A holistic approach to these realities require us to rediscover, respectively, together and in practical terms, some basic principles and values. Education, everyday life and interaction with fellow citizens of different origins, cultures and religions are the things that will allow us to apprehend our common humanity in concrete terms, and to understand that it is, by its very essence, made up of diversity and of many different identities and traditions. Our fellow human beings act as mirrors, and they allow us to understand that we too have multiple identities, and that we are not reducible to one origin, one religion, one colour or one nationality. This education and these relations forge knowledge and shape a psychology. It takes time, patience and commitment: changing mentalities and transforming perceptions and representations means that we have to work with our fellow human beings at both the local and the national level.
We have to give a ‘philosophy of pluralism’ substance through our practical commitment, and through the projects of actors who represent a diversity of cultures and religions but who are also inspired by their common willingness to take up the same challenges. We can thus create a collective psyche, a common sensibility and a mutual feeling of belonging.
None of this can be done at the legal level; we have to begin long before the law intervenes. How and why, at a given moment in history or life, does a group acquire the ability to say ‘we’, and to allow its members to feel at ease with themselves, to feel that they are recognized and that they are at home? A group or a society… regulated and organized by legislation and cemented and unified by a common sensibility. This is not a matter of recognizing the formal limitations of the law, but of coming into contact with the other’s sensibility, values, doubts and quest. We encounter new trajectories, and the efforts others are making to belong, and to find their equilibrium and peace. We learn to empathize, as we have already said, and to identify the sacred spaces of the ‘other’ who is our neighbour. We learn to understand the importance of our neighbour’s values, loves and convictions, and even the geography of his or her psychology and sensibility. As Mircea Eliade points out, even the most modern amongst us have their personal maps of their sacred and profane spaces and elements. We become a society when two, three, thousands or millions of us learn to decipher the main lines of our respective routes and to respect them because we understand their general meaning.
As we have said again and again, we need the law. But building a society means going beyond the legislative level and entering the realm of civility. At this level, it is not a matter of using the law in order to know the extent to which I can exercise my rights to impose my will or to attack the other who stands in my way (or whom I mistrust), but it is important to concern ourselves with conviviality, to adopt the welcome vocabulary and aspirations of the political ecologist Ivan Illich. There are, as we have said, some things that are legal but that we shun because of our sense of dignity and decency. Knowing how to make use of our rights is indeed important, but we also have to some sense of our common humanity, a concern for the others, a shared sensibility and a shared emotional life. We are talking about an ethics and a humanism that precedes (and succeeds) the law. Illich was hostile to schools, to that ‘new church’ that promised ‘salvation’ in the light of an economic order that oriented knowledge and shaped behaviours in such a way as to make them competitive and profitable. Taking his inspiration from the biblical parables, he adopted the adage ‘the corruption of the best becomes the worst’ and tried to think about the future of our modern societies. And our desire for speed, profit and social success, together with our fear of the other, of difference and insecurity, are indeed turning the best into the worst. Our constitutional states are becoming fortresses within which we defend our interests, and a lot of our selfishness. Our rights, the most important of which is the right to self-expression, are being used to delineate territories and to provoke – for no good reason – the anger and reactions of those we distrust, or simply those whose presence and beliefs offend us. Our democracies used ‘legal’ mass persuasion and manipulation to justify – with or without the approval of the masses – new wars between civilizations in the name of civilization and democratization. These perversions stir up fears and distrust and block the development, at both the local and the international level, of the conviviality that gives individuals a sense of belonging. We have become the creators of ghettoes at both the international and the national level. Our affiliations are becoming more and more narrowly defined, our humanism is becoming a matter of tribal instincts, and our universalism is not very generous.
We must learn to say ‘we’ again. Just as I can say ‘I’ and still belong to myself, we must be able to say ‘we’ whilst acknowledging our common sense of belonging. Some would like us to sit down at a table and discuss the best way of saying ‘we’ and of respecting ‘one another’. And yet it is quite possible that the method itself is what is preventing us from getting the results we want. The same applies to the concept of integration: the best way to prevent ‘integration’ from becoming a reality is to go on talking about it so obsessively. A common sense of belonging is not something that can be willed into existence: it is born of day-to-day life in the street, at school and in the face of the challenges we all face. Theories and debates about ‘the sense of belonging’ actually make it impossible for us to feel that we belong. We are talking about a feeling: we come to feel that we belong because we live that feeling, because we experience it. The common law protects us, but it is common causes that allow us to respect and love one another (by acting together ‘for’ some cause and not just ‘against’ a threat). A common commitment to respect for human dignity and saving the planet, or to the struggle against poverty, discrimination, every type of racism, and to promote the arts, the sciences, sports and culture, responsibility and creativity: these are, as we have already said, the best ways of developing a real conviviality that is both lived and effective. When we trust one another, we now longer attack our neighbours in order to test their reactions without reason, and we can keep our critical intellectual distance from their ill temper or provocations. We become subjects who can say ‘I’ when we have discovered the meaning of our personal projects: we become a ‘we’, a community or a society when we can decide upon a common collective project. In most circumstance, it is not dialogue between human subjects that changes the way they see others; it is the awareness that they are on the same path, the same road and have the same aspirations (and their interminable dialogue sometimes blinds them to this). When our consciousness acknowledges that we are travelling the same road, it has already halfopened the door to the heart: we always have a little love for those who share our hopes. ‘We’ exist by the sides of roads that lead to the same goals.
The personal interaction or other exposure to cultures besides our own is easiest if it starts during childhood – before the fears and prejudices have time to take hold. I had a very blessed (and endlessly fascinating) childhood. Our ancestry covered not only several parts of the UK, but also several countries in Western Europe. My father was a teacher of French and German languages, and every few years we would make a family trip to Europe, staying with relatives or in small bed and breakfast accommodation in villages (cheaper than city hotels, and so much more interesting). During my teenage years there was other interaction in the form of my grandmother’s au pair girls (I remember ones from Japan and South America), and students we hosted over festive seasons, several of them from Africa. (My father had served in Burma during WWII, heading a troop which consisted almost entirely of Africans, whom he liked very much). It is little wonder that when I went to university I automatically gravitated towards foreign students, who tended to be shunned or ignored by other students who did not feel so much at ease with them. I ended up marrying one of them, and the gene pool of our children and their children has expanded to include Malay, Arab, Pakistani, Chinese and Champa (an ethnic group in Cambodia).
I feel that this experience and interaction from young has hugely enriched my life. I don’t at all feel that I have changed or lost my original identity, but rather my identity has been expanded and enhanced in a very positive way. I hope that more people everywhere will cast aside their fear and embrace whatever opportunities they have to get to know people of other cultures and religions.