Is there a gap in our society that needs bridging? Between say the followers of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, between those on the left and those on the right, between liberals and conservatives?

Furthermore do the present country wide demonstrations against newly elected President Trump, mean that the gap is there and still very much alive? Or is it what we would rather be the case, that the recent statements of President elect Trump, as during his talk with President Obama in the Oval Office, imply that the gap, while still there, is less than it was? For it does seem to be that just the fact of being the newly elected president nullifies the irresponsible positions and statements of the candidate who came before.

And what about Hillary? Was she speaking of a gap or separation between us when she said, “You know, to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?  The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, the ‘you name it.’”

Are there people like that? Are the “deplorables” real? The Blacks will tell you, yes, there are racists out there, as will gays confirm the presence of homophobics, women of sexists, immigrants of xenophobics, and Muslims of Islamaphobics.

So is the principal gap among us that between those of us who are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and those of us who are not? No, I don’t think so. (Also, no one is never just any one of those sorry characters alone.)

The gap, I think the principal one, is as always the gap between the “haves and the have-nots,” these two groups out numbering by orders of magnitude racists, sexists, and the others. In fact, the gap between rich and poor has probably been with us since the advent of civilization some 10,000 or so years ago, that point in our history when wealth accumulation became possible.

Prior to that time in our history there were the so-called hunter/gatherer societies but the anthropologists who study these people have, as far as I know, not yet uncovered among them Hillary’s deplorables and the “you know whats,” nor the legions of the poor and the jobless of today. Was it, perhaps, because the land was only there to use, not to take, as in the time of the native Americans?

But I’ve done it once again, while writing losing my north, my direction. What I had intended to write about was not all the above but the single, and for me most troubling gap of all, that being the ability gap (or gaps). For it is, I believe, differences of ability that most separate us. Even in just one family sometimes these are not easy to overcome.

At one extreme these gaps are huge, that between me and Richard Feynman, or between me and LeBron James, or between me and Beyonce. Take any ability, any one of the seven abilities, or as Howard Gardner called them, “intelligences,”  —musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and an eighth, naturalistic, and then you will see that the distances between us in respect to any one of these is huge.

So we all might on a scale of 1-10, for each of these abilities, place ourselves in respect to the “amount” of the ability in our possession, the one end, a 10, representing respective abilities of Richard Feynman, Lebron James, and let’s say Bach or Mozart (in place of Beyonce), and at the other a 1 representing (there was a point when I wanted to say Donald Trump, but I no longer believe that, because in his  case things are changing, for the better?)…?

If we were to do this, scaling in this manner our own abilities, that which happens in school, almost on the first day, when we begin to compare others to ourselves and see ourselves being compared with others, then almost on that very first day the ability gaps between us are visible to teacher and student alike. When this happens, this kind of learning about our own “worth” compared to others, we may at best be only at a loss for words. If we’re lucky we won’t be at the bottom of the scale in anyone of the seven intelligences. But there may be those who are, and if so these might, and probably are in many countries, labelled à la Hillary the “real” deplorables, (except when it’s much too politically incorrect to do so).

I think it’s clear that everyone knows, if not understands, that abilities are not evenly distributed, and in order to go on living with one another, in order not to be constantly envious of one another, even occasionally coming to blows and doing battle, we have to learn to live with and accept our differences. Most of us probably do. For we have no choice than to accept that we are very different, one from another. In my own case I’ve long accepted a number of big disappointments about myself, that for example I’ll never make it to Master level of chess, or teach classes of differential calculus at MIT, and I know that I’ll never have a role to play in a production of the Metropolitan Opera.

It is on this very point that our public schools have by and large failed. Failed because they have tried to hide the differences among their students, not wanting to admit that their students need individual attention, their abilities varying so widely that it makes no sense to pretend they don’t and keep them all together working at the same task or lesson, and while doing so making little or no progress. (That which we call the failure of our schools.)

Even worse the school people have I think, tragically, because of the lives that are hurt by their doing so, made the goal of a four year liberal arts college education the goal of everyone. It can’t be of course but the school people go on acting as if it were, and as a result they go on neglecting the real abilities of the students, pretending that college is within the reach of their real abilities whereas too often it’s not.

Now I would return to the gap between us that needs bridging. For that gap, I believe, results to a large extent from the huge differences in our abilities. The poor white working classes, many of whom did not attend college and while in school were academically challenged to say the least, during the recent election by and large supported Trump. The college educated, the academically gifted, the members of the country’s elite ruling classes by and large supported Clinton. Different abilities may have brought this situation about, but now the differences seem to be differences of class.

I know of only two methods of closing what I will now call the ability and often resulting wealth gap between us. But the redistribution of the country’s wealth, that remedy for wealth inequality, which has been most often tried by governments, and perhaps even ever so slightly diminishing differences of wealth, is not one of them. Differences of ability are still not within the government’s power to modify, let alone change.

One method to bridge the ability gap is and has been for some time, religion. And in fact one religion, Christianity, for example, came upon the inequality scene among men with the principal goal of encouraging men to love one another, paying no attention to any inequalities, differences of ability, wealth, or class, among them. If I were to love say, LeBron and Beyonce, and love was returned, of what importance would then be our differing abilities? None at all.

So I’m not convinced that religion is not the way to go. It may be, but it is not my way. My way is science, which means looking about one with a kind of skeptical curiosity while wanting to know as much as one can about one’s situation, about one’s surroundings, about the people and the things that one (everyone, regardless of ability level) encounters, about where one is on the earth,… all of this being an attitude requiring no particular ability and to some not small extent being within the power of us all.

And this for some is where science and religion come together. Given a population of Christians (or Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Confucians, Sikhs, et al.) and scientists the gap between people would disappear because neither religion nor science would give importance to skin, surface differences, the very differences that ignorance makes so much of.

In the past religion, forgetting the spirit of the book while being taken up by the words,  has too often failed to be true to itself, while so far, anyway, science has not. Both science and religion point us towards the very deepest possible understanding of ourselves, of the meaning of life, and this understanding, within the power of each and everyone of us, doesn’t depend on any one or more, even on greater or lesser amounts of one or more of the seven abilities, as exceptional or extraordinary as these might be, the logical-mathematical ability of a Newton, the musical-rhythmic ability of a Mozart….