Do you hear the people sing?

Singing a song of angry men?

Charactures singing by Miguel Covarrubias (1904 - 1957)

Recently in a safe space with trusted friends I expressed my exasperation with the difficulty many people seem to have with the idea that we are all first and foremost human beings and other identities are secondary. My friend Claudia Dommaschk, who writes Immediacy Forum, responded that that would require an ability to hold complexity. For me that was an aha moment and I have been ruminating on this for days.

A couple of months ago I wrote Pluralism or Monism because I was being challenged by my Christian Conservative friend. And we again failed in out attempt to bridge the gap between us. He seems unable to understand me while I felt that I was indeed understanding him.

In my opinion, he holds his identity as a Christian and his identity as a conservative very tightly. This is understandably very important to him, his essence, his core. And it seems to me that these are his primary identities and that his identity as Human Being is secondary.

It is my belief that everyone should hold Human Being as their primary identity and all other identities as secondary. Furthermore, we should hold our secondary identities lightly because they are constructs, in a sense both real and not real. Identifying as a human being corresponds to an observable reality in a way that a secondary identity does not.

As an aside, and a topic for another article, when I tell others what they should do, I also hold the thought that we should not tell others what they should do.

The Fetzer Institute has a good approach: A Shared Sacred Worldview - Uniting the World’s Faith Traditions Around Sacred-Centered Ethics for Human and Planetary Flourishing.

At a time of growing global division, the Fetzer Institute’s World Religions Coalition brings together faith leaders, scholars, and institutions to co-build a vision of shared sacred flourishing — one grounded in the moral wisdom, ethical assets, and spiritual depth of the world’s religious traditions… This is not a call for uniformity, but for unity: a collaborative ethic that honors difference while affirming our shared responsibility to care for one another and the Earth.

However, it seems that many members of the world’s great religions primarily identify with their religion and only secondarily as human beings. I am a Buddhist. I am a Hindu, I am a Muslim. I am a Christian.

The United Nations was launched in 1945 in the aftermath of WWII. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a beautiful document. But, imo, The United Nations at 80 is a story of failure. From the start, countries continued to identify primarily as individual countries and secondarily as a united collective of human beings.

MAGA, Make America Great Again, places the interests of America above the interests of other human beings and this approach is now being copied around the world…"Make Indonesia Great Again," "Make Spain Great Again" "Make T&T (Trinidad and Tobago) Great Again"

Foundational to metamodern thinking is the ability to hold multiple perspectives. This approach has its roots in the growing appreciation of complexity. I prompted Perplexity to give me a brief, recent history.

Emergence of Complexity Science as a Distinct Field (1980s–1990s): The 1980s marked a turning point with the founding of the Santa Fe Institute in 1984, which provided an institutional home for interdisciplinary research on complex adaptive systems. Complexity theory began to coalesce as a formal field, integrating ideas from systems theory, chaos, computation, and evolutionary biology.

Applications and Proliferation (1990s–Present): Since the 1990s, complexity theory has proliferated across disciplines, including public administration, policy studies, economics, biology, and the social sciences.

I have come to understand that human beings are best understood as a complex system and as a process. Framing ourselves as verbs is better than framing ourselves as nouns. But my Christian Conservative friend, and most other people, do not yet accept this framing which partly explains the gap between us.

We need to meet others where they are at. It seems to me that many people are stuck at a stage of some kind of monism. And many people have embraced pluralism. The Metamodern Wannabe quest, my quest, is a search for a path towards cohesive pluralism. Helping others move towards greater complexity seems like worthwhile work.