Respect Doesn’t Need Sameness

You cannot respect someone while needing them to become like you. And you don’t have to make yourself smaller to recognise someone else’s greatness.

Those two sentences describe the two ways respect usually fails. In the first, I respect you on condition that you change: think like me, pray like me, raise your children like me. In the second, I respect you by shrinking: you are great, so I must be less. Both feel like respect from the inside. Neither leaves both people their full size.

This essay is about a third way.

This may sound like asking people to give up who they are, or to accept everything. It asks neither. A person can belong fully to their community and still be human first, and respecting someone is not the same as agreeing with everything they do.

Narrower than human

Everyone agrees they are human, and then introduces themselves as something narrower. A profession, a nationality, a caste, a team, a side. These aren’t wrong in themselves. They are part of how we find each other. The trouble starts when the narrower label becomes the thing we defend.

Earth exists as one undivided reality. Humans have divided it into nations, religions, economies and identities, then spend their lives defending divisions that exist only in their own arrangements. The land doesn’t know where one ends and another begins. We drew those lines, and then forgot that we did.

None of this asks anyone to give up who they are. It asks us to stop ranking. A difference that is held without ranking is just a difference. A difference that has to be ranked becomes a reason to compete.

“You cannot respect someone while needing them to become like you.”

Harmony is completing, not matching

We often imagine harmony as everyone becoming alike. Madhyasth Darshan describes it differently. Coexistence (सहअस्तित्व) is being together without opposition, where each part helps complete the others.

Look at any living place. Soil, plants, animals and people are nothing alike, and that is exactly why they work together. The soil feeds the plant, the plant feeds the animal, and each returns something to the others. If they were all the same, none of them could complete anything.

People are like this too. We often imagine independence as freedom from others. Yet everything we observe exists in relationship with something else. Independence itself needs examination. What we usually want is not to be free of others, but to be in relationships where our difference is welcome.

Competing or completing

Much of the way we live trains the opposite. A society that needs everyone to compete cannot teach everyone that their interests are connected. We taught children to compete before helping them understand why they are here together.

Competition makes every difference into a ranking. Your strength becomes my weakness, your success my failure. Completion makes every difference into a contribution. Your strength fills a gap in mine.

If I stop measuring my success against other people, what remains as a meaningful measure of progress? Perhaps this: how much I have completed, and been completed by, the people around me.

Respect for nature, too

The same thinking applies beyond people. We call nature a resource when we have already decided the relationship is one-way. Taking from nature and contributing to its continuity are two halves of the same relationship. Respecting nature doesn’t mean never taking. It means remembering the other half.

The habit of ranking reaches the earth as well. When land, rivers and other living things are ranked below whatever we want from them, they become things to use up. When they are seen as parts that complete us, as the soil completes the plant, the question changes from how much we can take to what we give back. How to Live in a Relationship with Nature follows that thought further.

Gratitude without a ledger

Respect is closely tied to gratitude, and here too we often get it slightly wrong. Gratitude is not a debt you owe. A debt has to be repaid and then it is over. Gratitude is recognition: seeing clearly what someone else has added to your life. It doesn’t make you smaller, and it doesn’t make them your creditor. It simply makes the relationship visible.

A protocol to try

The next time you meet someone very different from you, in background, belief or temperament, notice two urges.

The first is the urge to change them, even gently. The second is the urge to shrink, to feel that their strength shows up your weakness.

Let both pass, and ask a third question instead: what do they have that completes what I have? You may be surprised how often the answer is the very thing that first made them seem so different. And if there isn’t an answer, respect still holds. Some differences don’t complete each other at all; respecting them can mean leaving room, keeping a boundary, and disagreeing without making the other person smaller.

Limitations

• Some differences really do conflict, for example in how people believe others should be treated, and completion is not always possible.
• Identities often protect people who have been treated unfairly. Asking them to stop ranking can sound like asking them to stop defending themselves.
• Our picture of nature as complementary is simplified. Nature contains competition too.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, सहअस्तित्व (coexistence), p. 193