Healthy xenophobia?
The media show us the victims and we are shocked, moved, ashamed. At the same time most of us practice xenophobia in some form on a daily basis
Two weeks ago it was in Naples
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3940192.ece
last week in Rome, fifteen years ago in Solingen, Germany: a violent mob killing and burning “foreigners”. Politicians did not forcefully discourage, on the contrary, they subliminally encouraged the atrocities. In Germany, France, Italy and probably elsewhere as well.
They might instinctively feel how deep rooted xenophobia is in our instincts: it is one of the “normal” ways of perceiving other social groups than the one you belong to. It lies at the basis of broad and popular entrepreneurial movements, like e.g. the Olympic Games, international championships, pogroms, wars or just plain and simple mobbing at the workplace or at school.
One of the strongest bonds of group identity is hating together another group or individuals and other groups.
Admitting that other groups might be different without stereotyping , despising or fearing them would be the practice of tolerance. The examples in history are rare. Epicurean and Buddhist, monastic orders come to mind. At least from the distance of thousands of years and kilometres some of them do seem to have been tolerant.
Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to – stated Michel Montaigne.
“Diversity” education started some 500 years later. Some teachers here in Germany really try to influence the children’s attitudes toward more tolerance, others just pay lip service and treat the subject as superficially as possible, while their daily behaviour and occasionally dropped remarks show what they really think about “the Turks”, or “the Russians”.
What are the chances of the tolerance-educators against the concentrated and synergetic power of the politicians, the media, cultivated ignorance and general moral cowardice?
Can any individual resist the massive group/community/media pressure on their own, standing alone? Or only as a member of a group/community living their values, including tolerance?
Or should he accept that xenophobia is probably a genetically deeply rooted feature and acknowledge it as such? (Which then again would be “politically incorrect” in most of our societies based on double standards and hypocrisy.)
And what to do if you have a rare and incurable disease: your stomach cannot digest xenophobia?
intoxicated by liberation philosophy
“The best of life is but intoxication.” (Byron)
In my younger days it was vodka, whiskey, wine, sex, romantic love, theater, movies, literature, philosophy I got intoxicated with. Nowadays it’s mostly just literature and philosophy. Luckily I take up ideas slowly and forget them fast (some of my friends suggest that this could possibly be a retarded effect of all the alcohol I got intoxicated with in my younger days), so I can re-read pages again and again on human bondage and liberation by Epicurus, Michel Montaigne, Voltaire, Esther Vilar, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Vonnegut, Manfred Max-Neef and about a dozen of other authors experiencing every time almost the same thrill I felt when I first read them. Is this an anticipation of the beatitudes promised by Alzheimer ‘s?
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