Snowstorms or Snowflakes?

An article by Lawrence W. Reed on FEE.org (Feb 25.):

There are two basic prisms through which we can see, study, and prescribe for human society: individualism and collectivism. These worldviews are as different as night and day, and they create a great divide in the social sciences. That’s because the perspective from which you see the world will set your thinking down one intellectual path or another.

No Two Alike

I think of it as the difference between snowstorms and snowflakes. A collectivist sees humanity as a snowstorm, and that’s as up-close as he gets if he’s consistent. An individualist sees the storm, too, but is immediately drawn to the uniqueness of each snowflake that composes it. The distinction is fraught with profound implications.
No two snowstorms are alike, but a far more amazing fact is that no two snowflakes are identical either—at least so far as painstaking research has indicated. Wilson Alwyn Bentley of Jericho, Vermont, one of the first known snowflake photographers, developed a process in 1885 for capturing them on black velvet before they melted. He snapped pictures of about 5,000 of them and never found two that were the same—nor has anyone else ever since. Scientists believe that changes in humidity, temperature, and other conditions extant as flakes form and fall make it highly unlikely that any one flake has ever been precisely duplicated. (Ironically, Bentley died of pneumonia in 1931 after walking six miles in a blizzard. Lesson: One flake may be harmless, but a lot of them can be deadly).

Contemplate this long enough and you may never see a snowstorm (or humanity) the same way again.

Dr. Anne Bradley is vice president of economic initiatives at the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics. At a recent FEE seminar in Naples, Florida, she explained matters this way:

When we look at a snowstorm from a distance, it looks like indistinguishable white dots peppering the sky, one blending into the next. When we get an up-close glimpse, we see how intricate, beautiful, and dissimilar each and every snowflake is. This is helpful when thinking about humans. From a distance, a large crowd of people might look the same, and it’s true that we possess many similar characteristics. But we know that a more focused inspection brings us nearer to the true nature of what we’re looking at. It reveals that each of us bears a unique set of skills, talents, ambitions, traits, and propensities unmatched anywhere on the planet.

This uniqueness is critical when we make policy decisions and offer prescriptions for society as a whole; for even though we each look the same in certain respects, we are actually so different, one to the next, that our sameness can only be a secondary consideration.  [read more]

 

A great analogy. In psychology the snowflake perspective is called differential psychology. The snowflake perspective is how conservatives look at their fellow human beings. Or at least they should try to look at people. Classifying things and treating things alike is fine. Things don’t care. But doing this to people is dehumanizing at worst and disrespectful at best. But classifying or grouping things is what the mind naturally does to make sense of the world. Putting people into groups is hard not to do.

Yes, groups of people have similarities. For example, women like to go shopping and like to express their feelings (okay, this an attempt at stereotypical humor).

There even some people who think that teenagers are going to have sex no matter what so let’s give them condoms. Or that all women are for abortion rights. Or African-Americans will always vote Democrat. Or even that all homosexuals are for same-sex marriage (they’re not. Dennis Miller says he has gay friends who are not for same-sex marriage.) I could go on.

But having similarities is not the same as being the same. You can only generalize so much from the similarities then you start to diverge. Take a lesson from chaos theory. Small differences can lead to big changes later on. The butterfly effect if you will.

When an artist does a painting he leaves his own personality in the painting. The same with novelists and even software engineers. That’s what makes the world interesting. Trying to make everyone act the same or believe the same is a cult at worst at best group think.

The Founding Fathers saw American’s as snowflakes. Remember in the Declaration of Independence it says the inalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?” That line wasn’t talking about groups. Only individuals have rights. The Bill of Rights are about individual rights too.

We are treated same under the law (or should be) but we are not completely the same mentally or physically. Even identical twins aren’t completely identical. God made us as individuals not as clones.  We attain individual salvation. “Collective salvation” is not a concept in God’s mind. The Ten Commandments are about individual morality.