I have been studying intercultural communication now for several years, ever since I recovered from a traumatic immersion experience that left me yearning for answers. I have discovered that in many ways, intercultural practice is a constant struggle to navigate the tension between human commonality and cultural difference; between human distinctness and the possibility for union despite this distinctness. The ambiguity of this struggle is at times overbearing, as we find we can never definitively draw the line between what we have in common and what we do not. Where we draw the line, however, has profound implications for the success or failure of intercultural dialogue.
One of the first lessons of intercultural psychology is that humans show an inherent bias toward viewing others through the lens of their own assumptions. A common-sense assessment of what provokes intercultural conflict and inhibits dialogue is that it has to do with each group being unable to realize how much they have in common. Intercultural communication teaches us to turn this assumption on its head in a seemingly counter-intuitive way: it is not a failure to perceive similarity that leads to conflict and miscommunication, but rather the failure to perceive the radical difference present in the situation. Assumption of similarity, or what is often called ‘minimization’ in intercultural lingo, serves as the primary defense mechanism to armor ourselves against difference and protect our own worldviews from scrutiny.
Despite recognizable differences in appearance and behavior, our default mode is to view everyone as fundamentally the same (that is to say, deep down, once we get to the ‘core’ or ‘essence’ of humanity that is beneath our superficial differences). In the academic world this is sometimes referred to as essentialism. Essentialism, as untenable as it may seem in the face of clearly visible differences, is held onto because it provides us a justification for judging one another. Judgments provide us with stability. If I hold someone to be fundamentally ‘like me’, but they are behaving in a way that is odd or foreign, such as say, standing too close to me while we are speaking, I have a justification to judge that behavior as incorrect and react decisively.
If I were instead to truly validate the difference of the other, and treat our respective assumptions as apples and oranges, I would be left with no firm ground to stand on and a sense of vertigo would set in. Suddenly my own assumptions about speaking distance would appear arbitrary, and I would be left flailing about in a cultural vacuum, not knowing how to position myself (physically and emotionally) in relation to the other. Minimization is a strategy that both protects us from this vacuum, and also sows the seeds for protracted miscommunication and conflict.
An alternative to minimization and essentialism is to conceive of humanity, in the words of philosopher Alphonso Lingis, as ‘a community of those who have nothing in common’. Lingis identifies the potential for genuine community (despite the radical difference that separates us) as being deeply intertwined with the experience of mortality.
“One enters into community not by affirming oneself and one’s forces but by exposing oneself to expenditure at a loss, to sacrifice. Community forms in a movement by which one exposes oneself to the other, to forces and powers outside oneself, to death and to the others who die” (The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, 12).
Such a community cannot be established once and for all and codified into doctrines or institutions. It emerges spontaneously and ephemerally wherever there is a genuine point of meeting: a giving, a sacrifice, an annihilation of the self. Inspired by Lingis’s concept of ‘the community of the dying’, I began to wonder if there was any correlation between the horror vacui we experience in intercultural encounters and the universal fear of death. If so, perhaps changing the way we relate to our mortality could change the way we relate to others.
As a secular thinker who has long been engaged with religious people as a component of the work that I do, I am also excited that mortality may offer a unique point of convergence for religious and secular thinking, helping us to better engage with one another in constructive dialogue. In my view, religion has always served humanity as a sort of applied science for managing mortality. In these cataclysmic times, many of our mortality management institutions are being strained and disintegrating through the pressure of massive change, and many are contributing to conflict and violence in reaction to the collective horror vacui. Witnessing the escalating complexity and ambiguity around us in the wake of these crumbling certainties, it is as if we can feel death closing in. And so we panic, we lash out.
But this state of emptiness and decay also presents the opportunity to be a state of formation. By assembling our collective differences and cultural resources, both secular and religious, we can continue the development of this science and produce the foundation for a different type of engagement – with death, with each other, and with ourselves.
