We are more alike than we are different. Aren't we? And yet, the differences are important, so important that we choose our friends and lovers by them, declare enmities based on them, and develop passionate convictions along these lines we draw in the sand. What don't we like about the fact that we're alike?
The Rub' al Khali or Empty Quarter is the largest contiguous sand desert in the world, encompassing most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula. The desert covers some 650,000 square kilometres including parts of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. (Wikipedia) The actual lines dividing the political entities that meet in the sand can't be drawn.
View attachment 19486
Sand dunes in the Rub' al Khali. The name recalls particular English cognates in aphorisms: "rub al khali; rub along; rub down; rub elbows; rub elbows with; rub in; rub it in; rub off..." as cited in a general Google search.
The most inhospitable place on Earth is also the most hospitable: the people you meet here will help you survive here. We die without each other in the desert. We understand what we are going through, in this common experience.
Widen the geography to the whole Middle East, and we find some of the most persistent hatreds on earth among peoples with DNA so similar that they are family. Moses and Mohammed distinguish the Semitic peoples who had already rejected Moloch--and then, after periods of living in peace as People of the Book, they now divide them.
It's not hard for me to see how they rejected peace with each other. They watched a forced division of land, imposed by a high-minded entity from a faraway place, assuaging near-universal modern western guilt over an attempted genocide that couldn't be ignored as previous ones had been. And I see that as a direct function of northwestern European culture. The book The Angry Island observes that the English--and by extension, the British--learned to subordinate murderous rage with a chilly collection of mores and manners and a celebration of law over family.
I'm not sure if anywhere else on earth there is a law that excuses only a spouse from putting familial loyalty over loyalty to the rule of law. It's sharply different from legal codes emerging from a perception of a human family under a personal God in a paternal relationship. It enabled the restoration of the feminine as a peer of the masculine, even if it couldn't erase the learned behaviors that don't acknowledge that equality.
From time to time, AC sees well-intended efforts by relatively uneducated people who try to simplify this dynamic when it comes to NTs and aspies, or people of color and whites, or men and women. I've read some recent efforts on abridging differences in experience with this thing we call empathy, a concept we hold in high regard. I've read some despairing pieces on "pathetic" emotions, and the word "pathetic" communicates emotions in low regard, contemptible, somehow a loss in self-respect.
We are high-minded about the ability to hold each other in pathos, but scornful when we regard ourselves in pathos. Pain ignites pathos.
Perspective plays a dual role here. I see problems with that role.
What we can't see in perspective, we empathize with. When we hear the other person's perspective, we can't believe in their empathy. Empathy lacks distance. Perspective is about distance. When we can't believe in their empathy, their connection to us, but can feel their perspective, we can feel our pain diminished, and ourselves with it. So we find in logic the words that become the swords between us.
Pain, I reason, is a part of personal identity and partitional identity. It's how we distinguish someone we connect with from someone we disconnect from. It's how we understand when perspective arises from positive pathetic connection--empathy strengthened by articulation. It's how we understand when perspective arises from negative pathetic connection--pathology, maybe. I can label you, but I can't understand you.
How I react to another person's "pathy" is about how genuine I think their abridgement of the distance between my pain and their knowledge is.
The reverse is also true. The emotional connection of empathy is my ability to feel your pain as if I were you because I've been you. I've been there, I've done that, I've got the same mug from which you now drink bitter water.
The thoughtful connection of pathology is my ability to move from pathos to logos, from the heart to the head, to articulate a bridge above the deep quicksand below, where you are drowning. If I do that by trying to ignore or diminish my own painful memories, I can't connect to you because I am protecting myself from my own pain. If I do that by trying to invent an equality to some other pain you don't recognize as equal, you will resent my unfairness in making unequal things equal. And you will feel my distance: I have declared myself an authority over things I don't rule or own.
I have, in effect, become a personal avatar of the Britain of 1948, the drawer of a line in the sand of a windblown dune, and I have forgotten that I can drown in the desert I've made of my guilty heart.
My ability to connect with you arises from my ability to see my face in yours. The great faiths of the world declare that it is not our own faces we seek in each other, but God's. By whatever names we know God, and whatever rituals we connect with God, the point of those rituals is so that we recognize the universally human. We are both in the desert, and we need each other's grace and hospitality.
When we don't recognize that we are in the desert, when we are too close together and too many together, I think we look for ways to reduce the number of potential predators we have to watch. Because I'm self-aware, because I have a set of social rules to live by, the predators aren't only things that take my life. They're also things that take my values down. So I seek people who share my values, and resent people who think that my values are easily come by, casually wrought, carelessly picked up. I resent people who think that my values are things I could just dispense with, because they are inconvenient to people who do not see things as I see them. Or that my values are some adopted external legalities, while theirs represent eternal truth.
This is how I lose the ability to enable the divine in me to greet the divine in you. I can only recover that by asking this question of you, without judging your answer: What are you going through?
Once again, the Ubuntu post inspired by Nadador revisits, invited by new inputs from Slithytoves and NTgirl4276 and revenants from cultural mythology posts about astrology (of all things!). Universal Humanism, Regional Identity, and Cultural Misappropriation...there's a lot more to all this.
