Modern civilization loves uniformity. Consider the nice things that make your life seemingly better: three square meals a day at fixed times, paved roads and sidewalks without any nasty bumps or cracks, regular office and school hours during weekdays, and pre-planned leisure activities during the weekend. The industrial revolution – and to a lesser extent, the agricultural revolution – made it necessary to forgo the whims of nature and impose our own structured, unvarying plan on the world. To domesticate parts of nature, the rough edges needed to be smoothed out. For everything else, defenses need to be constructed. Within this engineered world, we may safely practice the doctrine of uniformity.

It is hardly surprising that the scope of this doctrine has been extended to human nature as well. What we do to change nature beyond ourselves will inevitably affect the nature within us. The first step in this direction was the introduction of compulsory formal education. The industrial economy needed a supply of workers trained to possess a minimum set of skills, especially literacy. The concept of formal schooling has undergone refinements throughout the years, culminating in the modern expectation that everyone looking for a decent job should have an undergraduate degree. The bottom line is that an “average” person is supposed to have more or less the same values and intellect as the next “average” person.

When stated in this manner, such an expectation seems absurd. Yet it is implied in the way we think and talk about issues where the disparate ideas of different groups of people come into conflict. That’s not to say it is a pipe dream. It may be possible to achieve that level of ideological uniformity. After all, the writers of dystopic science-fiction have shown us multiple ways of doing it.