Law enforcement officials now tell us that what was onced believed to be the best evidence may be anything but the best. I am talking about eyewitness accounts. There are several reasons for that. We may see only part of something or see it from only one angle or we may see what we want to see rather than what is actually there. Take a minute and watch this lesson on perspectives from the British newspaper The Guardian in the form of an ad they produced a few years ago. Make sure your sound is on.
The implications for this on the intercultural scene are enormous. Let’s just look at something as simple as a world map. If you live in Europe, you may be used to a world map that looks something like this.
But for people in North America, world maps may look like this.
But a friend of mine who recently visited Australia, brought me a world map he bought there
Poor Greenland gets cut in two!
The message is simple. We all put ourselves in the center of the world, leaving some to be made less significant or even marginalized.
But all these maps agree on one thing. How about this one:
In fact all of these maps are accurate. But each see the world from a different point of view. And it raises the question of what is the scientific basis for putting north at the top of the map? Well, there is none. There is only a tradition started by the great Portuguese explorers of the seas during the 15th and 16th centuries, names like Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan and their Italian compatriates like Amerigo Vespucci for whom the Americas were named. These brave sailors drew the first maps of the places they visited and because they were from the northern hemisphere, they placed everything north of the equator on the upper half of the maps.
Illustrator unknown - From Augusta Stevenson, Children's Classics in Dramatic Form, Houghton Mifflin (Boston), From Charles Maurice Stebbins & Mary H. Coolidge, Golden Treasury Readers: Primer, American Book Co. (New York), p. 17., Public Domain
To be effective in making relationships across cultures, we must always be ready to see things from different points of view and not be like the Indian parable of the blind people who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind person feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side, the tusk, the tail, the ear or the trunk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are vastly different from each other.
In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true but incomplete.
I will have more to say about perspectives in future posts.
Herb