The Rub' al Khali or Empty Quarter is the largest contiguous sand desert in the world, encompassing most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula. The desert covers some 650,000 square kilometres including parts of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. (Wikipedia) The actual lines dividing the political entities that meet in the sand can't be drawn.
View attachment 19486
Sand dunes in the Rub' al Khali. The name recalls particular English cognates in aphorisms: "rub al khali; rub along; rub down; rub elbows; rub elbows with; rub in; rub it in; rub off..." as cited in a general Google search.
The most inhospitable place on Earth is also the most hospitable: the people you meet here will help you survive here. We die without each other in the desert. We understand what we are going through, in this common experience.
Widen the geography to the whole Middle East, and we find some of the most persistent hatreds on earth among peoples with DNA so similar that they are family. Moses and Mohammed distinguish the Semitic peoples who had already rejected Moloch--and then, after periods of living in peace as People of the Book, they now divide them.
It's not hard for me to see how they rejected peace with each other. They watched a forced division of land, imposed by a high-minded entity from a faraway place, assuaging near-universal modern western guilt over an attempted genocide that couldn't be ignored as previous ones had been. And I see that as a direct function of northwestern European culture. The book The Angry Island observes that the English--and by extension, the British--learned to subordinate murderous rage with a chilly collection of mores and manners and a celebration of law over family.
I'm not sure if anywhere else on earth there is a law that excuses only a spouse from putting familial loyalty over loyalty to the rule of law. It's sharply different from legal codes emerging from a perception of a human family under a personal God in a paternal relationship. It enabled the restoration of the feminine as a peer of the masculine, even if it couldn't erase the learned behaviors that don't acknowledge that equality.
From time to time, AC sees well-intended efforts by relatively uneducated people who try to simplify this dynamic when it comes to NTs and aspies, or people of color and whites, or men and women. I've read some recent efforts on abridging differences in experience with this thing we call empathy, a concept we hold in high regard. I've read some despairing pieces on "pathetic" emotions, and the word "pathetic" communicates emotions in low regard, contemptible, somehow a loss in self-respect.
We are high-minded about the ability to hold each other in pathos, but scornful when we regard ourselves in pathos. Pain ignites pathos.
Perspective plays a dual role here. I see problems with that role.
What we can't see in perspective, we empathize with. When we hear the other person's perspective, we can't believe in their empathy. Empathy lacks distance. Perspective is about distance. When we can't believe in their empathy, their connection to us, but can feel their perspective, we can feel our pain diminished, and ourselves with it. So we find in logic the words that become the swords between us.
Pain, I reason, is a part of personal identity and partitional identity. It's how we distinguish someone we connect with from someone we disconnect from. It's how we understand when perspective arises from positive pathetic connection--empathy strengthened by articulation. It's how we understand when perspective arises from negative pathetic connection--pathology, maybe. I can label you, but I can't understand you.
How I react to another person's "pathy" is about how genuine I think their abridgement of the distance between my pain and their knowledge is.
The reverse is also true. The emotional connection of empathy is my ability to feel your pain as if I were you because I've been you. I've been there, I've done that, I've got the same mug from which you now drink bitter water.
The thoughtful connection of pathology is my ability to move from pathos to logos, from the heart to the head, to articulate a bridge above the deep quicksand below, where you are drowning. If I do that by trying to ignore or diminish my own painful memories, I can't connect to you because I am protecting myself from my own pain. If I do that by trying to invent an equality to some other pain you don't recognize as equal, you will resent my unfairness in making unequal things equal. And you will feel my distance: I have declared myself an authority over things I don't rule or own.
I have, in effect, become a personal avatar of the Britain of 1948, the drawer of a line in the sand of a windblown dune, and I have forgotten that I can drown in the desert I've made of my guilty heart.
My ability to connect with you arises from my ability to see my face in yours. The great faiths of the world declare that it is not our own faces we seek in each other, but God's. By whatever names we know God, and whatever rituals we connect with God, the point of those rituals is so that we recognize the universally human. We are both in the desert, and we need each other's grace and hospitality.
When we don't recognize that we are in the desert, when we are too close together and too many together, I think we look for ways to reduce the number of potential predators we have to watch. Because I'm self-aware, because I have a set of social rules to live by, the predators aren't only things that take my life. They're also things that take my values down. So I seek people who share my values, and resent people who think that my values are easily come by, casually wrought, carelessly picked up. I resent people who think that my values are things I could just dispense with, because they are inconvenient to people who do not see things as I see them. Or that my values are some adopted external legalities, while theirs represent eternal truth.
This is how I lose the ability to enable the divine in me to greet the divine in you. I can only recover that by asking this question of you, without judging your answer: What are you going through?
Once again, the Ubuntu post inspired by Nadador revisits, invited by new inputs from Slithytoves and NTgirl4276 and revenants from cultural mythology posts about astrology (of all things!). Universal Humanism, Regional Identity, and Cultural Misappropriation...there's a lot more to all this.
