provisionally fixed points

A Buddhist saying goes something like this:

At first you view everything as the same: mountains, rivers, trees.
Then you see everything as different, distinct.
Then you see everything as the same again.

If you agree with this, then it ceases to be "Buddhist".

Isn't there a danger, a very real political danger, that an emphasis on 'sameness' stifles difference, uniqueness, and forces people into a homogeneous mass. How can there be tolerance if there isn't a respect for differences? How can there be 'right seeing' if you try to reduce everything and everyone to your fixed scheme of things? 'Otherness' is not a concept but is radical alterity, something beyond a mere 'idea'. Don't you think there's something just a touch fanatical about these reductionist strategies. And isn't universalism just one view amongst others? A view that deliberately ignores its own particular historical determinations and contours?

If one holds a particular view at any one point in time is that being ideological? If one maintains that universalism is actually a better approach -and here one is forced to concede some ground to the relativists and add: at least for you-is that being ideological?

I don't know, I can't speak at the level of theory, only from my limited experience. And it's this: most of what people claim to be ineradicable differences just doesn't hold under closer scrutiny. If that was the case then Rumi wouldn't touch so many people in the 'west', so many people in the so-called muslim world wouldn't be drawn to western music and films.

If one must be aware of the dangers of 'sameness' then one must also be aware-if awareness is what we're after- of the dangers of a parochialism, prejudice and bigotry that insists on irreduicble differences. Adam Smith's 'impartial spectator', or what Amartya Sen calls 'open impartiality':

We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgement concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them at a certain distance from us.
---TMS.

Sameness, then, is really about fundamental equality (not fundamental difference). but it is also an equality that recognizes difference. Sen's example: a disabled person has the equal right to live a good life, to pursue the things he or she has reason to value, but that can entail unequal obligations on the behalf of the state (more resources, say). To create equality in a fundamental 'evaluative space' one may have to accept inequalities in less important ones.

At the religious level you're with St. Paul insofar as he says: neither Greek, nor Jew (or what "we"-and who is this 'we'?-might say: God is neither of the East or the West).

Ultimately, this principle appeals to you -whether one wants to consider it 'religious' or not makes little difference I think:

tawhid: unity in diversity. The famous muslim position: the haqiqah (inner truth) is one; but the sharia (outward paths) are many.