Africa and the developed world

This is confusing.

A trio of writers from different parts of Africa, interviewed on NPR, say to all the well-meaning helpers from the developed world, the foundations and charities and development groups: “Just stop it!” They feel "irritated," they say -- pushed around by all the helping hands. They can't hear themselves think, or remember their own cultures. They want space to focus on exploring their histories and building a future based on African history and identity, not someone else's solution.

On one hand, this resonates with the liberal multiculturalist sensibility that advocates respect for all cultures, listening, understanding. On the other hand, some of what they say sounds like conservative criticisms of the liberal state. One of the three speaks of the mentality of “entitlement without involvement” that develops when outside do-gooders come in with answers. That’s exactly the conservative argument against welfare programs.

And this still leaves the question: What to do? “Just stop it!” is not enough. It doesn’t help the millions of desperately poor in these nations, who are not being helped by their own rulers. The instinct of "leave us alone" doesn't solve the problems.

The writers have only vague answers to this, but they come down to: Let’s work together, as human beings. We need to work with others, but first we need to be clearer about who we are and what we value. We have to be involved in defining the solutions.

It’s a very interesting interview. It doesn’t give much comfort to liberals or conservatives, or really to anyone. It gives only some things to think about.

Institutions of understanding

Understanding among diverse social groups will spread only when people in general, the population at large, know how to listen and engage in real dialogue. The bad news is that such experience is sadly lacking; but the good news is that it is more common than ever before, and it is developing rapidly.

For centuries we have developed habits of dealing with strangers at arms' length -- making deals with them, but not trying to see things from their point of view. But over the last half-century, there have been an increasing number of organized situations that help us get inside others' minds and cultures. Now, more than ever before, most people have at least some experience of trying to stretch towards another perspective. A short list of these developments might include:

• Elementary and secondary schooling, which have moved quite a long way over the last few decades to incorporate the idea of understanding different cultures from the inside, and have encouraged dialogues across powerful boundaries of ethnicity and religion.
• Higher education, which has become (since World War II) a mass experience that brings together very different people in intense shared experiences that create lasting bonds, pulling them out of their limited local communities.
• Self-help books, which have become ubiquitous from Massachusetts to Kansas, and which have largely adopted the new mindset: rather than telling people to follow traditional rules and to act with consistency, they usually encourage people to explore different paths, to seek out new experiences, to widen their horizons in the search for true identity.
• “Anonymous” groups, which create a structured context in which all are encouraged to speak of deep personal feelings and to empathize with others from all sorts of backgrounds.
• Social media like Facebook, where people interact with far wider circles than before (research evidence does not support the fear that people withdrawing into homogeneous groups).
• Structured community dialogues, which have just begun to be a popular tool for response to tensions among groups; they have recently been used in many communities to address racial tensions in the wake of the Ferguson troubles.
• Religious ecumenicism, deliberately creating dialogues that transcend orthodoxies.
• The “sharing” of music, art, cuisine and other aspects of culture and taste – leading to infinite varieties of mixing that pull together dispersed communities.
• Even reality TV attracts viewers by letting them see directly into worlds very different from their own. 

This is just a start. The level of invention is very high: new tools and organizations are constantly emerging, seeking better ways to connect groups that have long been divided. We’re still a long way from a society in which tensions are regularly resolved by trying to understand others’ perspective; but the encouraging thing is that we’ve moved a fair ways down the path in a fairly short time.

A small collision

As I got into my car at a crowded parking lot, the woman sitting in the car next to me honked and pulled down the window. “You just hit the side of my car extremely hard with your door,” she yelled. Taken aback, I said I was sorry – with a tiny sarcastic edge, almost unnoticeable. “Well, be careful,” she said, as she rolled the window back up.

I moved on, but I couldn't let this go. First, in silent monologue, I defended myself: I didn’t really hit her car, or if I did it certainly wasn’t hard – maybe I just bumped it lightly with my shoulder bag. Then I tried to turn the moral tables: she can’t expect her car not to be touched in a tight space; she must be ridiculously over-protective; she was way out of line. Then it got personal: I told myself I didn’t like her looks, or her voice, or her bug fat car. I slotted her into a category of people who repel me: arrogant, self-righteous. I regretted being so passive and searched for some stinging retort I could have used.

Then, because I am working on this topic, I tried something else: I tried to imagine it from her point of view – what she might have been feeling and thinking. I didn’t have much to work with, since I hadn’t actually talked to her and knew nothing about her. But it’s not hard to imagine scenarios. Maybe she was having one of those incredibly irritating days when everything goes wrong – she dropped the car keys down between the seats, she got to her appointment late, the person had left, she rushed to try to catch up, she got a speeding ticket; and now, on top of it all, this jerk opens his door into her new car and doesn’t even apologize. I've certainly gotten grumpy at times like that.

I have no idea if the reality was anything like this. But what was startling to me was that as soon as I started to think in this way, my obsessive anger abated. I didn’t feel the need to square the moral tables, to get even, or to justify myself to myself. My energy was moving in a different direction, with a different emotional tone. I was in an empathizing mode instead of a self-protective mode. I no longer felt lingering shadows of self-doubt and potential guilt. I felt much better about myself, as well as less angry.

There’s something profound here. The way I reacted at first is the way irrational conflicts begin, up to wars and genocides. They’re driven by the feeling of “We’re good, you’re bad; when you criticize us it just confirms how good we are and how bad you are; you can’t get away with that; we’ll show you.” I was feeling all of that, and if I had actually retorted as I was playing out in my mind I can imagine it could quickly have escalated into heated words, and maybe calling the cops, maybe a lawsuit.

The second way felt much better and was much less likely to lead to conflict. But it took an unfamiliar mental effort to get there, and it took continued effort to stay there. I can still, as I write this, catch myself slipping back into the initial anger – how dare she! I can wrest myself out of it by replaying the process of imagining her perspective. But it's clear that this is not natural.

We bump into each other more and more as the world gets tighter. If we’re not going to be fighting all the time we need institutions to help us understand each other – habits of empathy, mutual expectations (she might have tried the same on me), dispute-resolution systems based on it (not just trying to judge who’s right).