AT MUMBAI AIRPORT, on several occasions, I encountered a thoroughly annoying immigration official. He had a habit of spending an excessive amount of time, staring at each and every page of my passport, then occasionally looking up at me with a rather dour face, refusing it seemed, any real human contact. The 20 seconds with this official, the high-counter separating our two worlds, was stretched out to what seemed like an eternity, but was probably in fact an irritating six or seven minutes. He’d tilt his head to stare at the Hong Kong stamps as though lost in a daydream, change the angle of the passport to look at the South Africa stamp, and then ponder over the visa for Australia or somewhere or other. At one point I was convinced he was counting the rather numerous stamps for the Muslim country Morocco. What was I to make of him behaving in this tiresome way? Was I a potential drug smuggler, a terrorist or some other such threat in his eyes?
In the absence of any explanation as to why he was doing this, he became in a sense what Freud would call a blank screen, ready for me (us) to project my own image, my fantasy, my creation and interpretation of this man. “Suspicious bureaucrat,” I thought more than once, reducing him to a popular category of Indian. “Don’t form judgements,” a higher, less self-centred part of me insisted for the better, “Be curious as to why he is doing this.” Grudgingly, on about the fifth occasion, I asked him why. “You are the only person I see with a passport,” he told me. “Who was born on the same day, the same month and the same year as me. I will never see all the places in the world that you do. It was then, that our naked faces made eye contact. “I look at your passport, to see where you have been lately and imagine these places.”
I felt ashamed. I also felt that disturbing ethical pang, a matter of human rights, of who gets to share at the table of world travels, in this moment of recognition. I felt uncomfortable and yet nourished, although certainly not cosy in this proximity we shared. He was making an ethical claim on me.
This man of course, had up until this moment been simply a lazy invention of my own mind, kept like a stranger, neutral, at a safe murderous distance. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls the way we de-humanise the “Other,” reducing them merely to a category such as bureaucrat, as I so shamefully did, or by race, gender, nationality or some other such thing, totalization. Before my eyes, immigration man came to life, his humanity restored, just like the image emerging in a Polaroid photograph. Curiously, I now unthinkingly, without any effort, see every immigration official as potentially this man. For this important lesson in human contact, I remain grateful to the man who shared his humanity with me, and thus helped me regain my own.
At the same airport, after several days working pro-bono, where a group of us explored team strategies for preventing forest-fires in Rajasthan, a weighty Indian man, wearing a conspicuous amount of gold jewellery, bashed his trolley with some force, into the back of my legs (raised with good old English manners, I was of course hoping for an apology). I was clearly blocking this man’s way, as indeed were the people in the queue ahead of me. The second time he did this, politely, but firmly, I asked him to be careful. His response was to shout, “Go home, you British don’t rule India anymore,” and promptly scuttled off in the opposite direction. I was of course, like my immigration friend, dehumanised in this moment, collapsed into nothing more than a category of foreign rulers. What am I to make of why this man behaved in this way? What invention in my mind do I create of him? Do I follow my lazy temptation, to impulsively write him off as some sort of self-centred Punjabi? What might I say to him that would shake his perception of me out of this label that he chooses to define me by? What I would have to do of course to deepen our contact, break out of the box of confinement he has placed me in, to listen, to inquire, to connect, to share something about myself, in order to bring colour, to make my mark on the otherwise blank screen where he simply writes “colonial”. In my imagination, I want to say to him:
I am a little bewildered by why you want to label me as some sort of foreign ruler. This is not how I see myself, yet oddly I feel a hint of guilt when you say this, as though my Britishness makes me somehow complicit with the historical subjugation of the people of India. How peculiar that what you say should evoke guilt in me? I sense I want to defend myself as though I am on trial for the sins you perceive committed by others from my homeland, and to say to you that I am not guilty. Am I guilty, asks a voice in the back of my mind. I maybe someone from Britain, but I am more than that I want to declare; I am also a mother of a beautiful girl who is striking in her care others. Are you a father? I am a daughter of elderly parents for whom I feel the deepest love and respect. You are a son.
