The Epiphany of the Other 3
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 03.3
The dialectic between Identity and Otherness
As suggested by Tzvetan Todorov in his analysis on the New World, I’d like to list the 3 possible approaches to the encounter with the Other and define their subconscious paradigms; the third will exemplify our anthropological project of transcending the modern era.
- The most common approach is, presuming the other to be identical to us, that of absorption:
“You are human like us, hence you should become like us”.
The recognition of a common ground here justifies the suppression of the differences, and in case of opposition legitimizes the use of violence. It’s the case of the American natives, to whom was left only one choice: to convert or to be exterminated. The annihilation of the amerind culture cannot be considered simply ‘an unfortunate chapter of colonialism’; it represents the most eloquent expression of the refutation of the Other committed by the Western collective identity, since 1492 was at the same time: 1. the year of the discovery of America, 2. that of the expulsion of the Mores after the siege of Granada, and 3. that of the ouster of the Jews from Spain. Significant detail: “Most of the royal money invested in the second trip of Columbus came from the assets confiscated to the Jews”. The other humanities – the Mores, the Jews, the Indios – were simultaneously rejected outside the European borders right when those borders were expanding on the other side of the Atlantic.
The ghetto, during the Middle ages seen as a necessary compromise between the needs of rejection and mercy towards the unfaithful, will appear increasingly intolerable during the Enlightenment, and will be progressively metabolized and assimilated until when, in the roaring 19th century, it will be definitely hunted down by the modern nationalistic identities, blinded by their will to power. The Church, still daydreaming a worldwide integration in the Christian model forged on a Roman mold, provided an ideological tool for this destruction of diversity: by becoming Christian, ‘the others’ were to be eradicated from their identity and to passively absorb the doctrines of civilization.
We cannot hope to enter the new era until we have critically acknowledged all the oppressions perpetrated by our culture against the rest of humanity,
against the multiple forms in which humanity had expressed itself.
2. The second option to approach the Other is to aim at establishing a hierarchy between two different humanities, one of which is considered inferior to the other:
human, yes, but different and thus inferior.
In this way every difference is reduced to a ‘mistake’ on the part of the lower rank. In a just relationship, each subjectivity limits reciprocally the other, in mutual respect. When instead diversity is subordinated on a scale of value, we pave the way to the hegemony of the subject that proves stronger on the weaker one, whose subjectivity often ends to be negated altogether. For this reason the converted indios were considered for two hundred years unsuitable for priesthood: children of the same God, but inferior.
For this reason Winston Churchill couldn’t put up with the view of that ‘naked fakir’ named Gandhi talking face to face with the governor of his Imperial Majesty Lord Halifax. For this – as denounced by Ho Chi Minh in 1923 – even inside the communist organizations in South-East Asia “the indigenous is looked upon by the French worker as a negligible being, incapable of understanding and without an independent will”.
Absorption or subordination: That was up to now the fate waiting any population that would get in touch with the West.
Modernity has not witnessed any different outcome.
3. The new era reveals and points out to a way never attempted before and today made possible, or better necessary, by the structural unification of the planet and by the intricate web of interdependence that now clings together the various human ethnies around the earth.
It’s the way of equality within diversity, and diversity within equality.
It’s indeed the epiphany of the Other, that entails a modification of the individual’s relational mindset towards an identity at once fully self-aware and fully open to novelty.
By recognizing the other as such, I keep on being myself while becoming enriched by the difference. This difference, once repressed in the subconscious, reemerges to light and becomes part of my conscious human potential. In our encounter with the Other we enter a kind of hermeneutic situation where the inevitable accumulation of cultural prejudices and assumptions that defines pragmatically who we are stands between our ability to understand and the ‘living text’ under our eyes. Either the difference provokes a crumbling of that accumulation and awakens in us the urge of transcending ourselves by letting the other update our idea of humanity, or that accumulation withstands rigidly as a wall, assuming to be the only measure to the authentically human,
and thus
in the name of humanity we reject another human.
It’s clear today how the ethical necessity for this anthropological mutation coincides with the last call for survival involving the species as a whole.
This epochal human revolution cannot happen only as an inner development of our self-awareness; it requires and results in a radical transformation of the economic and political world systems,
as I will explain in the last part of the book.
The slaughter of the cultures
It’s no coincidence if the ‘Third World’ – to use a term that’s becoming unfashionable – would serve the West simultaneously as economic reservoir for its enterprises and as anthropological backlog destined to slow assimilation or to perpetual slavery. On the geopolitical plane, the Other is the Third World, and thus, at the same time, the portion of the Earth subject to the strategies of economic imperialism and the portion of Humanity subject to a methodical slaughter of the indigenous cultures, when not directly, consequently to the transplant of our economic system within a context culturally inapt to receive it.
It’s typical of the industrial civilization to put the economic factor first, even when confronting a pre-industrialized culture. The cultural identity of any human group is, as we said, systemic, since all its factors are correlated not in terms of the marxist’s mechanism of structure and superstructure, but rather in terms of a looped causal cycle that makes of every factor the condition and effect of the others.
Its overall significance is about
the creation and safekeeping of the symbols that reflect and communicate the meaning of life,
and not simply about the production and custody of useful technology.
“Culture, writes Latouche, is nothing else but the contingent response given by any society to explain its social existence. By splitting the unity of life in a material substance (economy) and a ‘conscience’, and later expelling the non-economical from the fundamental nucleus,
the western metaphysics has reduced culture to a by-product of the economic activity…
The economic perspective reduces the entire social reality to its ‘materialistic’ aspect, and then reduces it again to numerical data. In its essence,
economic analysis is terrorism perpetrated by the accounting sector”.
Any production tool, say the stone axe, was in the pre-industrial culture an element inscribed in the symbolical system around which the group revolved, right as the land or the bread on the table were not only seen as tangible assets but also as sacred emblems of the collective imagination.
By forcing a productive system upon a foreign culture we cause its disintegration, and consequently the human eradication, the loss of identity.
It’s renown, for example, that the introduction of the agricultural and food industrial models provokes the collapse of the agrarian class in the Third World, generating hunger, widespread rural proletariat, urban beggary and massive out-migration. The heaviest crime committed by the West was the cultural genocide.
Significantly, right in the age of colonial expansion and of the methodical and often criminal elimination of the Other, the western culture discovered its mass subconscious: negated on the outside, the other world was born inside us, the outer breakdown became an inner schism. “Western civilization – notes poignantly Todorov – having removed the extraneousness of the other on the outside, discovered another inside. Since the classical age up to the late romanticism (that is to our days) the intellectuals and the puritans never ceased to find out with amazement how the human person is not one, or that even it doesn’t exist, that the
‘I’ is really only an echo chamber of the plurality”. The reject human, the negro in us!
It’s the Es(Id) of Freud, the shapeless submerged continent (Acheron, would say Freud) where caged in a dark room turbinate the repressed diversities, the parts of us we relegated to the shadows.
