Who is the other? Who are we? How should we relate to each other? Addressing these questions becomes essential for us to understand the relationship between the universal reach of Christian love and our particular obligations toward those with whom we have special relations, such as family, ethnic groups, or religious groups.
Who is the other?
Some think of others as persons from distant lands with a very different culture. We learn about them through explorers and anthropologists. We travel to see them in their natural habitats because they either fascinate us or repel us. We call them the exotic other, and in our global culture they have increasingly become a rarity. The ease of access to this group has only stripped from them the aura of the exotic. They have become ordinary—but still misunderstood.
Then there is the neighborly other. Such others live next to us, at the boundaries of our communities and within our nations, in culturally and religiously pluralistic social spaces. For Western countries, this means that the pluralism of civil associations existing under the larger framework of liberal democracy has become complex. Formerly “Christian countries” have become religiously diverse nations,1but this does not describe a diversity of “anything goes.” For the most part, we don’t think that all religions and all values are either relative or that a rough parity exists between them. To say that our societies are culturally and religiously pluralistic does not so much prescribe how each culture should be evaluated and how they should relate but does recognize plurality of cultures as a social reality. We live near or with people whose values and interpretations of life differ from ours and who have sufficient social power to make their voices heard in the public square. The history of relations with “the other” has often been fraught with violence. As the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi writes, “Many people—many nations—can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy.’ ”2Religious, cultural, and racial differences continue as an important source of conflict around the world. We hold ourselves better on account of our color and put down others whose color differs from ours; we oppress them economically and marginalize them politically. Whites are well known for their sense of racial superiority, but racism is not known as a monopoly of Whites.
In recent years, cultural and ethnic clashes have left their marks of blood in the so-called Third World (e.g. Rwanda), in the former Second World (e.g. Chechnya or Bosnia), and in the First World (e.g. the Los Angeles riots). Muslims and Christians, Christians and Jews, Jews and Muslims, Muslims and Hindus, Hindus and Buddhists, are finding it difficult to share the same social space without conflicts, and violence often erupts.
So who are the others? They include people of different races, religions, and cultures who live in our proximity and with whom we are often in tension and sometimes in deadly conflict. But who are we?
Who are we?
To speak of the other without speaking of the self is not possible, for the others are always others to someone else. Just like that someone else, they, too, are to themselves simply us as distinct from them. But how should we think of ourselves? What does it mean to be a bearer of identity?
We often define ourselves by what differentiates us from others. That by which we differ from others can be categorized as properly and exclusively our own, and we sometimes think that our identity resides in what is exclusively our own. If we operate with such an exclusive notion of identity, we will watch carefully to make sure that no external elements enter our proper space so as to disturb the purity of our identity. Especially in situations of economic and political uncertainty and conflict, we will insist on pure identity. If race matters to us, we will want our “blood” to be pure and untainted by the “blood” of strangers. If land matters to us, we will want our soil to be pure, without the presence of others. This, described as the logic of purity, attends the notion of identity that rests on difference from the other. The consequences of the logic of purity in a pluralistic world are often deadly. We have to keep the other at bay, even by means of extreme violence, so as to avoid contamination.
An alternative way to look at identity would be to think of it as always including the other—an inclusive understanding of identity. As persons or cultural groups, we define ourselves not simply by what distinguishes us from others and what we, therefore, need to keep pure from others. Instead, we define ourselves both by what distinguishes us from others and by what we have in common with them. This notion of identity is consonant with the biblical account of Creation. In Genesis God creates by separating the light from darkness, and binding them together. When God creates a human pair, God both separates Eve from Adam and brings her to him so that they can become one flesh. Distinct-and-bound creatures necessarily have complex identities because they are what they are, not just in and of themselves but also in relation to others.
An example follows: Five years ago I became a father. I have a wonderful little boy, Nathanael. Now, after I became a father I remained the same person in the sense of having permanence and continuity over a period of time. But I did not remain the same person in the sense of my personality remaining unchanged.3 Nathanael has insinuated himself into my personality. He has changed not only how I see myself and how I act (my private person) but also how others see me and act toward me (my public person). In addition to everything else that I was (such as “Dragutin and Mira’s son” or “Professor Volf”) I am now “Nathanael’s father.” When I pick him up at his preschool, a parent of another child might say to me, “Ah, so you are Nathanael’s father!” and I would not be sure whether this is good or bad. I am not simply other than Nathanael; Nathanael is also part of who I am. My identity is inclusive, not exclusive. The same holds true of our other identities. To be a White American means to be in relation with Black Americans, including the history of slavery and discrimination, and this represents no difference with gender identity. What it means to be male will change over time and differ from place to place, but it will always be correlated with what it means to be female.4
For such inclusive identity two things are critically important, and they both concern boundaries. First, in order to have an identity, you must have boundaries. Imagine a world without boundaries. You cannot! For without boundaries you would not have “a world”; everything would be jumbled together and nothing distinct would exist, and that says that just about nothing would exist at all. To have anything except infinite chaos, you must have boundaries. Hence when God creates, God separates. If boundaries are good, then some kind of boundary maintenance must be good, too. Hence when boundaries are threatened, they must be maintained. Second, if to have identity one must have boundaries, then to have inclusive identity one must have permeable and flexible boundaries. With impermeable and inflexible boundaries, a self or a group will ultimately remain alone, without the other. For the other to come in and change the self or a group, the other must be let in (and, likely, after a while also politely let out!).
