There are more and more people of different nationalities, with unusual traditions and customs among us. How can we learn to live together and understand each other better? Psychophysiologist Victor Arshavsky offers to look at the problem from the point of view of … our brain.
Psychologies: Why in today’s world, where distances are rapidly shrinking, civilizations and cultures are approaching and interacting, do we continue to divide people into “us” and “them”?
Victor Arshavsky: It is in our nature. We differ from each other not only in appearance, character or religion, which we profess – our brain is arranged differently! Its right and left halves are known to be asymmetrical. Both hemispheres of the brain are involved in any complex mental activity, but in some of us the right hemisphere is more active, in others the left. The right connects us to the outside world through images (all children are born right-brained and remain right-brained until about 8–10 years of age). Thanks to the work of the left hemisphere, we understand other people and cultural codes, primarily language. Ideally, each of us should be able to process information with either the right or left hemisphere, depending on the requirements of a particular environment or situation. But this does not happen: the one that determines the type of thinking characteristic of a given person is turned on. Moreover, it can be assumed that civilizations – western and eastern – are also divided on this basis.
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Does each have one of the two types of thinking?
V.A.: Exactly. Western civilization is striving to actively change the world, biasedly analyzes cause-and-effect relationships. It is based on linguistic and logical thinking, for which the left hemisphere is responsible. Some Eastern civilizations perceive the world as an unchanging reality and are oriented towards human adaptation to it. To do this, they mainly use the possibilities of spatial-figurative (right hemispheric) thinking. The dominant type of thinking is passed down from generation to generation.
Therefore, a person of a different culture seems inadequate to us?
V.A.: So it is: it is inadequate for our perception of the world, just as we are for it.
How to find a common language with those who perceive the world differently?
V.A.: For starters, try not to interfere in his life. Let me give you an example: in Magadan, during the Soviet era, I witnessed a real apartheid of the northern peoples. The Paleo-Asians, to whom the majority of northerners belong, are people with a figurative type of thinking. In the Chukchi family, the mother will not say to the child: “let me teach”, she will say: “get up and look.” And here the Europeans moved – to earn money, and at the same time with missionary tasks: they came and behaved as if they knew how it would be better for the indigenous people. Children are illiterate, which means they should be taken away from their mothers and placed in boarding schools. And the children of the Chukchi, driven by homesickness, ran away on skis across the snowy tundra in early spring to their camps, 100–200 kilometers away. I once asked a boy how he found his way home. He replied: “The tundra smells…” These children found their way by smell! Could the Europeans understand them? A reverse example: the Danish government at one time strictly regulated the entry of Europeans into Greenland. As a result, the fully adapted Eskimos, while retaining their psychological status, took on a significant part of European culture that they needed. And the most striking example is the Japanese: they managed to preserve the traditions of their society, and as a result, they brought the country to the forefront of technical civilization.
It turns out that the most constructive is a long, non-violent, patient penetration of one culture into another? But it takes a long time, like in Greenland…
V.A.: Or like the Yakuts, who, in the course of three hundred years of non-violent Christianization, acquired the most adaptive mixed type of hemispheric response.
But we don’t seem to have that time: people of a different culture are already our housemates, equal partners in survival…
V.A.: As long as we perceive “alien” as alien, it remains alien – then there is a need to suppress or destroy it. Each civilization has developed its own principles of thinking, its own system of contacts, its own characteristics that allow you to act optimally under stress. We have to realize that our culture is not the only possible norm. Everyday culture of almost any modern civilization is focused on contact, on the openness of people to each other. If it is customary to greet you at the entrance, then you will naturally greet the Tajik janitor and in response you will meet a smile and a good wish. If there is no such rule, do not be surprised that the neighbors (whatever their nationality) will treat you with distrust.
Are the inhabitants of the Caucasus and Central Asia oriented towards the right hemispheric type of thinking, like other Eastern cultures?
V.A.: Most likely yes. But, of course, to hope that each of us, and even more so society, building relationships with migrants, will always make allowances for physiological differences, is a utopia. I am convinced that the only tool in solving this problem remains strict legislation that prescribes general rules of conduct for all who live in the same territory. Perhaps not all of them are citizens of this country, but everyone is obliged to clean up, for example, after their dog, turn off loud music after eleven in the evening, or send their children to school. Everyone should do this, then there will be no reason for conflicts and aggression, at least in everyday life.
In fact, you call for learning to simply accept the world in all its diversity?
V.A.: This is just the hardest part. But the most interesting! This is something that needs to be brought up from childhood. The ability to think in different coordinates provides unlimited possibilities; this is a very powerful reserve of our brain. We can agree only if we agree to develop both types of thinking available to us.