Hi Ian,
“I have been studying intercultural communication now for several years, ever since I recovered from a traumatic immersion experience that left me yearning for answers.”
Please share, if you are willing.
Peace,
Kelly
Kelly,
Thanks for your comment. I may elaborate on this in a subsequent post.
Best,
Ian
Ian,
Thanks for this.
I love the suggestion that the possibility for community hinges on exposing, not asserting, oneself.
Roger
Thanks for your response, Roger! You might want to read this post on dialogue by Tim Brauhn, which I wrote a lengthy comment on expressing similar sentiment
https://stateofformation.org/2010/12/what-is-dialogue/
Thanks for the thoughtful post, Ian. There’s a lot to reflect on here. I’m particularly interested in the idea of the “universal fear of death” as something that “presents the opportunity to be a state of formation.” Maybe this would be a fruitful topic for several contributing scholars from different worldviews to explore in a series of common posts.
Oliver,
Thank you for your response! I would love to see different contributing scholars to explore this topic further! I know I will be exploring concepts of loss and dialogue further in my subsequent posts, and look forward to continued engagement with our community about this.
Best,
Ian
Could it be that when considering one’s mortality one approaches the really big question: Who am I?. Am I my religion? Am I my race, my political stance, my cultural melieu?
If instead of arguing those temporary attributes of one’s personality, one were to experience, moment to moment, the answers to that question, perhaps all human beings would stand revealed in a common experience.
Having spent some years as a caregiver, I’ve noticed that the approach of death obliterates the temporal qualities of personality. In the silence of the final moments, you are left only with compassion and reverence.
Betsy,
Thank you so much for your comment. It is great to hear from someone who has experience as a caregiver and being present with people who are passing on. I have not really experienced mortality up close and personal like this, so currently my ideas come only from speculation. However, I hope that my thinking will bring me closer to people who have experience with mortality so that I may learn from them.
I agree about mortality leading us to approach the really big question: “Who am I?” I think what often makes this experience so unsettling is that when we sift through the layers of our identity (Am I my religion? Am I my race, my political stance, my cultural milieu?) we find out we are really none of these things, and that there isn’t anything underneath all of the layers, just an emptiness or void. I think that is the answer to the really big question, although it is kind of a non-answer. And I think this is where the potential for communion lies.
It is not that people don’t have anything in common; we actually all have ‘nothing’ in common. The fact that for each of us, beneath the temporary layers of identity, there is actually a ‘nothing’ there, is what can unite us. The problem is that the experience of this nothingness is horrifying to us so long as we remain invested in the temporal aspects of our identity – it can only be experienced as a death.
Thank you for reading! All the best,
Ian
Ian, may I suggest that you consider the experience of many caregivers….that the release from the physical body does not end in nothingness. At the moment of transition, there can be a single ring of the telephone; a ball of lightning whizzing past; a photograph of a loved on who has already passed, which comes to life and calls for the “dying” person to “hurry up, we have people waiting!”
A close family member may report seeing the loved one, hearing consoling messages. One recent story: Margaret’s sister, Deb, had died after many months of painful illness. They were so close. Margaret was inconsolable after many weeks and her family began to worry about her. A close friend’s little girl had come to play in the backyard playhouse of an afternoon. When
her mother asked how her playtime went, she said that Deb came and played with her. Deb said that Margaret had helped her feel better, but that “now I feel a whole lot better”.
Experience teaches that what we call death is not “the end”. I’m sorry to say that religion bears the burden of having taught people to fear it, thereby shutting them off from the many signs of continued love and succor from loved ones who have moved on. Love is the connection. It is love which makes everything possible. It is love which we all share. God is love. Love “makes the world go ’round”. Love is all there is.
May you drink deeply.
Betsy
Thank you for this enlightening post. I’m following a new blogger you may be interested who calls his blog Undiscovered Countries — A Notebook on Death Studies. You can find it here: http://deathstudies.blogspot.com
Caroline
Thanks, Caroline.