Our homes provide good examples of complex and dynamic identities circumscribed by permeable and fl exible boundaries. When I go to a foreign land, I like to buy a local work of art. I bring it home and place it in our living room, my offi ce, or wherever. A space identifi ed properly as our own contains a number of “foreign” objects. They are windows into worlds that have become part of me—Cambridge, Chennai, Prague, St. Petersburg, Zagreb. As such, they are also symbols of an identity not self-enclosed but marked by porous boundaries and therefore shaped by the other. Occasionally, I move a work of art to a different room to make space for another, and sometimes it even ends up in the basement. Something analogous happens with our identity. We enter new relationships and they shape us; certain things recede into the background and others receive new importance. We live as ourselves in that things that make up our identity multiply, shift, and change. Some of that change simply happens to us. Others with whom we are in close contact change, and as a consequence we change too. Nathanael came into our family, and I changed, whether I wanted to change or not. Moreover, I changed in ways that I could not fully control. Chance and unpredictability come with having permeable and flexible boundaries. At the same time, we can refuse movement of our identity in certain directions and we can initiate movements in other directions. In encounters with others we can significantly craft our identity, and in the process we can even help shape the identities of others.
Who are we? We are people with inclusive and changing identities; multiple others are part of who we are. We can try to eject them from ourselves in order to craft for ourselves an exclusive identity, but we will then do violence, both to others and to ourselves.
Who is the other? Earlier I argued that others are our neighbors who differ from us by culture and whose very otherness often becomes a factor in our conflicts with them. Now, after the discussion of inclusive identity, we can say that the others are also not just others. They, too, have complex and dynamic identities, of which we are part, if we are their neighbors. Just as we are “inhabited” by others and have a history with them, others are also “inhabited” by us. If persons and groups are attuned to such complex and dynamic identities, they will not relate to each other according to simple binary schemata “I am I and you are you” (in case of persons) or “you are either in or out” (in case of groups). Their relations will be correspondingly complex. How do such complex relations look?
How should we relate to each other?
Persons with inclusive and dynamic identities will now be analyzed under four headings: (1) The will to embrace the other; (2) Inverting perspectives; (3) Engagement with the other; and (4) Embracing the other. The four headings follow a certain order of priority but not simply sequential so that when you complete one step you go to the next.
The will to embrace the other.In a sense, the commitment to live with others is the simplest aspect of our relation with them, yet often the most difficult. Instead of considering others as my own diminishment, I have to imagine them as potential enrichment. Instead of thinking that they disfigure my social landscape, I have to think of them as potentially contributing to its aesthetic improvement. Instead of only suspecting enemies, I have to see them as potential friends.
We have reasons for wanting to keep others at bay. For one, we are afraid for our identity, and above all we fear being overwhelmed by others and their ways. A German word for this fear, Überfremdung, describes a guest in your home who would start to bring in their own furniture and rearrange and take out yours, cook foods and play music you don’t like, and bang around working when you would like to sleep. So you say to your guest as politely as you can, “This is my home, and this is not how I want to live. Go back to your own place, and there you can live as you please. Here we are going to live as I please.” Earlier I mentioned that globalization brings others into our proximity, often with the feeling of Überfremdung as the consequence. Smaller cultures are threatened by the huge wave of global monoculture washing over them. While attracted to many of its features, they fear that their centuries-long, rich traditions will be replaced by a culture that is foreign and shallow. Prosperous Western democracies worry that the processes of globalization, which bring to their lands people in search of better living, will undermine the very culture that made possible the freedoms and prosperity that they enjoy.
Second, we fear for our safety. The myth of an innocent other is just that—a myth. Relationships between people are always sites of contested power, and a permanent danger of misuse of power exists, especially between those who are reciprocally “other.” Yet we should guard lest we, in refusing to accept the myth of the innocent other, embrace two other myths at the same time: the myths of the innocent self and of the demonic other.
Third, old enmities make us hesitant about living with the other. But, even with our safety reasonably assured, either because we have become more powerful or because both parties have been inserted into a larger network of relations that guarantee our safety, we may still hesitate about living together with the other on moral grounds. Would positive relations with the other not amount to betrayal of our ancestors who have suffered at others’ hands? Finally, the brute fact of enmity pushes against the commitment to consociality. Just like sin, enmity has power. Once established, it subsists as a force beyond the individual wills of actors, and it perpetuates itself by holding enemies captive.
