Global Dialogues

We live in a time of growing isolation. Technology cuts us off from vital aspects of meaning, intermediating our contact with the world and people around us. Staring addicted into our screens, we imagine what we encounter there is reality. But it is only a simulation, an abstraction. It leaves us lonely, agitated, and unsatisfied. And as this occurs, we also find ourselves embedded in a sputtering, neoliberal economic system, where money determines our value. But money too is an abstraction. It too increasingly intermediates our experience of what it means to be human. We are expected to pay, and to be paid for, what were previously less commodified aspects of human existence: the ability to breathe clean air, to find companionship, to belong to a community. We experience this as anxiety and alienation.

Out of this predicament emerges our current crisis. As a species, we have more wealth than ever before, and yet needless famines and readily curable diseases stalk many millions among us. We have intricate structures of international law and codified rules of human rights, and yet we actively undermine and refuse to apply them to atrocities. We ignore the United Nations, with powerful countries not just willing but eager to strike at those that are weaker. After a period in which it seemed that the specter of World Wars was receding, we are engaged in massive rearmament, perhaps preparing for a World War to come. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is symptomatic of all of these: starvation when food is available, war crimes without penalty when concerted action is possible, flouting of the will of the United Nations, the spectacle of massive arms deals, and a war-for-profit industry gone mad.

How might we respond to all this? It is perhaps worth considering the views of two Romans, separated by centuries, and yet having much in common, not least the fact that neither of these Romans was from Rome. The first was born in Buenos Aires, as Jorge Mario Bergoglio. He lived most of his life in Argentina, and was known for his humility and compassion, expressed not least through his washing of the feet of criminals, the ill, the destitute, and the elderly. He rejected the impulse to avert his gaze. Even when others around him refused to, he spoke up for those who suffered: for refugees, for the poor, for victims of war. He came to live in Rome late in his life. There he was called Pope Francis, and in his encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, or “Siblings All,” inspired in part by an encounter he had with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, he exhorts not just the potential of, but also our innate desire for, human fraternity. Even more radically, he calls for us to heed that longing from within that bids us to seek out a form of political love, one that “gives a universal dimension to our call to love, one that transcends all prejudices, all historical and cultural barriers, all petty interests.”

Our second Roman who was not from Rome was Jalaluddin, born in Central Asia eight centuries ago. A Muslim refugee who fled the Mongol invasions, he escaped massacres such as those that consumed Balkh and Samarqand, and later Merv and Baghdad, the latter two among the largest cities in the world at that time. Jalaluddin finally settled in Anatolia, then ruled by the Seljuk Turks, but until recently the heart of the Eastern Roman Empire. It was for this reason that he came to be called Rumi: “the Roman.” Rumi had experienced loss both personally, forced to abandon home after home, as well as on a much larger scale, in the slaughter of millions. Out of these twinned senses of loss, his own and that of others, Rumi discovered something universal: an essential connection, a shared longing of human beings for their source. The result, in his poetry, is an exquisite empathy: “Oh listen to the reed flute, how it does complain/and how it tells of separation’s pain…” Thus does Rumi begin his Masnavi, among the greatest (and lengthiest) works of medieval literature: with the longing of the flute for the reed bed from which it was cut, a longing for home that expresses the unity of existence and the eternal nature of love.

Rumi and Pope Francis both allude to something that seems almost preposterous in our current moment: that love and compassion might allow us to transcend, and thereby transform, the predicament that surrounds us. And yet, upon closer examination, it is not preposterous. We feel the numbness that emanates into our lives through constant technological intermediation and the ever-expanding economy and culture of money-is-all. We see the demagogues of our world whipping up hatred to cut through this numbness – and the growing catastrophes that result. We ask ourselves: what might possibly stand up against this? A politics rooted in a radical form of love, in a recognition not merely of our shared humanity but of our desire to share our humanity, seems essential for us to explore.

Mohsin Hamid is a novelist and essayist who explores contemporary global and political issues.