Perhaps you judge me not just for the colour of my skin, but because I looked so grubby with my wild unruly hair, having spent half the night bear tracking, or perhaps because I am a professional woman (and maybe you don’t like those, I judge) or maybe you were simply having a bad day. I cannot know unless you share yourself with me. I want to say, I want to understand….
Levinas writes in his work on ethics, that “The tie with the Other is only knotted by responsibility,” and our responsibility begins by understanding the narrative, the version of the Other, beyond any simplistic invention that exists in the mind that may bear very little resemblance to the reality of the Other. Listening, the ultimate hospitality towards the Other, is exhausting, makes you sweat as Scott Peck describes in his book The Road Less Travelled. It disturbs your rigid views. We know, that distorted perceptions of the Other have real repercussions, sending a chill through whole communities breeding fear, human suffering and persecution across the globe. It is not simply a matter of us being nicer, but possessed of more of our natural humanity, our curiosity our intelligence to assume that we long to join with others, and a knowing, an acceptance, that to feel disturbed is to be human. “I wish I hadn’t got involved,” a bid for distance, the pain of ethical pangs, confusion, disturbance. Fear that real human contact is simply too intense, too alive.
To attempt to keep the other as the perpetual stranger will not rid us of inner disturbance. In Stephen Covey’s book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he describes an everyday moment when he is sat alone on the subway train, and is joined by a man and his three unruly children. His intolerance grows as the children noisily running up and down the carriage, until he finally blurts out to the man “Can’t you control your children?” The forlorn looking man replies, “I don’t know how, we just left the hospital two hours ago, their mother’s just died.”
Levinas is an interesting philosopher of ethics of the encounter with the Other because he places firmly at the centre of liberal ideas an emphasis upon our responsibility towards the Other. What if the man in the car that you are waving your fist at and honking your horn at has just left the hospital? We may simply not know. To make possible that the Other be more than simply a stranger in such encounters, creates a rupture in our cosy self-containment, we become a little un-glued by their interruption, not so much by an internally, logically dictated command, but in Levinas’ s view, because we are actually compelled to serve the Other, that is a pre-cognisant part of being human.
I remember, some fifteen years ago or so, teaching a psychology seminar at the University on the subject of altruism. Why, the class discussed, did some people seem to go more out of their way for others, what is it about these people, some of whom would even risk their lives for others? Interestingly, one of the key findings is that these extraordinary people didn’t think, they simply acted, doing the right thing without any sort of internal engineering of the pros and cons.
The voice of the Other is of course at times the dissenting voice. In Richard Hackman’s research, he analysed the black box data from flight crashes, finding that invariably there was a dissenting voice that predicted the problem that then ensued. The voice was ignored. It was invariably from someone more junior in the flight crew, whose lowly status, bestowed fewer rights to speak and importantly, be heard, with dire consequences and not infrequently, the loss of lives. Similarly, having been asked to conduct a sort of ‘what’s going wrong’ exercise for a Swiss bank, that involved listening in face-to-face meetings, as an outsider, to the opinions of their staff around the globe, I presented my findings to the board in Zurich. I gave them one flip-chart page with the image of a bomb about to explode. I told them that in my view, their entry into the U.S. market, would fail for two reasons. Firstly, it was based on a form of underdog envy of the American firms, that created a psychological swing between grandiose beliefs in the bank’s collective ability and a profound sense of incompetence and secondly, a lack of actual skill, or understanding of the way the U.S. market works and a viable strategy. Sadly, I was both unable to influence them and my predictions proved to be rather accurate. Bang, almost. One of the board members, a year or two later told me that, “If you’d been a man, they’d have been listened to you.”
I’m rather inclined to think that we are never able to shirk our responsibilities to others, whether the ethical pangs come in our waking hours, or indeed take us hostage to insomnia. Perhaps our sleeping pills, our anxiety drugs, are really an attempt to numb the sense of persecution we feel, the very weight of our deep seated awareness of our ethical obligations towards others. Only, let’s be clear, the persecution is coming from ourselves, it’s an inside job. We keep others at a distance so we don’t get unhinged, confused, or overwhelmed. But what is the alternative? Levinas once wrote that you cannot murder someone, if you have to look the person in the eye. Perhaps therein lays all the answers.
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