Our sense of identity, fear for safety, and old enmities all militate against the will to embrace the other. So why should we want to embrace the other? First, it may be in our interest to do so. The alternatives—either building a wall of separation or perpetuating enmity—are often much worse. As proximate others, we are intertwined by bonds of economy, culture, and family. Severing these bonds can be worse than trying to live together. However, the more important reason is that living with the other in peace expresses our God-given humanity. We are created not to isolate ourselves from others but to engage them, indeed, to contribute to their flourishing as we nurture our own identity and attend to our own well-being. Finally, for Christians, the most important reason for being willing not only to live with others but positively to embrace them is the character of God’s love as displayed in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ died for all human beings because He loved them all. Through Him we are called to love indiscriminately every human being, including not only the other but also the enemy.5
How do we acquire the will to embrace the other? How do we sustain it through difficult times? I’ll try to answer with a story. I was in Zagreb, Croatia, speaking at the promotion of the Croatian translation of my book Exclusion and Embrace. As I was explaining the idea of “will to embrace,” I noticed a person in the audience who was listening intently but restlessly. After I finished my lecture and the crowd had cleared, he almost charged toward me and said, “But where does the will to embrace come from?” He was agitated. “Is it inborn? Can one learn to will in such ways?” We went together through different possibilities. Ultimately, I said, the will to embrace comes from the divine Spirit of embrace that can open up our self-enclosed sense of identity, dispel our fears, and break down the hold of enmity over us.
Inverting perspectives. To live out the will to embrace we need to invert our perspectives. Before the discussion of inverting perspectives, however, one important feature of otherness needs to be noted, called a reciprocal relation: If others are “other” to me, I am an “other” to them. This is especially important to keep in mind in cases when otherness does not remain as just a neutral term to describe difference, but when otherness acquires derogatory connotations—when to be other means to be not as good in some regard as I am myself.
Let me illustrate: When I was a doctoral student in Germany, along with many other Croats (as well as Greeks, Italians, Turks, and others), I felt like a second-class citizen. I was an Ausländer, and for many Germans Ausländers are deficient in some important ways. Once I was given a ride to Croatia by a porter of my dormitory who was driving there for a vacation. After we crossed the border I made a joking comment, “Now you are an Ausländer!” but he did not think this was funny. In his mind, a German was a German and never an Ausländer. And yet that cannot be. In a reciprocal relationship, if I am Ausländer in his home country, then he becomes an Ausländer in mine. The denial of reciprocity includes, in part, what constitutes a prideful and injurious denigration of the other.
Once we understand the reciprocity involved in the relation of otherness, we will have more reasons to be interested not only in what we think about ourselves and about others but also in what others think of themselves and of us. This is what I mean by inverting perspectives, and there are pragmatic reasons for this endeavor. As Rowan Williams has written in his comments on the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, “we have to see that we have a life in other people’s imagination, quite beyond our control.”6 Not attending to other people’s imaginations of us may be dangerous. But there are also moral reasons for inverting perspectives. Commitments to truth, to justice, to life in peace with others all require it. To be unwilling to engage in inverting perspectives means to live, as Immanuel Kant put it, as a self-enclosed one-eyed cyclops in need of another eye that would let him see things from the perspective of other people.
What does inverting perspectives entail? First, we need to see others through their eyes. Because it is natural for us to see them with our eyes, to see others through their eyes takes a willingness to entertain the possibility that we may be wrong and others right in their assessment of themselves. Second, we need to see ourselves through the eyes of others. Sometimes we think that if we know anything well, we know ourselves well. But I can fail to see something well not because it is too distant but also because it is too close. Moreover, when it comes to me, I have a vested interest in seeing myself in a certain way—noticing the positive but not the negative, or letting that which is positive overshadow or relativize the negative. Because we often fail to see ourselves adequately, we need to learn how others perceive us. Take as an example the debate on so-called orientalism (the stereotypes that the Christian West has about the Muslim East) and occidentalism (the stereotypes that the Muslim East has about the Christian West). Where the West may see itself as “prosperous,” the East may see it as “decadent”; where the West may see itself as “freedom loving,” the East may see it as “oppressive”; where the West may see itself as “rational,” the East may see it as “calculating.”7 The West should see itself from the perspective of the East and inquire seriously as to the adequacy of its own self-perception in light of the way it is perceived. The same, of course, holds true for the East.
