The hardest part of acknowledging privilege, it seems to me, is to overcome your impulse to claim authority, to know things in an absolute way. We are taught that knowledge is power, and it is, but not always in the literal terms in which we conceive that phrase. Because knowledge was not handed down to us from Mount Sinai. It was built, rock by rock, exchanged between all of us, pebbles turned over and examine for better purchase in the cairn we leave behind us for the next people to fumble through to find meaning. If we are lucky, we leave the cairn a little higher than it was when we found it.
The most dangerous kinds of power appear natural to us, pre-ordained. The divine right of kings, so-called biological imperatives, “the way things are.” All of those lay claim to knowing what this existence is, and at the end of the day I’m not sure we do. I think we wake up in the morning and we live in the world we have identified for ourselves, but we know so very little about it, individually.
It seems to me sometimes we are afraid to acknowledge that individually we are very, very little. That’s because this is a political culture founded on Western individualism, of course. And we have been trained to believe that the value of rights is that we, as people, be able to assert them without limit, as opposed to believe that they are the paths leading us back to each other. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone say that freedom of religion was important because a dialogue between religions is crucial to the avoidance of dogma at either end of the telephone.
Equally, we conceive of freedom of expression as the ability to speak instead of the responsibility to listen. Which strikes me as a real shame. I was reading some essays of Susan Sontag’s recently, and this line stuck in my head from a speech she made upon accepting the Jerusalem Prize:
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other words, other territories of concern.
That encapsulates it for me. When I think about why I care about social justice, why I bother to write this blog, why I can’t just let solipsism have its own field day, it’s because, precisely, of “other selves, other domains, other words, other territories of concer.” I know there are people who do not look very far beyond their own shadows, but I do not understand them. I do not understand them as activists, and I certainly don’t understand them as writers.
PSoul, this is really beautifully written. I feel unequal to comment on it, except I will say that it brings to mind all of the great things I learned from the Jesuits during college; being the most liberal and, frankly, the most focused on education of all of the sects, they openly embraced other religions and trains of thought (one would even ask God to bless Buddha during the consecration of the Eucharist which would be considered blasphemous outside of the school) and as a result our education included (and encouraged) us to explore other religions as part of that particular academic requirement.
I don’t understand the unilateral “you’re either with us or against us” mentality that so many groups today espouse, because we lose so much in what we could have known had we just listened, even a little, to something that might be unfamiliar but could be life-changing in what is imparted.
I think this is why I like food so much–it’s such an easy way to connect with so many cultures and traditions and learn something new because it’s something that can get a conversation going. I wish other aspects of culture were as easily distributed and adopted.