Foreignness: a primary problem

One of the obstacles we face as a global society working to abolish foreignness is the perception of foreignness as only an ancillary problem, or a problem that is secondary to more critical and pressing global issues. Rather than deal with the question of the abolition of foreignness head-on, we seek to address the problem through proxies, hoping prejudice and hate and bias will simply go away if we first address the more material problems that supposedly underlie them. If we only do away with educational inequalities inner city schools, one argument might go, then racial tensions will be resolved. If we seek to address climate change on an international level through multilateral collaboration, another might say, then transnational cooperation will be a necessary byproduct. If access to technology were readily available to all, a third person might maintain, then intercultural awareness and tolerance will organically emerge.

All this is true enough. The psychological problem of attitudes of foreignness is inseparably tied to economic and sociological problems such as inequalities in access to goods and services, whether they be primary means of production or social institutions like education and social. Working to eliminate the material causes of foreignness can go a long way toward extinguishing the fuels that flame psychological animosity toward and suspicion of the Other.

But I would maintain that all this is inadequate, as it fails to assign to the psychological aspects of foreignness adequate weight. To assume from a materialist standpoint that foreignness is a purely a problem of, say, economics is facile. Foreignness is a grave issue that is, at the same time, both an effect and a cause of other social concerns.

Perhaps we can use education as a case in point. Unequal access to opportunities of learning is without question a cause of attitudes of foreignness. Ignorance can lead people to see differences where there are similarities, to find sources of tension rather than solutions, but knowledge too can also be a barrier to the abolition of foreignness, as knowledge can bring about in its bearer a haughty, supercilious attitude toward those who lack the schooling that he has. When people lack the intellectual means to comprehend what they read or to understand a complex problem they face, they will inevitably be brought up in a world foreign to the educated mainstream, and a host of other foreignness problems—occupational foreignness, gender foreignness, even racial foreignness—can ensue; the under-educated will lack the tools to combat the oppression they face, and those who participate in the mainstream and perpetuate that oppression may not even realize that they are doing so. A gap in knowledge, or at least a gap in access to information, thus emerges between different levels of education, and foreignness arises. Improve education for all, then, and the problem is solved; education is the primary problem, and foreignness the ancillary problem.

But perhaps it is not so simple. Perhaps we must complicate this simple chain of causality. The perception that some people, whether because they are of a different occupational, gender, or ethnic group from the mainstream, are in need of less education itself is a cause of education inequality as much as it is an effect. Before we are ready to improve education, we must have the courage and audacity to believe in the need for a world where all deserve equal education. This is perhaps not so insubstantial a point as it may seem. The willingness to sacrifice resources that could otherwise go to one’s own education for the benefit of those who are of lesser privilege requires a great degree of altruism, a conviction that educational foreignness must needs be abolished, but how comfortable are we with the threat to our own privileged status that the democratization education embodies? Education is costly and difficult; are we willing to invest in it, even when it may not have immediate benefits for us? The will to eliminate foreignness may indeed then be a greater obstacle to the way.

Other issues are similar in this regard. Reversing climate change, for example, will help to improve the lives of those who suffer from its deleterious effects and thereby reduce their foreignness, but before we sit around the table to draft climate change policy, we must enter the room with the conviction that others deserve a healthy planet no less than we do. A necessary corollary to that conviction is that we are willing to sacrifice our own short-term benefits for the sake of someone else, knowing that in the long run foreignness is merely an illusion and that helping another is no different from helping oneself.

All this is perhaps a rather convoluted way of emphasizing the point that we must recognize that foreignness is not merely the byproduct of other social ills that will simply disappear once we solve those other problems. Foreignness is itself a primary problem that must be tackled directly, not obliquely, and if we first eliminate attitudes of foreignness, then we can more easily begin to tackle other global problems. Certainly, we cannot wait to solve the material causes of foreignness, but we must be willing to combat foreignness as an entity as well, for foreignness itself is, after all, the greatest perpetuator of further foreignness.