Otherness

by David Brin

  It is good to recall that nations and tribes never preach tolerance and love of diversity when they are afraid. Witness the civil strife now raging in so many formerly peaceful parts of the world. It may be that Otherness rests its foundations on a brief oasis of plenty in human history, and that this new meme will vanish from sight just as soon as the dunes sweep back in.

  Make no mistake about it, Otherness (along with its two offspring, science and democracy) is still the upstart, the underdog.

  What we can say in its favor is that Otherness has become powerful in the official morality of many nations. In most debates over issues concerning the public, both sides usually wrap themselves in terms such as "tolerance," "privacy," "choice," or "individual rights." And absolutely everybody, right or left, is suspicious of the government!

  How bizarre, in the context of history, is the impatient, deeply Utopian notion, shared by millions, that our institutions can and must be improvable?

  Or that vigorous criticism is one of the best ways to elicit change . . .

  Or that "I might be wrong" is a statement any adult is made better by saying frequently, aloud or in private . . .

  Or that it might be possible—and desirable—for children to learn from the mistakes of their parents, or even surpass them . . .

  Or that a golden age is not to be nostalgically mourned in ancient tomes, but to be earned in a better, wiser tomorrow . . .?

  Now the bonus question: Do I take all of this seriously?

  Are a bunch of infectious "meme" worldviews really at war over human minds, with the prize being the future of human civilization and the planet?

  Of course not. My job is to take you on entertaining rides on the backs of strange new metaphors. It's what you people pay me for, and you went along willingly on this one. (At least those of you still holding this book in your hands!) I hope you found this trip through strangeness to your satisfaction.

  Still, I've thought of an amusing experiment you might play, using these five protagonists—the five memes—I've just described. Try to picture what might happen if extraterrestrials ever did come to Earth and landed in a macho culture, or a feudal one, or a paranoid society, or in the East.

  You get four wildly different scenarios, don't you?

  Now go one step further and imagine alien contact with people brought up in the final way I've described—under the Dogma of Otherness.

  Forget Hollywood pathos about mean, nasty CIA types and trigger-happy rednecks. Those guilt-tripping movies have been partly responsible for seeing to it that (with luck) that sort of schmaltz won't happen. Rather, picture a flying saucer setting down in a parking lot in today's California. The National Guard encircles the vessel . . . to protect our alien visitors from novelty seekers, reporters, talk-show hosts, talent agents, and hordes desperately eager to have their consciousness raised!

  The jury is still out whether otherness-fetishism is any saner than older ways. (Sometimes I wonder!) Nor is there any proof it will, or should, win in the end. Yet I know where I stand. My upbringing cannot help coming out in my writing, or in hoping that readers of my books will come away each time feeling just a bit more tolerant, more future oriented, more critical and eager for diversity and change.

  If you feel the same way, then it hardly matters whether it's a meme, or a rebel worldview, or simply a way of life. We may disagree about the how and why and wherefore of Otherness, while agreeing on what counts . . .

  . . . It is our country.

  The territory of hope.

  The wide-open commonwealth of wonder.