Inverting perspectives is second nature for the weak. In encounters with the strong, they always have to attend to how they and their actions are perceived by the strong. Their success and even survival depend on seeing themselves with the eyes of the other. The strong are not in the habit of taking into account what the weak think of them; they can do without inverting perspective. If the weak don’t like what they see, so much the worse for the weak. If the only thing that matters to the strong is power and privilege, they will charge ahead without regard for the perspective of the weak. But if they want to be truthful and just, they will want the weak to free them from their own false judgments of themselves and of their relations with others.
Engagement with the other. To see oneself and the other from the perspective of the other cannot be considered the same as agreeing with the other. As I invert perspective, I bracket my own self-understanding and the understanding of the other, and I suspend judgment. After I have understood how the other wishes to be understood and how the other understands me, I must exercise judgment and either agree or disagree, wholly or in part. At this point, argumentative engagement comes in.
I could refuse to engage the other with arguments. I could simply insist that I am right. But the result would be an irreconcilable clashing of perspectives. In the absence of arguments, the relative power of social actors would decide the outcome. True, we cannot argue interminably, for life would then have to stop. As we are, in fact, acting even when we are waiting to resolve our own intellectual questions with no exit from acting—as William James has argued in “The Will to Believe” 8—so we will be acting even as we are waiting to argue through our differences in perspectives. But we can act in our best light, and then return to argument. In fact, citizens in wellfunctioning democracies do this: They argue, they vote, and then, if some of them don’t like the result, they argue and vote again.
Positive engagement with the other is not just a matter of arguments. Even when arguments fail to bring anything like consensus or convergence, we can still cooperate in many ways unless a dispute concerns acts of grave injustice. The belief that we must agree on all essential values in order to live in peace is mistaken. It ultimately presupposes that peace can exist only if cultural sameness reigns. But even if one considered such sameness desirable, it is clearly unachievable. Take major world religions as an example. A consensus between them on overarching interpretations of the world cannot be seen on the horizon in the near future. Must their adherents be therefore at war with one another? Of course not—they can live in peace and cooperate, and they can do so out of their own properly religious resources. Though the practice of Christians sometimes seems to falsify this claim, everything in the Christian faith itself speaks in favor of it, from the simple and explicit injunction to live in peace with all people (Rom. 12:18) to the character of God as triune love.9
Embracing the other. A simple willingness to embrace the other does not suffi ce. A further step of actually embracing them is needed. As we argue with others about issues of truth and justice, we are ensuring that embrace, if it takes place, will not be a sham. As we invert perspectives, we have started embracing others in that we have taken them, even if only in a symbolic form and for a time, into our own selves; we have made their eyes our own. But for embrace to take place, more is needed. We need to make space for them in our own identity and in our social world. We need to let them reshape our identity so as to become part of who we are, yet without in any way threatening or obliterating us but rather helping to establish the rich texture of our identity. Just as after the birth of my second son, Aaron, I let him be inserted, so to speak, into my identity, so also we ought to let our proximate others be a part of who we are (adjusted, of course, for the differences between family and neighbor relations).
Such relation becomes possible on Christian terms because we Christians should not think of ourselves as having a pure national, cultural, racial, or ethnic identity. We, along with Jews and Muslims, believe that all human beings are creatures of one God and therefore the humanity that unites them is more significant than any difference that may divide them. Further, an image of the Christian life that looms large in the Bible can be described as that of a pilgrim. Pilgrims are defi ned primarily not by the land or culture through which they travel but by the place toward which they are on the way; their primary identity comes from the destination, not from any point along the journey. And the land toward which Christians continue moving is God’s new world in which people from “all tribes and languages” will be gathered.
The unsettling of Christians’ sense of cultural identity cuts deep. The apostle Paul writes that Christians “are not their own.” As a Christian in Paul’s sense, I am so much not myself that “‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me’ ” (Gal. 2:20, NKJV). Christian identity is taken out of our own hands and placed into the hands of the divine Other—God, and by this it is both radically unsettled and unassailably secured. Because Christ defines our identity in the primary way, Christians can confidently set out on a journey with proximate others and engage without fear in the give and take of the relationship with others that marks an inclusive identity. What will be the result of this engagement? Like Abraham’s, it will be a journey of faith and hope toward the land that one has not yet seen.
1 See Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001).
2 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 9.
3 See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2–4.
4 For this notion of gender identity, see Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and
Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 174–6.
5 The universal scope of love was historically grounded in the common Adamic descent of all human beings and in Christ’s death on the cross for all human beings (see Gene Outka, “Universal Love and Impartiality,” The Love Commandments: Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy, eds. Edmund N. Santurri and William Werpehowski (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1992), 9.
6 Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust: After September 11 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 55.
7 See Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma, “Occidentalism,” New York Review of Books (January 2002). Online at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15100.
8 William James, “The Will to Believe,” The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy and Human Immortality (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 1–31.
9 See Miroslav Volf, “Christianity and Violence,” Reflections, Winter 2004, 16–22.
