I think most of us feel in our bones that the urgency of today’s crises call us to do something different, to find new ways of engaging one another, of speaking to each other and listening to each other with a new spirit. Whatever old spirit’s been moving us, it’s decrepit. Its chattering is unhelpful if not downright destructive.
Celebrated Nigerian author Ben Okri has been thinking about this, and while he focuses on the work of artists, his insights apply to those of us here in the everyday. In a recent interview, Okri says, “A human being is a continent; a human being is a universe. We have dimensions to us. And if those dimensions are taken out of play, it makes it easy for us to be manipulated.”
Okri is asking artists to match their art to the needs of the fully human. He continues: “As long as people are seen in a narrow context, it is very easy to dehumanize them. The minute you put the vastness of what it is to be human back into the picture, it’s a bit harder, because you’re dealing with a human being who is just as rich and complex and wonderful as you are.”
To get a good idea of “people seen in a narrow context” visit Twitter. Okay, that’s an extreme. The truth is that life seems overwhelming these days and we are often moving so fast and with such purpose, or with what we convince ourselves is purpose, that stopping to see the universe in others would slow us down or get in our way. Yeah, well, that way lies madness. I speak from experience.
In contemporary politics and public life, the madness prevails. We tell ourselves we are not dehumanizing others when we hurry and say whatever we think needs saying before we even take a moment to listen. We may think we are speaking to their interests even though a part of us knows we have no idea what their interests are.
In his essay, “On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” the philosopher William James speaks to the problem.
Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the…vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.
James wrote this essay after recognizing that he’d been blind to the “vast world of inner life” of a poor mountain farmer he’d seen on a trip to North Carolina, a man James at first took to be living an impoverished life. He later came to see that we should be forbidden from “pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own.” Humans are a continent, a universe, after all, as Okri said.
This is a damned hard practice, and if you are like me you will disappoint James’ hopes, and our hopes for ourselves, time and time again. Maybe that happens because we are hurrying past ourselves, so to speak, and failing to inhabit the “vast world of inner life” within us as well as beyond us. We can be forgiven.
It should be easy to see how all this relates to the multiple crises we hold in common, from the climate crisis to the civilizational crisis that has many turning into the blind alleys of authoritarianism. Right now we need our narrow interests to fly to pieces. We need new perspectives.