People of a certain pragmatic frame of mind have long insisted that you have a better chance of making a good match with someone who is similar to you than someone dissimilar. It seems that there are statistics to back this claim; this discussion includes some nice, if unsurprising, correlations from Jared Diamond’s Third Chimpanzee.
But since most of the attributes that make us similar or dissimilar to each other are probably roughly normally distributed, there must be people on the fringes whose backgrounds are dissimilar from nearly everyone else’s. Perhaps they had one Muslim parent and one Southern Baptist parent; perhaps one parent lived on a commune and the other in a mansion; or perhaps their parents individually were on the fringes themselves. In addition, they may be several standard deviations from the mean in intelligence or some other personality trait. According to Diamond’s analysis, these people will have great difficulty finding companionship.
If you, like me, believe that companionship outranks nearly every other good in life, then you will agree that this is a serious problem.
To begin to approach the problem, we can select one facet of it: beliefs. I am probably not alone in my feeling that the most important function of beliefs is precisely the social role I’m discussing. While there are some practical consequences of belief in the largest sense, differences between viable beliefs have only social consequences. For this reason, it is tempting to think that fringe people can simply be reprogrammed to successfully engage with some larger group.
But this trades one problem for another. Our identity is as important for most of us as companionship is. What would it even mean to choose a new identity in order to enjoy more companionship? It would be no different from hoping that some other person will find companionship: it does nothing to help me.
Nevertheless, there probably are things that can be done. Readers of this blog will know that I am very ambivalent about the kind of “irony” or ironism that has taken root in our culture, but to the extent that it could help us to be more flexible in the bonds that we form — to be more deeply socially mobile — it might be a healthy thing. It is, in fact, possible to embrace a kind of irony (not the irony of hipsters, but rather a simple disavowal of traditional idealism) and still have strong convictions. One must simply view one’s convictions as personal: fully worth fighting for, perhaps, but by no means absolute.
The issue deserves serious study. While the inability of fringe people to find companionship is by definition uninteresting to the vast majority of people, it is not unreasonable to suspect that a human population capable of seeing beyond its ideologies and developing a more sophisticated cultural grammar would be a more mature human population.
caldron 