[Buddha-l] Fallacy of division (Why neo-conservatives are not welcome on buddha-l)

[Richard Hayes]

On Sun, 2005-08-21 at 20:20 -0700, paul bennett wrote:

> Thank you for putting into words a gut feeling that I have, that
> diversity is not
> all it's cracked up to be. I try to tolerate, enjoy, and appreciate
> diversity, but
> not necessarily embrace or mimic it. I also attempt to be tolerant of
> intolerance.

There is nothing in life that takes up more of my energy than struggling
with this question. One of my many attempts to come to terms with it in
available on my download page at
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes/download.html. Look for an item entitled
"Reflections on September 11, 1893," which is the text of a guest sermon
I gave at the Unitarian-Universalist fellowship in Battlement Mesa,
Colorado in 2003. You'll see that my thinking was in a mess then, and
I'm afraid it has not improved much since that time. 

Just to clarify my position, I'm all in favor of diversity at the global
and national level. I just don't think that every individual
organization in the country can, or should even try to, reflect the
diversity of the whole. To give a biological analogy, a complex organism
such as a human being functions because it has many kinds of specialized
cells, each of which has evolved to do a particular task. If every cell
had to reflect the diversity of the organism as a whole, none of the
organs in a human being would work well, and many would not work at all.
Applied to the social level and political level, a complex country
functions best if it has the full range of societies that focus on doing
what they do: Buddhist sanghas, Presbyterian synods, Catholic dioceses,
Jewish synagogues, neo-conservative think tanks, liberal think tanks,
B'nai B'rith, the Ku Klux Klan, the Communist Party and so on. Get rid
of any of them, and the national organism is weakened and may even die.
But asking a neo-Nazi group to accept Jewish members or B'nai B'rith to
present both sides of a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem is like
asking a heart cell to have the structures of a liver cell or a motor
neuron. Bad idea.

-- 
Richard Hayes