When I was a classroom teacher, there was always a point in discussion where you could sense the students starting to dig in, to commit to a particular hill they were willing to die on. In history class, it often coincided with the year 1848. That’s when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto and socialist rebellions swept throughout European monarchies with mixed results. Out came the sophomore socialists to do battle with the freshman free-market capitalists, neither giving an inch of ideological ground or conceding the other side had anything approaching a valid point. It was class struggle versus laissez-faire competition in an ideological death match. There could be only one–one winner, one idea to rule them all.
I learned early that, when it comes to ideas, it’s easy to get enamored with one thing. You know that thing, right? The thing that explains, well, everything? The history of ideas might fairly be described as a greatest hits of “the one true thing.”
If I were a DJ of intellectual history, my playlist of “one-thing wonders” might include some oldies–Form, Substance, God; some classics–Certainty, Perception, Liberty; and some recent hits–Pleasure and Pain, Authenticity, Will to Power. All of which, for some fans, were the one thing–the only thing–that explained, and ordered, everything.
I remember a classmate at college animatedly talking about how—after reading David Hume, the great Scottish skeptic—we couldn’t have real causal knowledge of, well, anything. Turns out that the one thing, could also be no thing.
The realm of ideas isn’t the only place we make one thing the only thing that matters above all else. It’s also in our daily practices, in how we organize life in the marketplace. Like my capitalists students, some see the exchanges we make, of labor for money, money for goods and services, and the percentage of market share a company claims as all, and only, about competition. That’s the one thing that drives everything. Others, like my student socialists, may chafe at that, asserting that cooperation, or perhaps redistribution, should be the thing.
Pushing this further into culture and politics, we get really testy about our things. “Order!” some say. “Equality!” say others. “Security!” yell these. “Opportunity!” yell those.
I mean really, what is the deal with us, and our things? Why do we think one thing can be everything?
Imagine, for a moment, that chemical life were just one thing, one element.
Call me Hydrogen. I am all there is. Just me, gaseous lil’ ol me, out here all by myself. When there’s just me, there’s, well, mostly nothing.
Then this other thing, Oxygen, shows up. The nerve! How dare he! I cannot be everything, if that thing is here too. (Never mind that, by myself, there’s not a lot of things.)
Sounds absurd, right? Yet we do this all the time with our precious things.
We make the acquisition of wealth the only thing.
We pursue popularity and power above all else.
We take a principle like liberty and set it as the only principle that matters.
We select one thing–one idea, one principle, one belief, one practice–and force that thing to hold everything of importance, everything that matters to everyone. And then we find ourselves surprised, disheartened, even angry, when it can’t. When we make one thing into everything, we have no room for anything else. It leaves us emptied of everything but our precious thing.
That one thing was never supposed to be about everything. Just as we’d never ask our heart to do its job plus the jobs of the lungs, stomach, and brain, we shouldn’t ask our concepts, our systems, our institutions to be everything.
I wonder, instead, what might happen if we just let our things be the things they are, doing the things they’re designed to do, together with other things. Like, call me crazy, but what if Hydrogen was just allowed to be Hydrogen, and Oxygen allowed to be Oxygen—who knows what thing could happen?
Water. Life. Everything.
One thing cannot contain everything. One thing cannot be everything. But everything we need to live, and work, and love, is found in all the things. Without them all, we got nothing.