“Seeing others as they are.”
When we do we will see the world as it is.
This is the second of two essays on the question of our collective sight and its opposite. Part 1 of this series is here.
23 AUGUST—The Cold War redefined the world for 42 or 44 years, depending on whether we mark its end with the fall of the Berlin Wall or the final dissolution of the Soviet Union. Beginning with Truman’s 1947 intervention in behalf of Greece’s fascist monarchy, all was subsumed in the East–West binary, that blight upon the human community. It was difficult for any nation to manifest an identity of its own. India to an extent, Indonesia until Sukarno was deposed, de Gaulle’s France to an extent, Tito’s Yugoslavia: These were among the notable exceptions. For the rest it was with-this-lot-or-with-the-other.
The Cold War’s end changed everything, or nearly, once again. As East–West enmities evaporated, nations were able to define themselves on their own terms and no one else’s. Those paying attention in the 1990s could scarcely miss this, a promising time after four grim decades—for many people crushing decades. It was as if the world had gone back to the first years after the 1945 victories, I recall thinking. The same aspirations were again evident.
“Become who you are” is one of Nietzsche’s frequently quoted aphorisms. This was the post–Cold War project for much of humanity. It was a question of restoring social relations the East–West binary had done much to tear apart. Cultures, traditions, submerged histories, political systems, systems of justice, social structures, the lessons taught in schools…: By way of these and many other such things people and nations set about retrieving identities the Cold War decades had suppressed but never extinguished.
The Cold War’s passing precipitated an historic turn in the collective consciousness, I will take the risk of saying. In my read it was as much a revival as it was the advent of anything new. Certain inevitable realities reappeared. It was as if they had been preserved in an earthen jar, like scrolls, and disinterred more or less intact. I have named two of these here and there in previous commentaries. One was parity among Western and non–Western nations and peoples: The demand for this came once more to the surface. There was also the necessity of seeing others as they are and developing the capacity—the desire, indeed—to understand their perspectives.
A couple of examples seem in order so as to avoid drifting into airy abstractions. If the People’s Republic asks one thing of the West, beyond the export markets and the foreign investment and the technology, it is to be recognized as an equal of the Western powers. China’s infamous “century of humiliation”—from the Opium Wars to the Revolution—adds a piquancy to its insistence on this point.
As to seeing others as they are, the case of post–Sukarno Indonesia is a ready-to-hand illustration of my point. It was politics in command for the archipelago nation’s first president. Sovereignty, independence, and pride came before all else, “the Bung,” Brother Karno, taught his people. When the C.I.A. deposed him and installed Suharto as another of Southeast Asia’s dictators, Indonesians were instantly rendered invisible and their aspirations counted for nothing. For the next three decades Indonesia was shorthanded as “a staunch Western ally”—a phrase I heard so often it came to repel me during my correspondent years in Asia.
Parity among nations, seeing as others see: I count these 21st century imperatives and have done so for some years. If we are fully to understand what amounts to a revolution in the world order we must grasp first of all that it reflects the non–West’s insistence that a half-millennium of inequality is ending. But I will leave aside the matter of parity for now. My immediate concern is clear sight, our ability—ours as in America’s, as in the West’s altogether—to see others just as they are. Our ability or our inability, as the case so often is. If we are unable or unwilling to see ourselves as we are, as I argued in the first of these essays, it follows ineluctably that we have blinded ourselves to other peoples and the cultures and traditions that define them.
How costly it is to live in a pervasive darkness.
In the autumn of 1990—just as the divide that had ruled humanity for so long was ending—Ryszard Kapuściński delivered a lecture called “My Other” at a writer’s symposium in Graz. Could the celebrated Polish correspondent and author have been more prescient? It is time, he argued “to build bridges of understanding” between the West and all its Others. This had to begin, he thought—and how could it be otherwise?—with seeing our Others as they are.
“My Other” was later published in The Other (Verso, 2008), a collection of Kapuściński’s lectures on the theme. Transcending the fundamental fallacy of the very notion of Otherness, he remarked, “is not just an ethical duty but also an urgent task for our time in a world where everything is so fragile and where there is so much demagogy, disorientation, fanaticism, and ill will.”
To say it is a pressing task of our time to see others as they are and not as we wish them to be or insist they must be is another way of saying that it is imperative we see the world as it is. And so to the crux of a question: To the late-phase imperium, clear sight is a matter of great contention. Try to imagine the consequences for the empire’s managers were Americans to understand others and have some grasp of how they look upon the world. I have no trouble with this: It would be transformative. Clear sight, it follows immediately, is a cause it behooves paying-attention people to advance.
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In the philosophic principle called perspectivism, all knowledge is held to be determined by where a given observer is standing. At the risk of undue simplification, if you are… fill in the blank… Chinese or Brazilian or Ghanaian, you will understand life and events as they look from East Asia or Latin America or West Africa. Perspectivism is as old as the pre–Socratic Greeks (although Plato, with his absolute ideals, stood against it). Another name for perspectivism among modern scholars is epistemological pluralism: There are many different ways of knowing the world, depending on how you look at it.
