Odd Socks

In high school, some friends formed a group they called something like "The Caffeine Addicts and Silly Walkers Appreciation Society." SF fans, Whovians, Trekkies, Monty Pythonites... A rag-tag collection of odd socks.

And it didn't feel right to me, even though by every measure I belonged there. It wasn't even a particularly principled stand—I probably justified staying away by thinking of the conforming non-conformist paradox (see the immortal scene from Life of Brian:)

but this was basically me being ornery about signing on with any group. I didn't trust groupthink in any form.

And so here I am among the Quakers. And diversity and variety are very much on Quakerdom's mind. But here's the question I keep coming back to: diversity to what end? If diversity itself is a defining value, then what of our human desire to hang around with people like us? If diversity is a defining value, then what do we have besides being a collection of odd socks.

The thing is, there is push-back in a lot of communities, a commandment to conform. Indeed, this seems to be some kind of deep-rooted human social thing. It's what we do. And so people get pushed to act in ways they do not as individuals feel right acting. They are asked to put on what feels like someone else's skin.

And the ones who get pushed hard enough they just can't take it, or people like me who are just ornery about getting pushed... we leave, or we put up a big stink. And we often develop a whole philosophical approach to life that decries conformism and conformity, sees conforming as an insidious disease. We think about the kind of cookie-cutter conformity that stereotypically characterized middle-class America in the 1950s.

And as liberal Quakers, we see a religiousness that doesn't really have a moral foundation, but that tells you to go to church because that's what nice people do. And so we look for a religious experience based in "realer" things: peace, the experience of worship, justice, diversity... and we end up gathering people around us who believe in those things. And soon enough we become a group of people with a common odd-sock-ness.

It is so bloody hard to gather a people who share values or dance moves or dietary restrictions or whatever, and then not enforce conformity on individuals. The gathering itself brings out a kind of mirroring, as we seek to be "better" at whatever it is we are gathered together by. And if that thing that gathers us is a value of diversity, How much time to we spend worrying if we are being "diverse enough?"

There are plenty of broad societal reasons why we as a culture, as a nation, as a community, need to fight against the biases that have condemned races, genders/preferences, religious affiliations, languages, physical limitations, etc to second-class citizenship. Conformity has been used as a weapon of power to broadly keep "you people" down so I can be higher up. And I as a white, male, straight, American-English-speaking, basically able, American citizen, am right at the top of that heap. So I shouldn't be writing this at all, probably. By many lights, I should sit down and shut up.

But I resist being told to sit down and shut up. I resist conforming "because." I'm ornery.

Here's what I think: We need to be gathered. And we need to not be in denial about this. It is part of being human. That gathering is not about deciding who we are gathered with, but neither is it based on divine mandate. We need to be with people we can trust, and who will be our team, our company, our gathered place. And within that group, we need to enforce that trust: if you will not behave in a trustworthy manner, we need to be able to kick you out.