Tip-Off #124 - Elsewhere
"… to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot
Living abroad, I did not miss home but found it. As the poet Philip Larkin put it:
Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,
Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,
Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:
Once that was recognized, we were in touch/
. . . To prove me separate, but not unworkable./
Living in England . . . no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
Moving to Venezuela initially made me feel out of place, but back in America, my native country, I struggled to feel I belonged. My heart remained in one place while my body resided in another, leaving me caught between two cultures.
One way or another, we are all caught between "cultures,” personally and socially. with different ways of life, conflicting habits of belief and behavior, and opposite views in the family or among friends. Edward Said was a controversial scholar who wrote about the intersections and conflicts of different cultures. Palestinian-American, he grew up in Cairo and Jerusalem and lived in New York City. Said made headlines for maligning the West while living here luxuriously. His hostility was not really against the West but rather against its dominance over much of the world and its stereotyping of the East as "the Orient."
We can do better than judge Said by his excesses. Caught between cultures, he knew firsthand how they are intertwined and argued for "contrapuntal thinking—learning to see ourselves in light of contrary views and values, not universalizing our own. The generality of universals — like justice and human rights — makes sense only in connection with concrete action; otherwise, it finesses the need to take others seriously.
A personal analogy: Love is presumptuous if it is not understood in terms of the particular “languages of love” — for example, what one psychologist calls “words of affirmation, quality time together, physical touch, being especially helpful, and giving gifts.” An international scholar at Harvard writes about the geopolitics of emotion: how cultures of fear, humiliation, and hope are reshaping the world. Not knowing an emotional language besides one's own makes mutual understanding an illusion—just as the language of England is not the only way to speak English, and the language of science is not the language of art (although closer than we think).
It's easy to praise difference and diversity in general. Making everyday sense of it is something else. I wish my wife would agree more often, at least when I'm right. We wouldn't argue so much. But when she does agree, it's not always clear that she cares.
I have come to realize that perhaps one of me is enough. Besides, how can I care about "the importance of elsewhere" if I can't live with it at home?
"Know thyself" is still good advice unless we try to do it alone. "Who we are is tested in the fires of dialogue we did not start and will not end."
Democracy is an unfinished conversation. So are we.
Notes
"The Importance of Elsewhere," poem by Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (1955).
"… to arrive where we started" Eliot, Little Gidding V. Four Quartets (1943).
Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (2000). Human rights pivot on empowering the marginalized, like the Palestinians. Said’s militancy and apparent one-sidedness provoke critics like the prominent human rights activist Irshad Manji, founder of the Moral Courage College. See her Don't Label Me: How to Do Diversity Without Inflaming the Culture Wars (2020), and Moral Courage College: https://www.moralcourage.com/
Cf. “Basic human rights are, to use an appropriately paradoxical phrase, relatively universal.” - Jack Donnelly, “Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly (Nov. 1984). JSTOR. Donnelly is an international political scholar (University of Denver) and author of International Human Rights (2020) dealing with post-Cold War issues such as humanitarian intervention, democracy and human rights, "Asian values," group rights, and discrimination against sexual minorities.
The Five Love Languages - Gary Chapman (2004). The book has sold more than seven million copies and has been translated into nearly 40 languages.
The Geopolitics of Emotion - Dominique Moisi (2009). Moisi is a visiting professor at Harvard in the Program on Transatlantic Relations and the chairholder for Geopolitics at the College of Europe, the oldest educational institution in European affairs.
"Who we are is tested...," Daniel McClain, "Childhood and the Dangers of the Storied Self," Church Life Journal (2021): https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/childhood-and-the-dangers-of-the-storied-self/
Reading
F.S. Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (1945), 69-84. "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (1991), esp. ch. 8 "Might Not Universality Be Our Own Foreignness?" Epigraph: "In a strange land within my own country." - Louis Aragon, French poet.
Jean Graybeal, professor of philosophy and psychology of religion (NYU Gallatin) - "Joy in the Truth of Self-Division," Body/Text in Julia Kristeva (1992), 129-138.
Jeanne Morefield, professor of political theory (New College, Oxford) - Unsettling the World: Edward Said and Political Theory (2022).