Perspective

At work, I had 2 bosses that loved to lay an E on the table and have everybody notice how it didn't look like an E from every side---perspective.
It always looked like an E to me, a backward E, a sidewise E and unside-down E--but an E.

Understanding perspective is actually more difficult than that.  Visual artists get it, everyone else not really.

Picture you are the teenage child of a family living on the moon.  Your family has been on the moon for 6 generations, they don't require oxygen, they have lighter bones, they all look alike because they have all been closely related for 6 generations.  They have no books or communication with the earth.

They live on the bright side of the moon and always see the blue/green/white planet their family came from.  It is always the same temperature, the buildings they live in are the same ones they have always lived in, they eat the same things everyday--something that grows in one of the buildings and so forth and so forth.....

They are an homogeneous group living on an always light place and they are the only form of life.

If you asked them to use their empathy to imagine life on earth, they might make up stories about the blue and the green and the white or include bits of oral history passed down from that first generation, but they will imagine those earth people to be people that look like them, that eat like them, with the same level of education and health and life expectancy. 

Their perspective is heavily influenced by what they know.  The chance of them imagining anything that they have never heard of or seen is extremely small and as likely to be wholly erroneous as it is to be at all descriptive of the people on earth, and forget the other lifeforms.

If I lost you, my apologies.
Let me explain my point.

If you try to empathize with people you know almost nothing about, you also risk that your imagination will be wholly erroneous.  If you consider them bad or evil or enemy, you are more likely to give them demonic or animalistic qualities than anthropomophize them. (something we do to pets and cartoons a lot if we care about them or they are cute).

You need to understand their, the others,  perspective.  To do that, you need to understand the filters and leanings your own perspective places on you.

Language has an impact on what we can and can't describe accurately.  When our language becomes too precise, we loose the ability to accurately describe things we are unfamiliar with.    Our language becomes part of our barrier to being  truly empathetic with people that do not speak our language just as their language shapes them.  It creates a type of perspective.

Our personal and/or cultural beliefs also impact our ability to empathize.  Taboos will never be learning moments, breaking them is an instantaneous creation of "other".  But even those things we teach to our little ones as always wrong--taboo-- become, because they are not always universal--stopping spots for our ability to empathize.

We say "terrorist", and know that they are bad people with bad intentions.  They are evil.  But the people living in those groups that are sending out those "terrorists" see themselves as heroes ridding the earth of evil.  We are their "other".

Should we empathize with terrorists???
Maybe if we recognized when we were creating terrorists with our own lack of empathy, we would not be creating terrorists.  Terrorists are always "other".
Maybe, if instead of teachers referring to those individuals that go shoot people then die as "loner", "weirdo", "scary"--if those teachers had recognized poor coping skills, something going on at home, kid being bullied for looking, acting, seeming different; started recognizing pain, and "otherness" we could prevent these events.  And not trying to dump on teachers, they have a hard job, they are underpaid and given ridiculously politicized assignments, but most kids have had teachers while most of us have not had a therapist, close counselor or priest. 

We all need to recognize when we are creating "other" with our good intentioned expections of being like "everyone else.  Whether we shove it onto our child or our students or our employees or our state or nation pushes it onto it citizens or "enemies", we need to recognize, up front, that in treating someone as "other" unless they conform; as less than, as enemy, we are preparing someone to treat us like an enemy.  We are just reaping what we sow.

The same is true with poverty and racial anger and religious and political extremism; both in our country and globally.  We, like Batman, were creating our next enemy with our short-sighted selfishness, intolerance and imperialism.

We know very well how to treat people that are different--as if they were inferior, less deserving, less capable of thinking, less likely to be a good person.  But do we know how to empathize with them?

When was the last time someone looked at you like--"o--that one doesn't belong here, not one of ours, not one of us, they need to just leave".  Imagine how hard it is to walk into a school or a job interview with dark skin or a scarf on your head or even in full emo dress or how about in drag.  They are being who they are, and in so many places where that is NOT the norm. They are stared at; people back away and leave them in a little no-mans-land. They are shunned without anyone trying to know them.

We do things to people using empathy from our own perspective, that neither understands or fits with who they are or where they are coming from.  We decide things about them, that they are poor because they are lazy and don't matter, that they are backward because they are stupid and don't matter, that they have stuff we want or want to use that they don't need or know how to use so they don't matter. 

They are "other".  We are "the people".   Its very tribal.

Perspective will change that.  But it requires learning about those other people FROM those other people.

Learning from them---not going over and teaching them to be like us--that is the epitome of rudeness, disrespect and arrogance.

Missionaries routinely make this mistake and use their own beliefs to explain why it is OK.  Then we all cry when a mission is destroyed or missionaries murdered and blame it on the savages.
Soldiers make this mistake by command.  They are given very stereotypical educations on the native peoples and are then allowed to treat them as less than human.  It makes it easier to kill them.
Police make this mistake, by local tradition.  They use no empathy and only have their police perspective.  They want and demand  their respect as representatives of the law, but do not have requirements about respecting the people they interact with.  Police have become their own tribe just like soldiers in other countries become their own tribe.  Sometimes those 2 tribes have a hard time returning to the larger tribe.  The rules are very different as civilians.

A tribe creates its own taboos and mores.
Like tribes of extremists or a loner whose entire tribe lives only in his head, their taboos are about rules very specific to their own extreme views.  Their taboos may allow the killing of innocents or the renaming of innocents so that their deaths are acceptable.  Or they may make the killing of all that are not part of their tribe acceptable.
While most religions are anti-killing, it is obviously not a taboo in very many.
Taboos, those things we tend to think of as universal, are anything but.
We know it is taboo to rape children or eat human flesh.
But the  Korowai are a tribe of about 4,000 individuals living in the jungle of New Guinea,that still practice cannibalism in ritual.
And adults having sex with children, while illegal, is common, and there are places known to be openly providing children for this to wealthy visitors.
There are taboos against eating with your left hand which seems ridiculous to most of us but pretty nausea-provoking to others.
There are taboos against reproduction with first degree relatives (incest), but that was OK and common among ancient Egyptian pharaohs.
There are places with taboos about eating beef and places with taboos about eating pork and places with taboos about eating insects.

What all this means is that we need to improve and enlarge our own perspective.  We need to go for the 360 degree world view.
We all need to go to the figurative mountaintop and examine those issues we believe are only one way, from all sides.
We need to be fact-checkers.
We need to be seekers of truth in libraries not our own.
We need to question everything we have ever taken for granted as true because we have always known it was so.
We need to become the answer to the hate and anxiety and fearfulness that surrounds us.

Understanding the need for perspective makes us all better and makes us all part of the same tribe.
And no matter how many we are, no matter how rich some are or techno some are or poor some are--we have always been just one tribe.
We are all "the people".