Learning the alien

Senior American politicians who cannot tell a Sunni from a Shi'ite have been rightly roasted in recent years. However, to learn about a culture completely alien from your own is difficult.

My ancestors are mostly from Western Europe. I grew up hearing the names Locke, Kant, and Descartes, and so they were familiar to me well before I studied their work in college; and in those classes, instructors could point to the recognizable influences of those thinkers on my beliefs, my language, and the institutions around me.

Learning about Islam or about China is much harder. The names of its thinkers and other notables—even the forms of their names!—are unfamiliar to me. I cannot draw on habit or upbringing to make sense of what their thinkers mean or pick out the important parts of their thought. I lack the faintest grasp of the Arabic or Mandarin languages; and neither language had much influence on English, so I lack even that secondary knowledge. My grasp of Islamic history and Chinese history is embarrassingly weak. All is alien to me, except our common humanity.

Will I stop trying to learn? No. But I am impressed when I compare the vast forest of my ignorance to the small clearing of my knowledge.