DH 10 Diverse People Meeting Together on Sensitive Social and Global Issues

DYNAMICS FOR HOPE 10 DH 10: DIVERSE PEOPLE MEETING TOGETHER ON SENSITIVE SOCIAL AND GLOBAL ISSUES A society is healthy when care is taken to make sure that everyone has an honoured place. The task of opening up to different others about sensitive themes between us is not easy. As we know from scapegoating, culturally it is much easier to secure our identity over and against others who have very different beliefs and positions to ours, rather than take the risk of meeting together. When we know that we are safe, we make others safe. Safety is that each person has their dignity and place and is free to robustly state their views and disagree without fearing they will lose their place.

In the modern age, we have extended our relationships to a global level through economics and trade, through politics and conquest, through migration and movement, through technology, and now through our families. We are being challenged to engage with different others in a human way and in an unprecedented manner, often everyday. We cross and meet borders every day in our different societies. Many times, we can feel afraid of the consequences of these changes. We fear we will lose our place in a faceless and heartless global melee. We also fear for what we know and value as we experience moving into the unknown. Deep down some of us, who are comfortable, fear we will lose our privileges, however small. How is it that cultures teach us to fear change rather then welcome it; to fear the other, rather than be more open to them? So often, shaped by earlier rivalries deep in our history, instead of opening up, we hunker down. Rather than risk extending a hand of friendship to one another. In our uncertainty, we demonise those who threaten us. The real problem is that hunkering down no longer creates security, even for those on the inside. Instead, it spawns new relationships of resentment, in which what we do to one another is remembered and reciprocated, with the potential that we end up in a spiral of revenge rather than enter a new world where everyone is recognised as the unique, different human being they are. In mimetic rivalry we all become more frightened and more emotional. The threats rise, even as we try to get rid of them by securing ourselves in winning. We are often not even aware, from the inside of our group, that we are excluding others or that we are hunkering down: we say that what we are doing is ‘just normal’. In fact, to really know about exclusion we have to experience it ourselves. We can be oblivious unless we have our own experiences where we have felt excluded, or we know about it through another person talking about their experience of exclusion. Recognising exclusion depends on our solidarity with the excluded or by listening to the excluded or acknowledging experiences of being excluded ourselves. Constantly ensuring that we have not fallen into the habit of keeping others out is a discipline which has to be learned and then practiced in our workplaces, professional associations, sporting, cultural, trade union, civic, business and faith based organisations. Cross Cutting Links Are Essential To Embedding Peace And Justice Our future depends on recognising that we can only escape the risk of mimetic escalation and fear through meeting together in a place of freedom, where we can really engage and meet one another. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. ” Maya Angelou

It is only in the ‘model / model’ learning structure (see UR 2 in Book 3) where people give each other their place and where the other is seen ‘as a gift not a threat’, that this form of a more open relationship is possible. Meeting in this way means we experience the meaning of ‘equal while different’ and that we can change together. Having this relationship in one place, or one time, makes it possible for us, in mimesis, to spread this approach in our other relationships or at other times. The emergence of real justice and sustainable civic values depends on the spreading conviction, rooted in experience, of the value of the other for us and of the experience of being valued. Such an open experience is fundamental to nurturing hope, and such a fundamental experience transforms us. Learning to meet those we only know on the surface, in a real and deeper way, is a learning task of the first priority. As we become more and more inter-connected, making time and space to meet intentionally becomes more and more important. In societies that appear stable, this may, in fact be a bigger challenge than in those which appear to be afflicted by open conflict- precisely because the need to meet is not so obvious. In conflict-affected societies, such meeting with others always also runs the risk of scandalising those who are trying to find security by closing the door. Meetings with people regarded as ‘outsiders’ may even come under direct attack. However, for those who experience having a place with those with whom they have been in in conflict, such encounters are life- changing, routes to a world in which we are not rivals or enemies but make a future together. The ability to bring different people into positive engagements with others from different traditions, as many ‘stay with their own’, keeps open a vital window on the possibility of a global civic world. Douglas Fry’s studylxiv suggests the ability to cross-connect people is essential for peaceful societies. Amartya Senlxv suggests that we are people with many diverse elements in our formation each with our own very diverse backgrounds of ancestry, culture and beliefs. He also argues that, for communities to be plural and diversely different, we need to give people possibilities to cut across lines of separation and connect deeply with many different others. This understanding challenges isolated or fixed conceptions of self and culture by acknowledging our complexity and the multiple ways we interdepend. By recognising one another as human beings, we assert that there is no outside or inside, only persons dependent on one another. In Sen’s ‘one human race’ vision, a task for all of us is to resist degrading and vilifying treatment, because the alternative is that we will all be degraded and vilified.

DH 10: DIVERSE PEOPLE MEETING TOGETHER ON SENSITIVE SOCIAL AND GLOBAL ISSUES