Today the Eastlit editorial November 2013 is by another guest.
The modern world is remarkable. I am writing this in Ohio, and god knows where you are. Let’s not look deeply into that statement for its meaning—questions of what is god, is there one, could such a being know. See, the sentiment is enough, an idiomatic expression, which is to say: You may be anywhere.
I have my qualms about the internet. But, like all swords, it has an edge we can use for good things, even if we must bend it into something other than what it was at the beginning. Swords to plowshares, right? I think Eastlit is one of those good things.
Depending on who you believe, the internet began with researchers at CERN, a European organization that studies nuclear physics, or with DARPA military researchers in the United States. Science or war, better waged by connected computers. Science is fine when we use it to understand the world—not when we apply it in ways that reconstruct the world in the shape of a machine, or destroy living things for technology or trade. As for war… Well, let’s not talk about war.
Either way, the internet was the product of expert minds with expert tasks. Communication among people expressing their own experiences and reflections was not its purpose. Though there is usefulness to distributing data-sets, bringing people a little closer together by moving words over oceans and continents has a usefulness of its own, and it is certainly not the original goal of networked computers. So, swords into plowshares, and beakers into water glasses, but wash out the chemicals, first.
Why is Eastlit important? I speak for the Westerners among us, since I am one. Since Edward Said wrote Orientalism, some Westerners have been more aware of the temptation to see foreign countries and peoples as ‘other’ in a way that means ‘fascinating, but lesser.’ He was focused on the Middle East, but the tendency holds true for the West and other countries in general. We are so involved in our own culture that other ways of seeing and living are strange to us. This is so for all people, perhaps, but intolerance and insularity towards the ‘other’ is more problematic when your way of life brings you into consistent contact with them.
The media at large has not gotten the message of honesty. Being so large, it rarely gets any messages at all. In communications parlance, it’s a one-way channel. Unable to see individuals, you are unable to hear the human voice. You hear the roar of a mob or nothing—nothing as silence, or bad pop music, while looking at ratings in an office. Television studios and Hollywood caricature what life, people, and places are like, treating them as means to the ends of entertainment alone, and the people cannot talk back. That is not communication, and it’s even worse when the media ‘entertains’ us by portraying life, people, and places in East Asia. For conglomerates, no human being or culture is a subject. On the corporate screen, there are only objects.
Eastlit has the advantage of being small, and focused on human beings. There is no other way to be human but as small subjects, and we are certainly that. Once we become or see ourselves as anything else, where are we, and what have we become? Faustian—pretenders to something we should not have or be, investors in a delusion. We are not Faustian or masses. You can hear other people, here, and you can be heard in turn. It’s rather nice, isn’t it?
By its focus and content, Eastlit provides a bridge of communication across cultures that must remain open, and become wider, if we are to recognize our fundamental equality. Appreciating that other people are people, without trivializing their differences, is the cure for many ills. It’s also a lot more fun! Perhaps the only other ills that need curing are those of health and hunger—in which case, plowshares will come in handy. Enjoy reading Eastlit!
by Zach Wilson
