By Prof Sarah C. White

Our work at the Relational Wellbeing Collaborative shows that relationships power wellbeing and centres relationships in strategies to achieve wellbeing. But the relational basis of human being also has a shadow side. This post begins to explore this.

A few weeks ago a Bangladeshi friend and I joined a daily fast for Gaza outside parliament. That evening we visited his daughter, who spent part of Ramadan last year in Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.  She told me how she had kept a very close eye on her toddler daughter, as ‘the IDF are all paedophiles.’ I said I didn’t think the IDF were paedophiles, they were mainly ordinary young people who in extraordinary circumstances found themselves doing some terrible things. She wasn’t convinced. But it set me off thinking, what is it that happens in people that enables them to act with the brutality that we are witnessing in Israel/Palestine?

The next day, talking with my friend, the beginning of an answer came to me. We know that seeing others as less than human is a common feature in all kinds of violence and oppression, such as the enslavement of Africans, anti-Jewish pogroms, the Rwandan genocide, attacks on hotels housing migrants and wars in general. I have always thought of this in terms of its effect on the victims. I realised that day that this is only one part of the story.  Because denying the humanity of others in turn diminishes the humanity of those who do the denying. And it is this diminished humanity that engenders acts of casual cruelty and institutional barbarism.

I think that this links to the famous saying of George Fox, one of the early Quaker founders, that we should ‘answer that of God in everyone.’ To do this, I believe, is to evoke that of God in ourselves, or even somehow to participate in the being of God. This mirrors the way that as humans we are not separate, independent entities, but emerge through relationship. Just as who I am is always being expanded and enriched by the people I encounter, so the denial of relationship reduces and limits me.

Another side of this essential relationality of human being is that one of our core temptations is to define ourselves in opposition to others. I state who I am and reinforce the identity of my group in part by distancing myself from those whose opinions, actions or ways of living I dislike.  This is commonly normalised, claiming it is human nature to prefer ‘our own kind’. We may think of this as something that afflicts only narrow-minded people, but I believe it can also be a danger for those of us with a keen sense of justice and a tendency to moral outrage.  We need to resist identifying ourselves against others in this way, recognising that it is the first step along the same path. Denying the humanity of others sows seeds of inhumanity in ourselves.

Sarah C. White is the Honorary Professor of International Development and Wellbeing at the University of Bath