When we break through the veil of the ever-me and expose ourselves as the contingent, historically defined beings that we are, we open up a vast horizon of possibilities for re-creation. This acceptance of our contingent nature, however, not only serves as a powerful tool to build a better relationship with ourselves. It can also help us better understand others and ultimately accept them for who they are. In so doing, we open up equally vast new horizons for building relationships with others.
The reason for this is that when we hold onto the notion that the characteristics of the person we were born into are somehow essential, we tend to equate the way we are with the “correct” way to be. This makes those who have been born with differing genetics or in different societies feel “wrong”. Most of us who have been brought up in mult-cultural societies have been taught to overcome this initial reaction of wrongness, but it’s nonetheless incredibly powerful.
I used to teach a philosophy class about different concepts of the person. The university I taught at had many first generation college students and my class was about half black and half white. Since I knew my students had a hard time with reading and often wouldn’t complete the texts, sometimes I’d start the class by having a few students read out loud. One afternoon when I asked for volunteers to read, the usual suspects raised their hands, and I chose my star pupil, as I knew the text was challenging to read.
As part of the curriculum, that week we were reading a short story written by a black woman from the inner-city in the late 1970s. In it, she wrote with the exact voice she’d grown up with. As my best reader began reading out loud, she faltered like I’d never heard her do so before. She was struggling to even make it through sentences and sounded like someone who couldn’t read at all. After about a page, I had to save her, so I suggested I’d finish the section for her. I got up and began to read and was quickly overwhelmed by the text. My tongue simply wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do.
As I was reading, in the back of the class I saw a young black man who never participated at all raise his hand, straight and high. I was actually a little shocked. I’d tried to get this student to participate in class before, but he always just slouched in his chair like what I was saying was the stupidest shit he’d ever heard. I asked him if he wanted to read and he just nodded his head.
After he slowly made his way to the front, he opened the text and began to read. What came out was nearly poetry. The naturalness and cadence with which he read was unreal. Here was a student that I didn’t even think could read, laying out a text that my best student and I couldn’t stammer through. After he’d finished a couple of pages, a black girl I’d also never heard say a word in my class raised her hand and read the text with equal passion and clarity. For the rest of the class, black student after black student, most of whom I’d never heard from before, read the rest of the story to us.
As someone working on my Ph.D. in Philosophy, I’d always considered myself pretty open to other people and other cultures. The fact is, however, although I doubt I would have admitted this to myself, I thought less highly of most of my black students than I did of my white and Asian students. I was pretty convinced that many of them couldn’t read at all. And although many of my students of all races did suffer from high schools where failure was a fully anticipated outcome, what I learned that day was that these particular students could read with the best of us if they were given a text that used the same language they’d grown up with.
The point is, even when we rationally accept that the person we are is a product of our unique history and biology, as the self-centered humans we are, we still feel like people who are different than us are wrong. This feeling of wrongness isn’t just a racial thing either. We secretly judge people for all sorts of ways they may differ from us–politics, sexuality, age, finances, and even what media they like. These misguided judgements of others by the ever-me completely cut off large portions of the population from the possibility of intimacy, and radically limit who we can feel close to.
That’s why it’s so important for Thanatism to be a faith rather than just a philosophy. Much of what death can teach us about ourselves and others are things that on some level we already know. When we emotionally accept our mortality, however, and through practices allow it to work into the core of our being daily, we begin to feel these things more viscerally.
My hope is that as we build a community, our practices together can help us live what we already know. Understanding that we have a limited perspective as humans isn’t enough. Understanding doesn’t break down the walls that prevent truly communing with those who are different than we are. We need to feel our limitations viscerally, so that our hearts can truly open to all of those people whose very differences would make them such incredible companions as we learn to walk this earth together.