Sullen Decline

Barry Oshry says of Encounters with the Other (published in a new edition in March 2024):

“This book may be the last and smallest of my offerings, yet it is the most personally precious… it grows out of the life force that created all the rest.” 

He starts with this assertion:

Many cultures may look strange to us,
but not to the ‘others’.
And our culture may look strange to the ‘others’
but not to us.
That simple fact is the beginning of understanding.

It’s a reminder of Richard Rorty’s idea of a final vocabulary: “the set of words which [people] employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives”. These words, which may describe things that we see as ‘true’, ‘good’, ‘right’ or ‘beautiful’, are somehow incontestable. People who hold to their truths as inescapable and universal will by definition find the final vocabulary of others false, bad, wrong or ugly. That’s how it begins. It ends in bigotry, racism, oppression and genocide.

Oshry describes that sullen decline into genocide beautifully.

In time, we and the ‘others’ learn our rules so well
that we no longer experience them as rules,
they become the lenses through which we view the world.

As Bill Tate would say, they become the water that we swim in.
Oshry continues:

When we encounter the ‘other’
Since our cultural rules are experienced
as the way to live, to survive, to be,
the cultural behavior of the “other” is experienced
as upsetting of our culture,
as weakening it,
or coarsening it,
and, potentially, as threatening its survival.
And we react.

The reactions are predictable:

Sometimes,
out of Looseness or Liberalism,
the ‘other’ is allowed to co-exist in the host culture,
in a tolerable state of tension,
with various restrictions and limitations…
This is a culture’s tolerance solution to the encounter with the ‘other’.

Sometimes,
out of Tightness or Conservatism,
the forces to reject the ‘other’
overwhelm the forces to accept them.
The ‘other’ is experienced as too different, foreign, dangerous.
The solution is to protect and preserve the culture by
confining, suppressing, exiling, or destroying the ‘other’.
This is a culture’s purity solution to the encounter with the ‘other’.

Then, reverting to a lifetime’s interest in the role of power and love in organisations and society, Oshry asks:

What do we see when we see the “other”?
Do we see them as like us
or as different from us,
as connected to us
or as separate from us?

Power seeing
is seeing difference
and separateness.
The ‘others’ are different from us
and unconnected to us.

Love seeing
is seeing commonality
and connectedness.
The ‘others’ are like us
and connected to us.

But, he asserts,

It is possible, theoretically at least, for our experience of the ‘other’
to be grounded in both Power and Love;
where we experience our differences from the ‘other’
and our commonality with them,
our separateness from them
and our connectedness with them.
Robust seeing is a possibility,
yet it is a possibility too rarely realised…

Oshry explains why with a neat summary that will serve as an answer to anyone who is ever asked ‘what is systems thinking?’:

Here is what we need to know:
The patterns we fall into shape how we experience ourselves and others.

When we are blind to systems,
we believe that our experience of the ‘other’
is a reflection of reality –
This is who they really are.

When we have system sight,
we understand that how we experience the ‘other’
is a consequence of the pattern we have fallen into.
Change the pattern and our experience of them will likely change.

When we are blind to systems,
we think that the realistic way to deal with our relationship with the ‘other’
is to dominate, oppress, suppress, exile, or destroy them.
Who wouldn’t do this to such people?

When we have system sight,
we think that the realistic way to deal with our relationship with the ‘other’
is to change the pattern of relationship we have fallen into.
In this case, this means infusing Love into ‘Power without Love’.

Oshry’s concluding list of the 20th- and 21st-Century ‘catastrophes’ that have been brought on by systems blindness is justification enough for anyone interested in systems thinking to pursue that interest into politics, education and society at large. (There is no need to read this partial list. You can, instead, bury the rag deep in your face, for now is the time for our tears):

• Myanmar (2017 and continuing): Muslim Rohingya have been driven from their homes and country, forced to live in squatter camps and slums and have been raped and tortured.
• China (2017 and continuing). In its purification program, China has detained over one million Uighurs in ‘re-education’ centres.
• Palestine and Israel (continuing): Both Arabs and Jews have engaged in purification campaigns aimed at displacing or eliminating the other: from the Palestinian Nakba in which an estimated 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes to the 7th October 2023 assault on Israel to the retaliatory devastation of Gaza.
• Darfur (2003 and continuing). Government attacks on Sudan’s non-Arab, darker-skinned farmers have resulted in four million people being displaced and two million dead.
• ISIL genocides (1999 and continuing). The caliphate aimed to build a pure Islamic state which would purify the world by destroying all who do not live by its principles.
• Rwanda (1994). Over 100 days, up to a million Tutsis were slaughtered through the actions of the Hutu majority government.
• Cambodia (1975-1997). Between 1.5 and 3 million Cambodians were killed in a vision-driven attempt to create a new society.
• Partition of India (1947). Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs attacked each other in efforts to purify their newly separated states. Gangs of killers were reported to have set whole villages aflame, hacked to death men and children and carried off young women to be raped.
• Croatia (1941). In the service of establishing a “Greater Croatia”, an estimated 500,000 Serbs were murdered, 250,000 expelled, and 200,000 forcibly converted to Catholicism.
• Armenia (World War I). The Ottoman government, followed by its successor Turkish government, systematically exterminated 1.5 million Christian Armenians.
• Germany (1942-1945). Of the 8,860,000 Jews living in countries under Germany’s control, almost 6 million were murdered.
• Nazi Eugenics (1939-1941), 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions, 5,000 children in institutions, and 1,000 Jews in institutions were killed.
• Genocide of the Slavic population in the Soviet Union (World War 2). As part of their plan of expansion eastward and creating a New Order in Europe, the Nazis enslaved, expelled and destroyed the Slavic peoples of Europe whom they considered racially inferior. The death toll in areas occupied by Germany was estimated at 13.7 million.
• The Expulsion of Muslims (1860s). The Russian Tsar ordered the expulsion of most of the Muslim population of the North Caucasus in order to have access to the Black Sea coast. A whole population was eliminated to satisfy the economic interests of a powerful country.
• Algeria (1830-1875). The French conquered Algeria and attempted to purify it (making it French) by killing an estimated 825,000 indigenous Algerians.
• East Timor (1975 onward). During the occupation of East Timor, the Indonesian government tried to purify the country by killing or allowing to die 60,000 - 200,000 East Timorese.
• North Korea (continuing). In an effort to purify the state, the Christian population has been systematically massacred and persecuted; by 2012, over 50,000 Christians were imprisoned in North Korea’s concentration camps.
• Polish Ukrainian genocide (1943-1945). The Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed 40,000 - 60,000 Polish civilians in Volhynia and 25,000-40,000 in Eastern Galicia for the purpose of removing non-Ukrainians from a future purified Ukrainian state.
• The Srebrenica massacre (1995).  More than 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks were massacred by units of the Bosnian Serb army.
• The Holdomor (1930-1937) an estimated 7-10 million Russian peasants died of starvation resulting from the elimination of kulaks – rich land-owning peasant farmers – who were shot or deported and whose lands were collectivized.

Enough.


Encounters with the Other: Barry Oshry
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: Richard Rorty
The Search for Leadership – Bill Tate
and multiple thanks to Rajan Rasaiah for inspiring and sharing ideas that filling the Idioticon.

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