Fr Paul Andrews SJ highlights unconscious prejudice and how we can annihilate the more vulnerable people in society without ever being aware of what we are doing.
In a lovely book called The Places in Between, Rory Stewart, a tough young Scot, has written about his walk through the mountains of Afghanistan. He would spend the night in villages, sitting with the men and watching them.
The order in which men enter, sit, greet, drink, wash and eat, defines their status, their manners and their view of their companions. Status depended on age, ancestry, wealth and profession, but also on whether a man was a guest, and other factors. When other senior men from the village entered, we all rose in their honour. But when the servants brought the food, I was the only one to look up. Servants, like women and children, were socially invisible.
It is startling, isn’t it? In Ireland we like to talk to those who bring the food to the table – in fact we enjoy a new game of guessing where a waitress comes from. Women here are highly visible, and children, when they come into a room, can cause a nice stir. There are unspoken rules that govern how we listen to people, whether men or women, and decide who gets our attention and who can be interrupted.
Greetings
We have our own ways of showing respect. I once welcomed Bishop Dominic Tang to a dinner in Dublin. As a Jesuit bishop he had been over twenty years in a Communist prison in China, seven of them in solitary confinement, and he had an extraordinary story to tell.
While we sat chatting, neighbours would enter the room to pay their respects to this remarkable man. Some of them half expected to be kneeling and kissing a bishop’s ring. But as each new face appeared, the bishop jumped out of his chair and hurried over to greet them, making them the centre of his attention and regard. The simple, self-effacing gesture impressed me even more than the stories he told of prison.
We call ourselves a multicultural society, and think about the ways we need to adapt to other ways of living. The important things are not so much dressing up and tribal dances and folk songs, as the things we take for granted: the attitude to strangers, and servants, and women and children.
Rory Stewart was taken aback by what he called the social invisibility of servants, women and children; in men’s company they did not count. Yet he dedicated his book with great warmth to these same people. Among them he found unquestioning hospitality:
I was alone and a stranger, walking in very remote areas. I represented a culture that many of them hated, and I was carrying enough money to save or at least transform their lives. In more than five hundred village houses, I was indulged, fed, nursed and protected by people poorer, hungrier, sicker and more vulnerable than me. Almost every group I met… gave me hospitality without any thought of reward.
Hospitality meant an evening meal, which might be just a piece of bread, and the freedom to spread your mat and sleep on the floor of the room. For a traveller in snowy mountains, that meant the difference between life and death. Hospitality was a sacred, unquestioned duty.
Assumptions
So what are the unquestioned assumptions in Ireland? One way of exploring them is by asking this question: Who are the easy targets? In the various groups I talk with, is there a sense that nobody will object if I bad-mouth a particular person or group?
In Hitler’s Germany you could say and publish the worst calumnies about Jews, or Jesuits; for them the law of libel was suspended. Nowadays you could find groups who would see President Bush as an easy target, or the Catholic Church, or Northern Unionists, or Sinn Féin, or politicians as a group, or RTÉ, or Dublin 4, or an unpopular neighbour. Prejudice means forming a judgment without evidence, on the basis of a label or social stereotype.
It is even sadder when good people start to see well-meaning institutions as an easy target, because of some ancient jealousy or rivalry. We joke nowadays about rivalries between the Jesuits and the Dominicans, which roused passions in past centuries. But they were tragic rather than funny at the time, and diverted energy and love away from the service of others.
Challenge of Christianity
Jesus startled his disciples when he told them: ‘Those who are not against us are with us’ (Lk.9:50). It is so easy to snipe at the easy targets. Any fool can do that. The hard job, the Christian job, is to seek out the ways in which we are like others, to try to see the world from within the skin of those who are different.
When Abraham Lincoln was criticized for being too courteous to his enemies, and reminded that it was his duty to destroy them, he gave a lovely reply: Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my Friends?
This article first appeared in The Messenger (April 2007), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
