humanity would probably have little effect on resolving our immediate discrepancies with our neighbours or family members – having a common ground doesn’t help much when our different behaviours are quite simply annoying for each other. However, what we need to be concerned with now is the bigger picture, and the global tensions caused by a globalisation which has always ignored the global sense of our own essential being that is the common ground we call humanity.
