The tragic incident on the Ethiopian news year Enkutatash. My friend said ‘you betrayed me and do the unexpected. What happened to us? There’s a telemarketer calling our house today we snap and angrily hang up. We have a customer service agent because they follow a no return, no return policy. Other drivers on the road scold us when they refuse to let us in (I am especially and often guilty). All the examples of how each of us falls victim to the spirit of abstraction daily. The main reason I refuse to join the group is the spirit of abstraction. Of course, textures and interests are associated with different cultures and traditions, but giving too much meaning to labels can make other people easily abstract. Is included. Not that it’s wrong to value a particular facet of a person (as long as valuing it is what you’re doing), but every group—except for the largest, the human race itself (and perhaps even that’s too narrow)—by definition excludes others. We like to connect ourselves with people who share similar backgrounds and characteristics to make ourselves feel comfortable and safe, but the cost, in my view, is often (though certainly not always) too high: a subtle belief in our own group’s superiority that promotes the abstraction of anyone else belonging to another. How often do you think about even your spouse outside of the function he or she plays in your life, regarding him or her as a full-fledged human being in his or her own right whose needs, desires, and pleasures may exist completely apart from your own? How often do you think this way about your children, overcoming the tendency to conceive of them as simply extensions of yourself and allowing them to blossom in your conception as human beings with their destinies—destinies that may be intimately intertwined with yours but are ultimately their responsibility in the same way your destiny is yours?
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