I Don’t Know About You People and Yes, I’m One of You
I’m a writer and a reader. Still, I grow weary as I try to absorb and understand your points of view, which seem to solely be to prove yourselves right —you, the rightest of people.
Maybe it’s because I’m multilingual. When you have multiple languages, you have multiple kinds of cultures as part of your being. But that’s just the beginning. I don’t go for confirmation, as in, I don’t allow myself to have confirmation bias.
Okay, sure, I get a boost when I do find an idea of mine confirmed in some significant way. But I won’t get too full of it, because I’m willing to get my bubble burst — in fact, I seek that experience.
I love the comment sections I find on Medium. First I get to read an article, and of course, my head gets filled with the ideas or observations made in the article. Then come the comments, which can be surprising in many ways, and surely are an interesting way to learn about sociology, philosophy, and psychology.
Some respondents are complete jerks or assholes. Some seem to completely miss the point of the article or of a comment. At times I’ll make a rude response to such people, or more likely comment on the idiocy of the respondent to the author who is getting dissed.
But part of my method is to engage in a kind of empathic listening with the jerk. I’ll get the person to clarify his position and I’ll ask questions. When I think I have a rough idea of where he’s at I’ll say it back to him as if to make sure I really understand.
This disarms people and I’ve had some great conversations and most of all I find little pieces of philosophy or reason that I can add to my own body of knowledge.
I have one kind of interaction that happened several times about a year ago, with two or three different people. I had written in a couple of my articles that while being a white guy, I didn’t notice race in others. I’m color blind — plus where I grew up in Ohio in a German settlement I never saw any people except for white people. My parents and teachers never even mentioned racism.
In my young adult life and ongoing to the present I often lived in black neighborhoods and Hispanic ones too and never gave a thought to the ethnic origins of my friends and neighbors. In other words, I really am not a racist.
But some people online laid into me. Saying of course I’m racist — I’m a white American male. So I’d respond along the lines that it was true I had advantages. I wouldn’t get thrown in jail because of my skin color. (I wouldn’t tell them I did go to jail several times for being a fucking long-haired hippie.)
Eventually, I’d end up having my correspondent confess to frustration with being a person of color and that maybe I really wasn’t racist after all. I’d say, well, stranger things have happened, but I’m really not racist and I really regret that you experience all this pain because there sure are a lot of racists out there.
And thus I have added to my philosophical tool kit. I’m multilingual and multi-cultural and have a little bit of my philosophical ‘enemies’ as part of my DNA now. Well come to think of it, that’s the whole point. Our DNA is largely the same if we’re all Homo sapiens. Well, ‘homo’ means “the same” in Greek, but means “man” in Latin. No wonder we’re conflicted.
It’s just that being social animals and still primal at heart we distinguish between people even though we mostly all have similar appearances. Like how all cows look alike to us, but maybe not to other cows. I don’t know.
I still don’t know everything yet. I’ve grown old, so I guess I’ll just keep learning until I drop. I suppose my writing will live on, but not for long in this world of evanescent electronic storage of knowledge.
Fred
