One of the main purposes of my blog posting, today, is to pass on a recommendation.
Pendle Hill is a Quaker study, retreat, and conference center located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. It is also home to what amounts to a Quaker "bookstore," and the bookstore publishes a series of "Pendle Hill Pamphlets," available on a subscription basis. I have subscribed for many years.
One of the most recent pamphlets in my collection is Pendle Hill Pamphlet #486, by Sue Williams. This pamphlet, which was published in April, is titled, The World In A Sentence, and the stories that Williams tells in the pamphlet are drawn from her experiences both with Quakers and with local groups working for peace in many different countries.
I don't think you have to be a Quaker to be moved by The World In A Sentence, and I am recommending you read it. Click the link, above, if you'd like to order it.
The image at the top of this blog posting contains an optical illusion. Does that image depict a "vase," or is it really an image of "two faces"? That image is pretty well-known, I think. Many, if not most of us, have seen that image before. The cover of the pamphlet I am recommending (shown below) also contains an optical illusion, but we are not necessarily ready for that one. Is that picture on the cover of the pamphlet just a tree, or is there something else there, too? Once you know that you are expected to look, you can probably see what didn't strike you at all upon your first glance. We don't see everything, oftentimes, until we know that we are expected to go beyond our first impressions.
This idea, that we should always expect to go beyond our first impressions when we encounter other people, and new situations, is illusrated in Davis' pamphlet, and particularly in the section called, "Systems And Perceptions." Davis describes her work with Oxfam in Cambodia, in the 1980s, and says that while she tried to bring people together by talking about their different "perspectives," or "points of view," or "interpretations," the tranlator upon whom she depended, whose name was Ngarm, told her that there was "no comparable concept among Cambodians." The basic mindset in Cambodia, according to Ngarm, was that there was "fact" and "truth," and that was it.
Since, Davis says, the idea that different individuals and different groups will quite likely have different perspectives is quite fundamental in working with sociopolitical conflict, what Ngarm told Davis posed a huge challenge to her work. Here is how Davis responded:
Among the materials I usually traveled with was a set of drawings illustrating what is sometimes called "perceptual ambiguity." You may know of the drawing of two vases, or is it two faces? Or the drawing that may be a young woman, or a very old one. I showed these and others to Ngarm, and we used them in a seminar. Pairs of people would look at a drawing and then each would describe what they saw. The key question turned out to be: "Can you please help me to see what I do not see?"
I am recommending The World In A Sentence because I think we seem to be forgetting, here in the United States, what Cambodians in the 1980s apparently had yet to learn. Surely we know - at least intellectually - that there are different perspectives, and perceptions, and different systems by which different people decode the world. We know, in fact, that our system of self-government, here in the United States, is based on the idea that the fact that we often have different perspectives is a "feature," not a "bug." The world is complex, and we all tend to "simplify." When we do indulge this tendency to simplify, the full reality of our situation disappears. This year, as always - but maybe particularly this year - our politics must be based on the "key question" identified by Sue Williams: "Can you please help me see what I do not see?"
If we can't start seeing what others see so clearly, so we can begin to try to reconcile differing perspectives, then the kind of conflicts that Davis spent her life dealing with in other countries - countries torn by decades of violent, murderous conflict - will be the kind of conflicts we will be dealing with right here, in the United States.
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