It is with some degree of surreal abstraction that most Canadians watch the deplorable ethnocultural violence that seems to be plaguing our world of late.
Recent history is characterized by exceedingly dangerous intergroup conflicts, including mass murders in the Balkans, human slaughter in Africa, the plethora of Mideast conflicts, and now North Korea’s thermonuclear threats against the U.S. and South Korea.
At the heart of these conflicts is an old tendency rearing its ugly head in a very new and dangerous context. Ancient history is fraught with examples of groups deflecting their anger and blaming others for their troubles and wanting the out group to just disappear. This is a very old problem with a new twist – the proliferation of exceedingly deadly weapons.
We catch glimmers of international news in our cars as we race through our day driving our kids to soccer, stopping at Canadian Tire to restock, and moving from one job assignment to another. Personally, I always felt a great sense of pride about how well we Canadians tolerate each other until I became suddenly a member of an out-group last week and tasted for the first time a mob lynching by people who wanted me to become invisible.
It was with enthusiastic gusto that I aired a radio ad on a Christian-based radio station announcing my services using a slightly Catholic theme. I constructed my ad after listening carefully to all the other ads on the station wanting to keep in line with the same degree of religious flavour.
One week later, the station pulled the ad due to a high level of customer complaints that I had made reference to a specific and widely accepted Catholic approach to a particular business situation. Apparently, the mainstream listeners found it intolerable that a Catholic would be entitled to access the same media as themselves. They wanted me to just disappear!
Kim Jong Un wants the U.S. and South Korea to just disappear. Some Israeli Jews, Muslim Arabs, and Egyptians want each other to just disappear. The genocidal government in Rwanda wanted the Tutsis to just disappear. And so it goes on and on.
At the heart of all of these examples is a conflict of identities whereby the members of groups possess a high degree of intolerance for another group based upon culture, religion, or values. The contemporary radio listeners found it intolerable that a member from an ancient religious group would be able to assert herself on their “safe” radio station.
Peacemakers are struggling to understand how to get in-groups and out-groups to get along. Even the U.S. politicians and military leaders are scrambling to calm the nerves of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in an effort to avert a thermonuclear war.
The best brains of our international peacemaking arena are suggesting that the answer may lie in helping each group develop a less narrow sense of social identity by learning to interact with each other with a big dose of mutual respect.
We need to build a global community based upon superordinate goals like protecting the environment, nurturing the economy, and appreciating diversity in arts, religion, and culture. We need to coexist with the voice of the other heard with our full attention by remembering that behind that voice lives a real person trying to make a real living for a real family.
We may not agree with the ideas held by the other, but we can learn to live with each other with mutual self-respect. We’re not living in a zero-sum game. I can win and you can win too. If we can’t get along with each other in Canada, the land of milk and honey, then there is no hope for the world.
Sharon Ryan teaches ethics for UCLA Extension and lives in St. Albert.
