Levinas and multicultural society

Almost everybody I met so far was the same or nicer in real life than I expected, the same counts for Simon. So the question which intrigues me is: can I really get to know somebody whom I have never met in real life? And the question is even: Is it true that the real nature of a person is more visible in the online world? People who are not familiar with the online world are often worried that people present a more beautiful image of themselves than how they really are. I also heard my former sociology professor say that contacts in the online world are just superficial and that they never last long. I don’t agree with him of course. Two and a half year is pretty long and who knows how much longer it will go on, the discussions and the friendships. Some discussions are at a high level, certainly not superficial.

But of course there are differences between the online and the offline world. As I said before, I noticed something which Levinas described as that the face of the other is missing. I don’t talk to a person who is standing in front of me. I talk to a profile with a description and an image. It can easily happen that I forget that this profile is in fact a real human being. I can call the other whatever I like, troll, moron, devil. The other cannot slap me in the face when I say that. Maybe I don’t even realise that I am insulting / hurting him or her. And another thing is that because of the lack of physical space, there is no territory. I cannot say: you are here in the Netherlands so you have to respect the laws of our country and adapt a bit to our culture. There are no general laws / constitution, there is no dominant culture to which the “foreigners” should adapt. There are no foreigners. It is as if we are all together on Mars. This means that India and Pakistan are located in the same space, and Israel and Palestine, and Muslims and Islam-haters, and Jews and anti-semites, etc. This while it can easily be the case in the offline world that people are not so often confronted with people with totally opposed views or people whom they consider as “the enemy”. Among like-minded people you can repeat everyday how stupid the others are. At Orkut the others are listening to that mudslinging all the time and they are shouting back .
So this is why there are often many serious insults posted at Orkut and many hard fights. It is nice to see how much friendlier the contact is with most of them in real life. I don’t know which world is more real, the offline world or the online one. Both worlds are real. But it helps to realise that for many Orkuters there is a difference between how they behave in both worlds.

I wrote before about our totally opposed views: http://levinasandculture.blogspot.com/2006/05/justice-and-tolerance.html

I said then:

“What I personally find one of the most difficult things, and which is something of which I can see that others are having difficulties with it as well, is to be tolerant towards people who have ideas which are in my view very harmful towards what I consider as justice.”

And that counts for Simon, I think that his ideas are harmful, when people act according to these ideas. In that text I try to show that Simon's remarks are racist, that between the lines you can read the assumption that black people are more often lazy than white people. Of course Simon denies that, but he didn’t convince me that it is not racism.

So in the beginning I was wondering: do I want to be friends with somebody of whom I consider some of his ideas to be racist? Would I want that if I were black or if I were a Muslim? And my answer was yes but I didn’t really know why. I think now that the reason why I can accept him as he is, is because he totally accepts me as I am.

Our views are as far away from each other as possible, with regard to almost all political topics you can think of. The only thing we agreed about last Thursday was that children who like to work with their hands and who are good at that, that they should not endlessly be forced into an intellectual abstract education. And we also agreed that in an anarchistic state there would be different communities and there would also be communities for women who like to wear burka’s, so they would be free to wear them then. But that’s it, for the rest we are totally opposed.

So why do I find it so important that he accepts me as I am? That he likes to meet me and talk 2.5 hours with me although he thinks that my ideas are completely crazy and stupid and bad. It means that the degree of agreeing with ones opinions is completely separate from the judgement of a person as that person. I can be considered to be a completely mad lunatic liberal but the personal judgement is not based on that category. We can be friends despite our differences because we accept from the other that the other person has got these views. If he would try to convince me of his ideas and if the level of friendliness would go down the more I stubbornly refuse to change my mind, it would be over soon. Simon can be very convinced of his being right, it is not that he listens to what I say because he would be at the point of changing his mind, not at all (and the other way around it’s the same). But still he accepts the differences. That is true tolerance and open-mindedness, to treat the other as completely equal no matter what his or her opinions are. That’s very important to have a good respectful (intercultural) relation between the one and the other, as Levinas describes it.

# posted by Levinas and culture @ 8:07 PM