Seeing Through the Other's Eyes

To be honest, while I enjoyed the inclusion of a Star Trek episode and I find the debate over what constitutes understanding to be fairly interesting, today's class felt, to me, a little like beating a dead horse. For the first part of class we simply went back and forth trying to determine what communication really means and what real understanding is. It was repeatedly said that one can never achieve true understanding with any other individual. I think that this is a little silly. Of course we can never completely know what's going on inside someone's head (unless we're talking about a Vulcan mind meld). To me, it's kind of a moot point since complete and utter understanding, by definition of the word "complete," would require the ability to both read minds and have the exact same frame of reference of the other individual. Complete understanding is not even possible in a society where everyone speaks the same language. A PBS guide to cross-cultural communication gives an excellent example: "even in countries that share the English language, the meaning of 'yes' varies from 'maybe, I'll consider it' to 'definitely so,' with many shades in between." We touched on such issues of underlying meaning in class and, certainly, the inferences we make about communicated messages everyday may be wrong in some situations.

During the second part of class, we moved past this definition of true understanding to try to place the interactions between different humans and "others" from the books we've read this semester onto a scale of greater or lesser understanding. I appreciated this more concrete look at understanding because it gave us an idea of what promotes more in-depth understanding between cultures or species. Some of the indicators we came up with were: 1) one or both sides are able to "get out of their own head" and see the other's perspective; 2) the communication causes a change in the other's behavior; 3) one or both sides view the other as an equal. Someone also mentioned that, in many of the examples we looked at, a low level of understanding often meant the presence of violence.

For me personally, I feel that the first indicator is the most accurate because of the examples that I see as being more indicative of understanding, such as Ender and the piggies in Speaker for the Dead and Marjorie and the foxen in Grass. These examples exhibit more understanding between the main characters and the alien species because of the unique ability of both characters to see things from a different perspective; maybe they can never completely relate to the practices of the aliens, but they have an understanding of why things are done that way. In this instance, I have a quote that fits quite nicely. Gavin Sanderson writes in his article "Existentialism, Globalisation and the Cultural Other" that, "if it is popularly held that there is nothing that can be learned from the Cultural Other, what possibilities are there for transformative encounters to open our identities to change? To also see the world through their eyes and in doing so, become something more than we presently are (Marginson 1999-2000, p.5), whether at the level of an individual, an institution, a nation, or a civilisation." The only way to have encounters that change one's self (presumably arising from a new understanding of the universe or some small piece of it) is to open one's mind to another perspective.