The whole phrase is
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
reminding us that the something new exists when we are together.
Modern thinking, however, is obsessed with isolating parts and their contribution to the whole. We look for a particular gene that might lead to cancer or particular students that may excel in the classroom. The discovery of the atom as the building block of life has lead us to atomize our life, seeking out each building block.
Today, we seek out the exceptional.
Not the normal, of course. The good work of thousands of hours of practice. Or the generous craftsmanship of a neighbor. We look for the standout. The one who does something different.
This is often the exceptional athlete who does incredible feats of human achievement.
But it is also the one who fails, gets cut from the team, or is told they are terrible and unfit.
The real thing we miss about the whole, sum, and parts, however, is what an obsession with parts often leads to:
The crazy belief that some parts don’t matter.
The eugenics movement was only able to grow at the beginning of 20th Century because people were allowed to suggest that other people needed to die. That they were a cancer on the body.
People who just so happened to be different from “normal”. With normal being a cis-gendered white man of a certain age and ability.
Of course, eugenics was the manifestation of a racist movement seeking scientific validation during the same era they recruited community leaders for the KKK and destroyed Reconstruction efforts to democratize and build a more just society. Of course, it also served as the template for the Nazi movement and, eventually, the Holocaust. So there’s that.
But…
Killing people isn’t the example: it is the fruit of the poisonous belief.
At the root of the poisonous belief is the atomization of the community. It doesn’t start with terrifying practices like eugenics and genocide. Nor does it begin with amorphous problems like racism, sexism, and ablism.
The root is the simple idea that perhaps some parts just don’t count. In a quite literal sense: arguing that they not get counted.
Here is a whole: a people. Now let’s pretend this group (insert an oppressed minority group here) gets to be ignored. Not counted. We’ll say They aren’t even people.
It doesn’t take long for two parallel arguments to develop. One to suit the adjusted sense of “people” and the other for what to do about these “others”. So, of course, we will always arrive at the same place: “we” get protected from “them”.
The danger doesn’t start at fascism (the inevitable growth of this evil fruit). It starts in that original calculus: who counts. And not just because it isn’t just. But because it manipulates every piece of logic that grows from it.
We are literally pretending part of the whole doesn’t count. That it doesn’t even exist. Yet it doesn’t cease to exist. We choose to refuse its existence and treat the accounting as full.
A simpler example
Part of the reason some people obsess about parts is that political ideologies have been built around individualism and the preferred value of the individual to the whole. Even to the point of arguing that the whole, in essence, doesn’t exist. That we are, at best, a sum of parts. But we are always and forever parts.
And yet today we are struggling with how to deal with truth. Particularly in the ways people are able to deceive in light of our desire to maintain a healthy ethic of free speech.
In short: how do we know what’s true?
A big part of our problem is that we’re framing this as a parts question. A parts question that tries to reckon with a whole that we do believe exists.
How do we—as parts, sum, and whole—deal with truth?
As long as we are only parts, there is no truth. It is only ever completely defined by the individual. There can be no essential truth without a whole. So if there is no whole, there are the infinite truths of the ever-reproducing population of the planet.
In other words,
The existence of truth proves the whole.
So when someone says 2+2 = 5, they don’t get their own truth anymore than a teacher is required to accept that as an answer on a test.
Here’s where the rubber hits the road, though.
We all get that 2+2 doesn’t equal five.
The problem for the whole doesn’t exist in the math equation itself. Or in the lie that it equals five. Or in the confusion of what to do about it.
The problem exists in pretending the impact doesn’t exist.
And we do this when we consider only the liberty of a baker and not the couple, a company and not its employees, a country and not the people it bombs, a school and not its students and faculty…
It is convenient to tell the story as only about the narrow definition we give it. But it makes us liars. And the whole suffers. Even if only part of us is doing it. When most of us join in, we are participating in a charade.