This year, many students in the Opinions section have challenged us to resist judgment and stereotypes. They’ve urged us to recall that “in the end, we’re all—first and foremost—Hillsdale students” and that fundies are “really just like you.”
Just last week, one student pointedly asked “when did we all decide that the job defines the person? What gives anyone the notion that they have a right to look down on someone else because of how that person happens to earn their livelihood?” and another reminded us that “[i]t is critical that Christians treat broken people with love and acceptance, no matter what physical defects they have or what they may have done in the past.”
Preventing differences from distracting us completely from our common humanity is an innocuous, perhaps even beneficial, sentiment; people are, indeed, people too. But this year’s articles (so far) exceed that mild exhortation. In their consensus, we are not merely to limit these distinctions’ distracting us; rather, we are to ignore them altogether, hold hands, and join in singing Styx’s “The Grand Illusion.”
Yet this simplistic view rejects the importance of our disparities. These distinct social roles make us who we are, and the campus, what it is. To look past them, therefore, is to impose a conformity of abstract sameness. And in seeking this, our campus anti-stereotypists make an argument at least as old as the French Revolution, as Edmund Burke identified its animating spirit:
“All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our estimation, are to be exploded…”
In Burke’s view, one ought not to abhor but rather to embrace societal variations, and to stifle the impulse to strip members of the community of their social clothing and create a theoretical, pure individual. To divorce man completely from his surroundings is to reject reality and substitute a superficiality of one’s own; our differences, paradoxically, allow us to relate to each other more fully by helping to define and fill in the contours of our humanity.
Jettisoning our communal clothing to be socially naked in the eyes of our fellow man is far too facile, and actually prevents us from understanding one another in the particular as opposed to merely as humans in the abstract. For if we are not Fundies, not Sigma Chis, not Saga workers, what, then, are we?
