Strange meetings of the normal kind

While out biking today, I met a couple of men I see regularly in my gym but to whom I have never spoken. I stopped to pass the time of day. As we talked about this and that, I noticed a narrowing of the eyes of one man and creases in the forehead of the other. Both eyes and forehead suggested an inner conundrum in both of the men with whom I was passing the time of day, and that conundrum presented them with questions. "Where does this man come from?" asked the creases. "Is he one of us?" asked the eyes.

Of course, they must have heard my heavily accented German, the small mistakes or the poor choice of verb or noun and these linguistic inaccuracies made both interlocutors realise that not only was I a stranger to them, I was also a foreigner.     

For me, meeting a German is hardly unusual. After all, I live here. But for my gym colleagues, it looked as if it was a close encounter with an alien - someone who was different and from another place, a place called "Outland" and, perhaps, hardwired into their brains was a fear reflex -  a close encounter with the unfamiliar.

In premodern times, it might have made sense to be fearful of other groups and individuals. After all, they might be violent, steal "our" resources, or introduce new diseases "we" are not adapted to. But I could not help but wonder while I pedalled away why it was not possible to steer our cultures and rewire our brains so that xenophobia and fear or mistrust of "the other" can all but disappear. Indeed, working collaboratively across borders to overcome the global challenges of the 21st Century relies upon us doing just that.

Before I am accused of German-bashing, let me say at once that fear or mistrust of the outsider is not confined to Germany. True, I have never encountered this problem in Kingston-upon-Thames because that is where I come from, but I have encountered those narrowing eyes and creased foreheads in places like Yorkshire and Scotland. 

Nonetheless, it occurred to me, as I shot down the wooded hillside, that intolerance of the "other" might well be on the rise everywhere.  After all, leaders with nationalist leanings are taking centre stage around the world, from the US, to Brazil, to India and to the UK. 

But why?

Is it because environmental and political shocks cause societies to close ranks? Such shocks could include climate change, ecological threats, food and water shortages and we must not forget the Corona pandemic. It would be nice to think that such problems might lead to more international cooperation that results in a better world but it could equally lead to something much worse.  

It also struck me while packing my bike away in my garden shed, that right now could be a great time to write a novel with the political backdrop of...well...right now. After all, some of the world's great novels originated in concern for the future. For example, Margaret Atwood wrote her most famous novel out of concern over American politics. Disturbed by the right-wing rhetoric she was seeing in the early 1980s, she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale.

And what about Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe? After all, the story of Uncle Tom, an African-American slave, brought the horrors of slavery to the attention of the public on a personal level for the first time, and caused uproar.

One of the best-known anti-war novels, All Quiet on the Western Front tells of the horrors of the First World War from the perspective of a young German soldier. It deals with the futility of conflict and was among the books banned and publicly burned by the Nazis.

Having said all that, and dealt with the thoughts that followed, it may well have been the brightly shining sun that caused my two gym friends to crease up their faces and that I was suffering from some kind of persecution complex! 

 

 

 

  

Comments

[Christopher Anthony GODDARD]

Some fascinating perceptions & ideas in here... am mulling them... and BTW a related aspect could be the rise of the intolerant modern left (not to mention the loony right) with its ideas about e.g. critical race theory, i.e. if you don't agree, you're a racist, and even if you do agree you're still a racist if you're white - and either way you have to pay.... this is pure sophistry... in a recent issue of 'The Economist' the 'letters' column devoted a whole page to both sides of the argument (I am saving this for future reference)..