Connection vs. division defines us

There are only two kinds of people-those who know we’re all connected and those who don’t.

I thought about that as I looked around Scoville Park Sunday afternoon at more than a hundred booths, representing an astonishing array of organizations, and the hundreds of people who kept filing past, looking at all this remarkable village has to offer.

If you can’t connect in Oak Park, you most likely can’t connect anywhere. A Day in Our Village, now 35 years old, is dedicated to helping people connect. As is Farmers’ Market every Saturday morning for five months plus-mid-May through October. As is the Lake Theatre, a happy vibrant hub in downtown Oak Park. As are Youth Baseball and Youth Soccer, and Whole Foods, and the bookstores, and block parties, and all the places where you can dine outside.

Many towns are devised to enable residents to avoid one another. Oak Park, and to some extent River Forest, are designed so people are more likely to bump into one another. That can be annoying, which is why we complain so much, but in the long run, it builds a healthy sense of community.

We are dedicated to the principle that there’s really only one kind of people, but Americans have traditionally always insisted on two-Us vs. Them, Good Guys vs. Bad Guys. We need an “enemy” to define who we are.

As Dorothy Parker once famously observed, there are only two kinds of people-those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.

Americans need to be the ones who don’t, but we aren’t. We’re not uniters, we’re dividers. The primary season, which ended-mercifully-yesterday, has amply proven that.

Recently, I read a couple of interesting articles that helped put the presidential campaign in a new light for me. Roger Cohen wrote a column theorizing that Barack Obama has been so successful thus far because he understands the world is a lot more connected than do his opponents, Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Obama’s enormous fundraising advantage, for instance, was gained because he understood the power of the Internet, which is transforming the world and making it more Inter-connected.

Clinton and McCain, on the other hand, grew up during the Cold War world of Us vs. Them. That shaped their world view, and, as a result, their approach to problems is combative. They see politics in terms of division. Obama sees the connections.

Michael Tomasello, meanwhile, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, appeared in the N.Y. Times Magazine’s “Idea Lab” feature with a short essay titled, “How Are Humans Unique?” He notes that IQ tests comparing young chimpanzees and orangutans to 2-year-old children indicate that, in a number of areas, their cognitive abilities are comparable. The big difference is in social skills.

It is our “collective cognition,” Tomasello says-i.e. literally putting our heads together-which distinguishes humans from animals. In other words, our connectedness.

“Human beings have evolved to coordinate complex activities,” he writes, “to gossip and to playact together. It is because they are adapted for such cultural activities–and not because of their cleverness as individuals–that human beings are able to do so many exceptionally complex and impressive things.”

He points out that human beings also “put their heads together to do all kinds of heinous deeds,” but not usually within the confines of their identifiable “group.” The problem is we define our “group” too narrowly, which leads to the very “us against them” divisiveness that characterizes the “old-style politics” that has, for so long, enabled ineffective politicians to win elections-the very system Obama is making a concerted effort to change.

You can see it most clearly in the criticism Obama gets from Clinton, McCain and the punditocracy for daring to suggest we should actually talk to our enemies. That’s because Obama is about connection and the others are about division.

Let’s hope connection wins-because thus far, as you may have noticed, division has been a hopeless failure.

And if you were in Scoville Park on Sunday, you probably noticed how much better a connected world looks.

Read Ken Trainor’s blog, “Just Wandering,” most Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays at WednesdayJournalOnline.com.