Nietzsche was very high on perspectivism. There is no such thing as “viewing from nowhere,” he wrote, or “viewing from everywhere.” From The Genealogy of Morals (1887). The italics are in the Walter Kaufman translation:
Let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject.” Let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” … “knowledge in itself.”… These always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the moreeyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be….
Perspectivism has not traveled far beyond philosophical treatises and speculations in the Age of Empire, fair to say. It conflicts too frontally with imperial interests, which invariably turn on the superiority of the imperial power’s version of reality —la mission civilisatrice, “beacon of the world,” etc. In the imperial perspective, perfectly evident in the British, French, and American cases, there is only one perspective, one way of seeing the world, and it is the empire’s; the Other must always remain invisible—a stick figure, 2–D, having no perspective of his or her own.
To illustrate this point, one of my favorite books in the perspectivist line is Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, published in 1721. The great philosophe never used the term, he may not even have known it, but his book is perspectivist start to finish. It consists of letters an imagined entourage of Persian nobles write home during their travels to Paris, wherein they comment on the nonsensical absurdities of upper-class French life. Persian Letters is riotously satiric, but Montesquieu took pre-emptive cover against the controversies he knew the book would prompt by publishing it anonymously in Amsterdam.
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Suppressing any thought of the perspectives of others is essential to the operation of the American imperium, if this is not to state the obvious. As I just wrote elsewhere, American diplomacy no longer makes even a pretense of interest in Russia’s views of events or its aspirations. Even accomplished scholars such as John Mearsheimer, having spent little time among the Chinese, stop just short of reviving the “yellow peril” theme of the early 20th century. There is a long tradition among American newspapers of rotating foreign correspondents from one posting to the next every three to five years, this to guard against the danger of “going native”—that is, reflecting in the work how the world looks to the people upon whom one is reporting.
I am regularly surprised to discover how few Americans are aware that a new world order is emerging as we speak. When media report this reality they put it across as some kind of diabolic design to subvert America and the rest of the West. It is ridiculous, but ridiculous passes in the land of the thoroughly unseeing. Preventing us from seeing others as they are—emergent non–Western nations a case in point—comes to an exercise in blocking human development. This is the unstated, disguised intent, given the policy cliques are well aware that the Age of Empire is passing.
Suppressing any thought of the perspectives of others is essential to the operation of the American imperium, if this is not to state the obvious. As I just wrote elsewhere, American diplomacy no longer makes even a pretense of interest in Russia’s views of events or its aspirations. Even accomplished scholars such as John Mearsheimer, having spent little time among the Chinese, stop just short of reviving the “yellow peril” theme of the early 20th century. There is a long tradition Among American newspapers of rotating foreign correspondents from one posting to the next every three to five years, this to guard against the danger of “going native”—that is, reflecting in the work how the world looks to the people upon whom one is reporting.
I am regularly surprised to discover how few Americans are aware that a new world order is emerging as we speak. When media report this reality they put it across as some kind of diabolic design to subvert America and the rest of the West. It is ridiculous, but ridiculous passes in the land of the thoroughly unseeing. Preventing us from seeing other as they are, as the case of the new world order ought to demonstrate plainly enough, comes to an exercise in blocking human development. This is by design: It is one reason the Cold War, in the face of humanity’s revived aspirations, has been effectively reconstituted.
Nietzsche, much taken up with these matters, was well aware of the social-psychological prisons in which modern societies confine their citizens. In The Gay Science, published five years before The Genealogy of Morals, he urged that we “take off the garb of the West” so as to liberate ourselves from the limits of the modern consciousness, so escaping our material nihilism to make something new of ourselves, something larger, something more expansive.
Stripping ourselves of the heavy clothes of “Western civilization” (let’s stay with the quotation marks) is one way of defining the project that lies before us. To escape the confinements the imperium imposes—this is the fight worth fighting in our time, or the beginning of a long, large fight. Americans are getting this done a little at a time, it seems to me, and in this they are ahead of their purported leaders. It falls to the purportedly led, then, to insist on new ways of seeing. In lots of cases public sentiment is far ahead of policy. The gathering fervor against the terror regime in Israel is a plainly legible case in point.
Cara Marianna, my colleague and partner (etc.), publishes Palestinian Voices in association with The Floutist and in the Substack newsletters West Bank Alerts and Winter Wheat. This project began in response to the events of 7 October 2023, and the phrase chosen at the outset to describe its purpose was “to rehumanize the dehumanized.” But precisely. To listen to Palestinians as they speak: Is there any better way to transcend our confinements and embrace another people for who they are?
Russia, China, Cuba, all manner of others: The endeavor is the same in each case—to rehumanize all our dehumanized Others against the Russophobes, the Sinophobes, the Islamophobes, the Castrophobes. And isn’t it so that in getting to know others we will get to know ourselves, too, and know the world as it is for the first time?