No Whispering

Humanity’s belief in the existence of the “Other” is the source of much of the violence on our planet. That mistaken belief is manifested in behaviors we are ashamed to admit, and that most of us deny and don’t want to acknowledge. We know this is true because when the subject comes up we drop our volume; we talk in muted whispers and shield our mouths as if to prevent others from reading our lips. The topic is verboten [forbidden] as my German-speaking grandmother would have said, without sanction, at least in “polite” society.

In the context of a very genteel society, the American protagonist in Philip Roth’s novel Deception, says to his British mistress “In England, whenever I’m in a public place, a restaurant, a party, the theater, and someone happens to mention the word ‘Jew,’ I notice that the voice always drops just a little.”  She questions him as to whether this is really true and he replies “you all say ‘Jew,’ Jews included.”  

Writing in the New York Times, Roger Cohen recalls a dinner conversation he had with his Jewish mother in a London restaurant. She had pointed to a family seated in a corner of the dining room and said they were Jewish, her voice dropping when she said the “J” word. “I’m not whispering,” she said when he brought it to her attention. 

In the aforementioned examples Jews are the “Other.” Any of us can be the Other depending on the circumstances determining our religion, location, ethnic group, appearance, age, skin color—almost any detail about how we are perceived as “different” can cause us to be projected upon. The “problem,” however, originates with the person doing the projecting, that is to say, it is a reaction and they choose to do it, consciously or unconsciously. The sad and, as we shall see, dangerous behavior caused by belief in the Other has no basis in reality. The Other is a delusion, a very problematic delusion, not consciously understood by most of humanity today.

But it’s complicated. Britain, with its almost 300,000 Jews and more than two million Muslims, is caught in wider currents—of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and political Islam. Traditionally, England’s genteel anti-Semitism has been more of the British establishment than the British working class, whereas anti-Muslim sentiment has been more working-class than establishment.  

The Other can be a collective, of course, and suffer projections such as the pogroms in eastern Europe and the holocaust of recent memory. Now that the Jews have a homeland of their own they have to face a different kind of prejudice, anti-Zionism, and it comes not from the right but from the academic liberals. Things can quickly get crazy when fear begins to produce reactions all across the religious and political spectrum.

Even those participating (and that includes virtually all of humanity) in expressing the fear that produces hate get confused. Knesset members who have met in Israel with European rightists like Filip Dewinter of Belgium in the grotesque belief that they [European right-wing extremists] are Israel’s allies because they hate Muslims; [or there] is the Jewish writer Melanie Phillips, whose book Londonistan is a reference for the Islamophobes; or those who, ignoring sinister historical echoes, propose ostracizing Israeli academics and embrace an anti-Zionism that flirts with anti-Semitism. 

Today there is widespread anti-Semitism among Muslims and in recent times widespread Islamophobia. Islamophobia has been fanned by the rightist fabrication of the “Eurabia” specter—the fantasy of a Muslim takeover that sent Anders Breivik on his Norwegian killing spree [2011] and feeds far-right European and American bigotry.  The Other, as you can see, can travel in a dizzying circle and in its disorientation clouds human reason and stifles the compassion that forms the basis of the only true identity that we have – one undifferentiated identity – Oneness. 

We can all be sorted into a pile labeled the “Other” based on some superficial trait that has nothing to do with our innate worth. Such is the insidious madness that characterizes our self-destructive narrative. Mitt Romney aspires to the presidency and would like to be his party’s nominee in 2012 but, like a Jew, he belongs to a religious minority. Would our voices drop to a whisper if we were to say the name of his religion? For many of us, it would, or we would express some similar indication of discomfort. The People Who Decide These Things cough delicately into one sleeve, hoping Mitt will not overhear this….  It’s the ‘M’ word and, trust me, he is used to it.

The consequences of the types of behaviors we have been noting are related to nothing less than the very survival of humanity. These reactions toward the “Other” remove us from the compassion of the present moment and instead we experience regret, guilt and shame. That’s why we express the shame reaction of whispering or covering our mouth. Or the reaction has us expressing our fear and anxiety about the future as the Europeans are today around their fear of Islamophobia. The end result of this whispering, and we are experiencing it everywhere on this planet today, is abject, pointless, relentless pain and self-destruction.

When we drop our voices, when we hide our mouth, we are saying something that not only the human community has proscribed but something our soul, our heart, our true self finds painful to say. When we do that, we are creating suffering for ourselves and ultimately for others.  When we choose to whisper:

When we choose to respond instead of react; when we say NO to whispering:

We must say NO. 

NO! NO! NO whispering!

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References and notes are available for this article.
For a much more in-depth discussion on Simple Reality, read Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival, by Roy Charles Henry, published in 2011.