We Are Different. Or Musings on Ethnocentrism.

(written mainly in 2004, at the age of 21, and updated over the years)

We project our identity all the time in search of connection. The image one projects of oneself is the primary way of conveying one's individual content. We keep our essence in a secondary layer. We project our cultural baggage consciously or unconsciously to connect socially. And each being's interpretation of another's attitudes is a way of seeking some emotional equivalence, which determines the gathering of “similar people” in social niches. It is our unconscious at work validating the other, judging semiotic signs and seeking connection through some similarity, or excluding through difference. This is how our mind organises social niches: standardising what we see and analysing it through the filter of our cultural baggage. What is different frightens us and tends to be rejected. And what resembles us in some way is accepted.

This organic identity of ours, which never stops transforming itself, reveals the label we assume before others, often in a stereotyped way in a world dominated by the impact of images. Sight has enormous impact. It is the sense with the greatest capacity for analysis in making emotional connections, and is therefore the greatest generator of interpretations and judgements. Image is almost everything. An image with a script drives a narrative. A bad man who looks very presentable is more readily accepted than a good man who looks unpresentable. (Hence television's dangerous power over passive viewers, constructing political characters who are bad in essence but look like saviours.)

We constantly create patterns alongside our principles when exposed to a new paradigm. Before adding it to our cultural baggage, we analyse it. If the new fact is more disruptive to our current baggage, we tend to reject it at first, prejudicially. It functions as a basic rule of social survival, since difference frightens us. We form a preconceived idea of the fact and look for the synapses we have to categorise it. Remembering that interpretation varies from person to person because it is directly connected to the cultural baggage of the moment, the references each individual accumulates throughout life.

From there, I stop thinking in dualisms such as cultural right and wrong. Claude Lévi-Strauss criticised ethnocentrism brilliantly. In other words: “truth” will always be relative to the cultural baggage acquired up to that moment. Neither better nor worse. Each culture has its own truth. Relativising truth is necessary because it encompasses the many individualities and cultures that exist. If everyone were the same, behaviours would be identical and entirely predictable. Since not everyone is the same, despite often trying to behave as though they were, forced standardisation becomes impossible, however much similarity there may be. And this is the individual freedom that has historically been repressed on the many occasions when human beings fell into the “ethnocidal” totalitarianism of communism, for example. (Ethnocide is the systematic destruction of the ways of life and thought of peoples different from those carrying out that destruction.)

Every human being has been exposed to an environment. These influencing environments may even be the same for two different people, yet they would still not necessarily see the same “truth”. Two things are responsible: genetics and context. Genetics plays its part in shaping human personality through biological and chemical factors, and the context in which influences arise throughout each person's life is never the same. Identical twins do not have the same personality and may not see the same “truth”.

The constellation of values is constantly changing. Paradigms are broken or absorbed all the time, and new social hypes emerge. This constant change is the construction of the endless cultural baggage each of us carries. Contexts follow the change. And it is within these contexts that we analyse facts, always judging them and trying to put them into a little box. That is why opinions should change, particularly as time passes. After all, the longer we live, the more references we absorb.

Leaving utopia aside, and aware that there is no right or wrong in relation to one single truth, we can absorb difference as one more point of view that ultimately only adds to our cultural baggage. A perspective that adds a great deal, because it shows another interpretation, however absurd it may seem, yet always adds information to our baggage. We cannot remain attached only to the opinion itself. If truth = knowledge, the search has no end.

Opinion must be constantly deconstructed, forging knowledge that will never be finite. To judge it, we must seek to understand its constituent factor: context. The same words, spoken by two people, communicate the same information, but the similarity stops there. The contexts that led each individual to develop that thought are different.

23 August 2004