To ensure peace in the future, we need to channel our thoughts and energies towards finding ways to make the next generation appreciate diversity. Unlike today’s generation that seems to tolerate diversity upfront, but secretly or sub-consciously hates it. And the previous generation that did not tolerate it at all.
Why?
Short answer: Diversification is increasing, and this is not going to change.
Long answer:
Due the current social structure of the world, it is impossible to ensure uniformity, in fact the there is an increasing amount of diversity being ‘created’. Diversity in beliefs, tastes, choices, everything! ‘Alternative’ is just not enough to categorize a non-conformist choice, there needs to a sub-categorization.
Human nature as understood today seeks commonality with others, seeks to identify with others by seeing a reflection of oneself in them. This comes from common traits such as language, origin, bloodline, institutional associations, etc but mostly religion. The so-called global community is only in the minds of a few.
Centuries ago, there were a few key groups of people divided by geography and religion. And the number of divisions were few.
Religion is one of the few ‘concepts’ that has the unique position of having an intent to unite by dividing. Centuries ago, the way adopted to overcome this was by attempting to convert others. The major religions are certainly guilty of this – sometimes by coercion, sometimes by force.
Conversion had limited success and sometimes led to rebellion – which created more alternatives. Politicians also realized that a way to accumulate power over people was to keep them divided. Today, most folks are given the company of others following the same religion by default. Regardless of other associations they may build over their lifetime, the religious association seems to overpower those.
The sub-institutions built by every religious community, give them enough reason to build multiple sub-associations with it – for example community-level social work, mentoring, etc. Most people end up contributing to efforts made by the religious community v/s that by (sometimes more effective) independent non-profits. Not that this is not useful, I’m sure it positively impacts the lives of many, but people should give themselves more choice-of-causes to contribute to. That’s off topic, so let’s get back.
As long as an individuals strongest identity is with their religion, they will not find it easy to unite with those of another religion as they will find it hard to see a reflection of themselves in them.
With the current scenario of multiple religions, multiple sects in each religion, etc we are not only diversified, we are also divided in a big way. There seems to be no parallelism in the lives of people separated by religion+geography, even if that geography is as close as the next state. The number of belief systems is increasing with every act of intolerance and force. Even within a sect of a religion, people are choosing to believe and follow at varying levels. And then there is a new stream of ‘spiritual’ thinking – that suggests one can be spiritual without being religious.
Kids today should be exposed to their religion only as one of the many dimensions of their lives and not as the primary one. Their identity should be established by the institutions they belong to – since they make an active choice there, unlike religion which is ‘indoctrinated’ by birth. Instead, they are expected to study religion in a parallel schooling system where they also give exams!
Just as we are free to live in pretty much any country we choose to, we should be free to follow specific principles from any religion we want. This means we need to learn multiple religions. If we know multiple religions (not too deep, but at a fairly detailed level), we can not only relate to or identify with more people of the world, we also start seeing the commonality in all religions and the conceptual religious boundary line starts to blur. This leads to tolerance, to unity.
The question is – how to educate a child about multiple religions without making religion the primary association of their identity?
The alternative is to not educate them about religion at all, so the conceptual boundaries don’t exist in their mind. They are humanists by default. But doing this with the masses is impossible. The former is still possible through mass-media + education + the hope that their now-open minds will banish the strong association with their own religion and instead choose to see all as one. The idea is to not be extreme in any course of action as it can be damaging, but rather to be subtle, to be fair and to be consistent in approach.
Just as the current generation is against war, having seen it’s ineffectiveness, I hope the next generation is against religious intolerance, having had seen the ineffectiveness of religious conflict.
I believe this philosophy of learning applies to languages as well, kids should not be taught perfect-grammar local languages that they could learn to speak anyway, but rather be taught foreign languages and urged to join cross-border communities to speak that language on a regular basis.
