January 26, 2006

Dear Colleague,

     In the University's program, Design for Diversity, the diversity always refers to group diversity and never to a diversity of unique individuals. Group diversity--grouping people together in accordance with their ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and so on--actually militates against individual diversity, against the recognition that each person is unique. It is the same sort of mentality as when anthropologists want to promote tribal diversity--that the number of distinctive tribes in the world remain large. As for the individual tribal member, they can't care less, since he or she can't be subjected to statistical analysis. Anthropologists, in any case, tend to see members of the same tribe as much the same, just as university administrators are wont to see members of a minority group as much the same.

    This view is profoundly anti-Christian, another sign of how far our universities have completed their divorce from their religious, essentially Christian, roots. In the Christian view, we live "in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards a unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection (italics added). Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good." This is C. S. Lewis. He tries to capture the uniqueness of every person another way by saying: "Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith." And again, Lewis quotes a mysterious passage in the Book of Revelation, which says "To him that overcometh, I will give a white stone and in the stone a new name written, who no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it." Lewis's comment on this passage is: "What can be more a man's own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him? And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the Divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? And this difference, so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed creatures for one another, the communion of saints" (C. S. Lewis, Made for Heaven, 2005).

    Well, religion--in my cynical mood--is a matter of aesthetic taste. Mine veers toward a Christianity that has the Good Shepherd subject the entire flock to risk in order to search for one lost sheep, that preaches the overwhelming importance of every human encounter, for at each we are chatting with a potential bright being at whose feet we would kneel if only we have eyes to see, or someone from whom we would recoil in horror, as at a mirror image of our own self, encrusted with putrescent boils of irredeemable selfishness.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu