Not being able to vote because you are not of the ‘right gender’. Being traded and treated like a slave because you were born in the ‘wrong body’ or on the ‘wrong continent’. Your head chopped off by a machete because you belong to an “inferior tribe.” The cause of these atrocities is not a mystery. ‘Black pages’ are the direct result of the inability or unwillingness to accept differences.
The acceptance of diversity has laid the foundation for every civilization since time immemorial. If you want to suffer the most miserable death, all you have to do is isolate yourself on a desert island. We may be furiously disgusted with others, but it is thanks to mutual exchange that we can survive and live at all. Living together is therefore a systematic exercise in dealing with differences. But what if the differences seem to become too great?
Whether it concerns migration trends, changing social norms or the looming climate catastrophe, political conflicts in our society are gradually degenerating into an impasse. An impasse in which groups talk completely past each other. Contemporary doomsayers argue that we are in danger of being held hostage by ‘affective polarisation’. In this doomsday scenario, citizens are no longer able to deal with political and ethnic differences. Instead, ‘the other’ is seen as a threat to one’s own survival.
The awakening from this moral impasse begins with the realization that gay sapiens has no control over their own appearance. It is more likely to strike aliens than to have children who, before birth, dictated to their parents what skin color and gender they deemed desirable. Even our aesthetic and ethical preferences lie beyond our control. For example, conscientious people are more likely to have a conservative outlook on life. And people with a natural open mindedcharacter, for example, tend to think progressively more often.
The list of both social and biological factors that influence how we experience the world around us is endless. Generations that have experienced socio-economic deprivation tend to put economic prosperity at the center of their lives, generations that grow up in relative prosperity more often find a post-material agenda important. Even the language we speak and the words we use influence how we view the world around us. I learned that from Speaking and Beingthe insightful book by Kubra Gümüsay.
Psychological research shows us that everyone is subject to ‘naive realism’ suffers, the tendency to view your own interpretation of the world as truth, despite working with limited information. From the understanding ‘visual diversity’ it is becoming increasingly clear that people differ not only on the outside, but also in the way they experience the world.
The acceptance of differences in our society starts with the acknowledgment that we cannot change others (they can hardly do it themselves). In fact, we shouldn’t change others. Instead, we need skills that allow us to understand others and coexist peacefully with them.
in my book With the Netherlands in therapy I myself use the ‘LEF method’, which stands for Listening, Showing Empathy, and Giving Feedback. By developing these skills, we can prevent people from being hated and oppressed based on arbitrary characteristics. After all, every society remains a systematic exercise in dealing with differences.
Kiza Magendane is a political scientist and writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 11, 2022