For some people the world is routinely divided into two groups – us and them. Sometimes it’s the big ‘us’ (Europeans, Christians, developed or civilised countries), sometimes the little ‘us’ (British, Catholics, a language group). Sometimes the big ‘them’ (migrants, Muslims, illegals) and sometimes the little ‘them’ (East European migrants, fanatics, burqa wearers).
Often the purpose of this binary division of the world’s people is to (over)state our commonalities and to (over)state their differences. It is also frequently designed to insist that we protect us and our values, traditions, histories from them with their lack of sophisticated values, their anarchic history and their strange belief systems.
Today (as so often in the recent and distant past), there is no shortage of purveyors of this limiting and narrow view of history, geography, sociology, and indeed, religion.
We are currently witnessing a wave of opportunistic politicians, media moguls and commentators who argue that the great challenges we face can be readily resolved if we simply tackle the question of ‘them’. We, our way of life, our customs and traditions, our values are being ‘undermined and attacked’; we must defend them, insist on our true identity (if we could agree on it) and stand firm in the face of ‘them’. There is no shortage of the shrill voices of separation and division.
There are at least two specific problems with this view of things. Firstly, the ‘us and them’ equation assumes that identity is fixed in time, space and culture. However, most of us recognise that even our own individual identity is not fixed, immobile, rigid or static.
The ‘us’ is not hardwired inside each of us forever. Our identity is dynamic, flexible, context specific, responsive to ‘our times’ and is characterised by considerable mobility.
Our identity is also readily mediated by our stage of life – few seldom go through life with the same ‘fixed’ identity we inherited at birth. As someone who was born Irish, of nationalist and Catholic stock, I have become acutely aware of that limiting ‘fixed’ identity.
The second problem with this worldview is that it is not at all helpful in attempting to address today’s local, national or global challenges. The us and them equation seeks to externalise problems and challenges – it’s their fault, it’s the EU’s fault, it’s the fault of Islam – it is always someone else’s fault. If we could just go back to being ‘ourselves’, to our fixed and reassuring identity, then all would be well.
As a strategy for tackling issues such as migration in times of globalisation, climate change, systemic corruption, conflict etc., it is unhelpful and counter-productive as it seeks to separate and restrict ideas and options rather than unite and expand them.
‘Us’ solutions are far too narrow and constricted and they have the fatal flaw of wanting to exclude ‘them’ (who routinely happen to be a majority).
Us and them histories and worldviews amount to nothing less than fake equations and theories. Categorising the ‘them’ and indeed the ‘us’ in distant and recent history is hugely problematic.
‘They’ have often been women (seeking the vote, campaigning for equality or equal pay or even against domestic violence). ‘They’ have often been civil rights activists in the US or South Africa; gays seeking an end to discrimination and criminalisation; believers seeking the right to profess their faith, etc.
The great challenges we face can be readily resolved if we simply tackle the question of ‘them’
‘They’ have been young Gozitan women migrating to England in the last century to work in the canning factories, leather factories and mills (‘taking our jobs’).
‘They’ have included the wave of poor Maltese (and southern Mediterranean) Catholic migrants who arrived in the US in the second half of the 19th century and who were viewed with suspicion and hostility as likely to dilute the US’s democratic values through ‘ignorance and superstition’.
And, ‘they’ were likewise the Jews who fled pogroms and poverty in Eastern Europe and whose alien ways threatened ‘Christian civilisation’.
‘They’ also included Nelson Mandela until he become one of ‘us’.
Identifying the ‘us’ in history is also problematic and not a little controversial. Take Australian history for example. For many Australians, the ‘us’ were/are the descendants of white settlers, colonists and criminals who occupied an ‘empty land’ (officially terra nullius) and who built one of the world’s most successful nations.
For Australia’s Aboriginal peoples, the ‘us’ was entirely different – it was the world’s oldest continuing culture subjected to intense violence, dispossession and discrimination – they were not even included in the census until 1967 and did not have full voting rights.
The debate on reconciliation in Australia (and the campaigns that have fuelled it) illustrate the emptiness and futility of the us and them worldview as reconciliation agendas highlight values such as inclusion, a common future and shared identities.
The reconciliation agendas in South Africa and Ireland have travelled a similar route as they have, of necessity, had to emphasise commonality, inclusion, an end to discrimination and separation as those worldviews spawned intense conflict, violence and suffering.
For five centuries, Europe dominated the world economically, politically, militarily, and inevitably culturally. Europe imposed its power, its laws, its beliefs, its languages and its codes of behaviour.
Our relationships with ‘them’ were consequently dominating, overbearing, imperious and routinely paternalistic. With considerable violence, those centuries came to an end with the process of decolonisation but, sadly, many of the attitudes, beliefs, practices and prejudices live on.
Many seek to go back and recover those imperial days when all appeared well in the world; ‘we’ knew who we were and ‘they’ knew their place. This is akin to what Albert Einstein in 1950 termed an “optical delusion of the consciousness”.
We do indeed face many hugely challenging issues – environmental, political, cultural and economic. Narrowing our ideas base, our talent pool and our strategic options to the ‘us’ agenda is a doomed strategy.
Arbitrarily labelling, selectively categorising and artificially dividing humanity will not serve us or our children well. Focusing only on ‘us’ and our needs, agendas and systematically excluding ‘them’, their needs and agendas simply will not work and will, as it has so frequently done nurture mutual suspicion, hostility, violence and conflict.
Those who peddle in the us and them worldview would do well to ponder history as today’s ‘them’ can become tomorrow’s ‘us’, and vice versa.
Colm Regan lives in Gozo and is a human rights educator.