What do people have in common?

When I think about all the divisions among people in the world — economic, political, religious, ideological (which is already included in all three the previously mentioned concepts) — it appears somewhat ludicrous to raise the question about what people have “in common”. Right here on Thoughtleader the divergence of opinions, judgements and interpretations that manifest themselves daily is already sufficient to abandon any attempt at articulating “the common”.

This is certainly true if by common one means something identical that is shared by all people. No two people are identical in the strict sense of the term — not even so-called identical twins — given the fact that one’s identity is nothing monolithic, but rather a complex phenomenon, stretched between various psychic registers, some of which provide relative stability, while others introduce dynamism into the identity-mix. With this in mind, it is no exaggeration to say that every person is truly singular, and that any ideology that attributes to individuals a shared‘identity is simply promoting its own ideological interests.

So how can people have something in common, then? The short answer is that it is possible precisely because, although they are different, they can work and act in concert, in this way generating something common — for example expanding a science, promoting a commonly shared democratic ethos, or a commonly shared concern for global ecologies. The longer answer requires some distinctions.

First, there is the difference between a conception of knowledge that is “open”, and one that tries to limit it to private ownership. The latter, which is linked to intellectual property rights, is predicated on the assumption that ideas, theories, conceptual frameworks and the like can and will be more creatively produced if they are bound, by law, to those individuals who formulated them. It is not easy to resist this idea, because it seems so plausible in light of the accompanying claim, that such “privately owned ideas” would encourage competition, and at the same time, scientific progress.

In reality, however, the belief that knowledge should be privately “owned” is misguided, for several reasons. The most important of these is simply that ideas and knowledge cannot be owned, even if people believe that they can be. Don’t misunderstand me — I am NOT encouraging plagiarism; far from it. Plagiarism is the illegitimate, verbatim use of what someone else has formulated (whether it is in science, literature, philosophy or any other discipline), and pretending that it is one’s own precise formulation. This is to be rejected with contempt as intellectual theft, and as an admission that one is incapable of putting something in one’s own words, even if it is an interpretation of what someone else has said. Similarly, of course, if someone claims credit for a technological innovation that another person has produced, it is theft. But to use an idea, theory or technological device that someone else has formulated or invented, and perhaps develop it further in the process, with due credit to such a person, is a way of promoting knowledge that the human race has in common.

I have often encountered a kind of paranoia among colleagues that someone might “steal” their ideas. Personally, I have never been worried about that, because, as I tell them, even if I shared an idea or theory with ten other people before I have published anything on it, it does not bother me because each person would work it out differently, anyway. Besides, knowledge grows best if people work at it — in different, but shared disciplines — together. In Hardt and Negri’s words (In Multitude):

“Thomas Jefferson … famously authored US patent law in order to support technological innovation, and, in our own time, the mandate of the UN-sponsored World Intellectual Property Organisation is to foster creativity and innovation by protecting intellectual property. Increasingly today, however, private ownership that limits access to ideas and information thwarts creativity and innovation … When communication is the basis for production, then privatisation immediately hinders creativity and productivity. Scientists in microbiology, genetics, and adjacent fields similarly argue that scientific innovations and the advancement of knowledge is based on open collaboration and the free exchange of ideas, techniques, and information.”

Their emphasis on communication touches on a second important consideration regarding what people have in common, or could generate as something commonly produced. This involves what I would call the paradox of communication — the fact that miscommunication between people occurs every day, despite all the sophisticated technological means of communication that exist today, and yet, it also happens, however fleetingly, that they do “get through” to one another under certain (sometimes unlikely) circumstances.

There is a scene-sequence in Iñárritu’s astonishing film, Babel (2006), where an alienated married couple find themselves in a room in a small Moroccan village, the woman having been shot in the neck while on a tour bus, and having to depend, for the time being, on whatever primitive (if well-intentioned) help the locals can give her until she can be transferred to a hospital by helicopter. Until the bullet hit her, her husband tried in vain to get through to her, because she could not forgive him for leaving the family when their youngest child died a cot-death. Yet, under these dire circumstances, when she is badly injured, and she tells him that she needs to urinate, holding her steady he helps her position a bowl underneath herself and — in the most improbable of situations, while she is urinating — something happens between them, and they start kissing each other.

It seems that Iñárritu understands that, when communication between people has failed altogether, a traumatic experience can level the playing fields, as it were, and clear the way for genuine communication, which simultaneously produces something that they have in common — something that was absent earlier.

To be sure, these are not the only circumstances under which miscommunication can make way for successful communication. Under the present global conditions regarding unmistakable signs that natural ecological systems are straining under the combined weight of anthropogenic climate change, pervasive pollution of the earth’s water resources by certain industrial operations (like some mining activities in South Africa, which cause toxic acid to leach into soil and rivers), and unabated destruction of the earth’s indispensable rain forests (to mention just some sources of ecological damage), the paradox of communication manifests itself very clearly.

On the one hand there is a communicational conflict between the denialists, who claim that nothing is really the matter, and others who argue that we are in a crisis-situation. The latter include environmentalists as well as many concerned citizens, who urge corporations and governments to take immediate action to preclude a global ecological disaster. On the other hand, as more and more people seem to realize that we share a common world, and one, moreover, that is irreplaceable (at least for the time being, given the belief of many that humans will one day be able to “colonise” other planets), there appears to be a growing communicational space of commonly shared concerns.

The striking thing about these things that we have in common as human beings — shared knowledge and intermittently shared, communicationally produced concerns — is that they do not require that humans have some supposedly overarching identity in common, such as the “people”, or the “masses”, or the “proletariat”, as Hardt and Negri argue in Empire as well as in Multitude. In fact, they presuppose that the very people who generate or produce something commonly shared, are all singular, unique, human beings who are working towards the possibility of a better world because of some commonly shared values.
I say ‘some’, because such individuals come from many different cultures, despite which they sometimes succeed in communicating precisely because, like the couple in Iñárritu’s film, circumstances necessitate the kind of communication that will surpass all the differences that separate them. Under these circumstances we may discover that we can have more in common than we ever realised.