Encounter, engage difference in the 21st century
By Toivo Asheeke
The problem of the 21st century is the problem of how humans engage, encounter, and react to difference.
We find ourselves today 10 years into the 21st century, and I begin my first article of the year wth a statement very much inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Du Bois once remarked, “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” For his time, this to me was indeed an insightful and prophetic declaration of the realities of his world. However, in the 21st century, as has been a reoccurring theme throughout the vastness of human history, our greatest challenge will be how this truly globalized world interacts and reacts to difference.
With the accelerated pace over the last few decades of globalization due to factors such as technological advances and the expansion of capitalist free market ideology, the world has become smaller.
With this shrinkage in time and space, more people are coming into contact with people who are very different from themselves. Ideas, information and feelings are now shared between individuals and communities that would have never happened in the past. This interaction has and will form positive, as well as negative social relationships that did not exist before.
The challenge I see humans facing, whether black, white, yellow, Catholic, Muslim, homosexual, male, female, rich or poor is how we interact with each other.
Today, more than any time in the past, this issue is of paramount importance as mankind now has the capability to kill each other more efficiently and effectively than ever before.
In addition to this, through institutions like the media, those in power can now more easily demonize and villanize a people or idea they reject/don’t understand and influence millions in the process.
This being the case, institutions, communities and individuals around the world need to question how they react to a people/culture/tradition/lifestyle that is very unlike their own. Earlham, for example, in its Mission Statement and Principles and Practices expresses a desire to create a flowing, multi-cultural, tolerant community by engaging with difference.
One of the questions I believe then we as Earlhamites need to critically ask ourselves is how much are we succeeding with this? Do we really like to engage with people very much unlike usor do we like living in the illusion that we do but in reality we are scared to travel outside our comfort zones? And when we do engage, will our recognition of someone or an idea in opposition of ours excite curiosity to learn or instill apathy and closemindedness?
As for the wider world, will we as humans be able to see that, “Our global civilization is a world heritage — not just a collection of disparate local cultures” as was said by Amartya Sen (2002). And by doing that, recognize that much of what we enjoy and use today has come from someone who does not look like us, or live with us or worship the same God as us?
When human beings are able to look at history and understand it as human history, not only as African, Indian or Arab history, that is when the human race as a whole will have taken the first steps to embracing difference.
Rabindranath Tagore stated, “Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin … Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.”
Times change, and I believe in order for human beings to survive and flourish in this dynamic world, it is essential that we take to heart Tagore’s words. This can start by us looking at achievements made by Sun Tzu, Aristotle, Newton, Emperor Menelik II, Du Bois, and Nkrumah as not just Chinese, Greek, British, Ethiopian, American or Ghanaian achievements, but as human contributions to the world.
We should also understand, for example, that many of the first advances in mathematics and optics came not from Isaac Newton in 17th century England, but from India and the Arab peoples between the second and sixth centuries.
And when we sit back and examine human history, we can finally see that what has gotten us to this point of development is not just the work of “Western minds,” but an accumulation and collection of world minds.
Once we can understand that, we can then look at someone who is different from us and concentrate not on what we don’t have in common, but more on what we can learn from each other.
By being able to encounter difference, which can be scary and uncomfortable at times, we can move forward in the 21st century better-equipped to solve global problems, such as poverty, social inequality, global warming, war and a host of other troubles together.
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