Dear wonderers,
What do you consider as other as you go through your day?
Today, I invite you to take your time and do this observational exercise for, at least, one whole day: quietly capture the moments where your limits show in connection to another and how it makes you feel, think, and react. (It’s an exercise I used to do in my creative writing workshops, so if you feel inspired to create as a result, even better!)
We operate by othering as default. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with this mechanism - it’s how we delineate and categorize ourselves among the rest, the brain needs these neat boxes to keep us alive. But what happens when this othering becomes the reason for marginalization and violence? What happens when limits become a pretext for censorship? Where does fairness and sensibility end and oppression start?
As you can see, I have more questions than answers (as usual, I guess). What I know, though, is that we’re losing the art of such conversations: the capacity to listen, to entertain foreign ideas, to bring the othering mechanism into conscious thought. Or, maybe, it’s the exercise itself that we forgot how to do…speaking about it is the next step. Well, mind you, there’s a fine line between understanding and trying to homogenize everything, just like there’s a fine line between trying to right wrongs and completely erase the past in the process.
Memory and awareness are what’s keeping us from repeating past mistakes. Yet, this is hard. If you erase the traces of a cruel past in the name of a more enlightened future, then it’s quite easy to repeat the exact crimes you were trying to avoid in the first place. One of my latest fears? I’m terrified by what a new form of communist othering could bring in today’s technological landscape - and, I can see its shapes already forming.
My essayist’s quill is blunt and rusty, so I can only leave you with these questions and blurry thoughts. And, of course, way better thinkers to visit, in search of instruments for better answers. Or, even more so, better questions.
So, if you, like me, have these questions or other related ones, let’s explore them together.
And, to share how I approach that observational exercise, these are the lenses I use when exploring the “big ideas” giving us all headaches and heartaches in our fractured, burning world:
I truly believe that we define ourselves through differences, but forget to be curious about our shared human experience. And that might be one key to awareness. And memory.
I also truly believe we should venture into our human nature, heeding philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s beautiful words: To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.
There’s no “one true answer” to rule them all. I think that’s a slippery slope to take. It’s the complete and utter conviction that makes us forget the limits of our worldview to begin with.
1.
Let’s start with Alain de Botton’s “myth of normalcy”. If you’ve been around for a longer time in my little corner of the Internet, you know I like challenging this concept with all its unconscious biases and self-righteousness that it, oftentimes, produces. But Botton puts it so much more vividly:
Any idea of the normal currently in circulation is not an accurate map of what is customary for a human to be. We are — each one of us — far more compulsive, anxious, sexual, tender, mean, generous, playful, thoughtful, dazed, and at sea than we are encouraged to accept.
2.
Bertrand Russell on the “growing pains of our civilization” comes next (I know, I know, two Marginalian links in a row).
I should make it clear, not merely as an intellectual proposition, but as something that the heart spontaneously believes, that it is not by making others suffer that we shall achieve our own happiness, but that happiness and the means to happiness depend upon harmony with other men.
Beautiful utopia, yes, but also another “lens” in our toolbox of exploring the shared human experience more than our differences and grievances.
3.
This one will seem a bit out of context, but indulge me in our quest to see that nature itself has a way of finding harmony and comfort in what is, quite literally, the other.
4.
Sometimes, for the sake of argument and our own limits in dealing with complexity, we simplify cross-cultural analyses and cultural patterns. This was a surprising study for me, although in hindsight it’s quite logical. It goes to show, once more, that nuances are important:
Their findings challenge the usual interdependent vs independent binary. As Uskul and her colleagues put it, participants from the Mediterranean societies ‘distinctively emphasised several forms of independence … and interdependence’. For example, in response to some questions about how they viewed themselves in relation to others, the Mediterranean participants gave more independent responses, on average, than either East Asians or Anglo-Westerners – such as by indicating that they liked being different from (as opposed to similar to) other people; that they tended to rely on themselves (rather than on others); and that they favoured self-expression over preserving harmony in relationships.
Yet on other points, the Mediterranean-based participants gave relatively interdependent answers – for example, on questions about connection to others (eg, ‘If someone in your family achieves something, you feel proud, as if you had achieved something yourself’).
5.
… the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East.
Discover Alan Watts, a one-of-a-kind philosopher, as he dismantles the concept of the *self* and the *other*. What better way to question the limits of one’s construct of being? But curiosity.
Tiny Thought
As you muse and ponder, here’s a poem to further nuance everything, by the creator of Marginalian - Maria Popova:
Thank you for indulging me until the end.
(photo source: Dennis Ariel)