Sometimes, in our culture, it seems the individual is all that matters. Life is about me: my career, my wealth and status, my history. We talk about intersectionality, the many identities that make up one person. What about intersectionality among people, rather than within them? Isn’t that our most important circumstance, as a species?

Say one person is gay, male, white, urban, and Jewish. Another is straight, female, Asian, suburban, and Buddhist. According to what is usually meant by intersectionality, one might expect them to have little in common. But they both love dogs; they’re both poets; and they’re both passionate gardeners, though the guy’s plants are all in pots on his balcony. How different are they?

Ethnicity, gender, religion – these are aspects of the self that help us feel part of groups larger than our immediate friends and family. These aspects are endlessly fascinating. They take up most of our public discussion. Yet they represent a fraction of what a person actually is. More of our couple’s thoughts and daily activities are likely to concern their dogs, their poems, and their plants than any of the supposedly more significant aspects of their identities.

Ethnicity, gender, and religion are stories we tell ourselves. These histories are important and yet, to a degree, imaginary. They help make individuals what we are. But how have they come to outweigh other aspects so much that we sort ourselves into such narrow categories?

This sorting is far from accidental. A very few people have accumulated most of the economic and political power on this planet. So long as Black and white, male and female, Hindu and Muslim, are convinced we are significantly different, we can’t get ourselves together to challenge that power. One only has to look at Trump, Xi, Putin, Modi, or any other authoritarian to see that they deliberately foment enmity among ordinary people.

Imaginary boundaries keep us fighting one another, instead of taking charge of the planet, which the current culture is ruining for everybody. Preventing ordinary people from organizing is a short-sighted strategy on the part of elites, since their grandchildren as well as ours will have to inhabit this poisoned planet. But the elites, being human, are not good at taking the long view.

The internet gives us new opportunities to take down the walls we have built. Rapid and radical climate change gives this project new urgency. Online, people can identify with other dog lovers, poets, or gardeners. One’s ethnicity, gender, and religion can begin to appear less relevant in these circles. Old associations give way to new. Meanwhile, racist, ethnic, and anti-LGBTQ violence reinforces the old boundaries. Hate crimes are committed by people who depend on those boundaries for their whole identities. The increasing violence points to the degree that such people feel threatened. Whenever there is peace, the old boundaries erode.

The Black Lives Matter movement drew in white as well as Black people, not just in the US but globally. The (nearly all peaceful) demonstrations centered on the suffering experienced by Black people for no reason except that their skin color put them on the wrong side of an imaginary wall. Earlier, the Occupy movement also spread around the world. Wealth is another imaginary wall that causes great suffering to people on the wrong side of it. In addition, the environmental movement and the #MeToo movement are global or in the process of becoming so. All these movements indicate that at least some people are beginning to see ourselves as human first, with every other aspect of ourselves being less significant than that primary, leveling, identity.

Every human is clearly a unique world unto themselves. Every human is also 99.9% exactly like every other human. If we focus only on the individual, we just see the actions of one person, subject to chance, a sort of Brownian motion, like the movements of a particular molecule. If we’re interested in the larger movements of our species, we have to consider that most obvious and invisible thing: our culture.

The paradox of being human is that the essence of our personality provides a through-line in our lives; we carry that essence with us, like a smell or a sound that only we can produce. Yet we change constantly. Every day brings us new experiences, and every experience changes us, becomes part of who we are, whether or not we think about it or remember it.

Imagine if we could see the connections between us. Every meeting would form a line. More meetings would make a stronger line. There would be lines between clerk and customer, police and criminal, writer and reader. Instead of a universe of separate points, we would see a dense network in which no point existed in isolation. The loneliest individual, after all, would not have survived infancy if someone had not fed them and wiped their bottom.

This dense network of connection, though impalpable, is who we are. This is the reality of our species. Like the individual, humanity has through-lines. The constant is human nature. The flux is culture, which never stays the same, one day to the next.

We can’t change human nature. We can, however, change culture. Everything we say or do changes the culture, as well as everything we buy, or boycott, everything we listen to, argue with, dismiss or support. In such small increments, the body of humanity moves. In what direction are we moving? Tiny cells in the body of our species, we can hardly tell. All any of us can do is move in any way we are able toward peace, sustainability, and justice. And hope.