I cannot touch on Sameul Paty's obligation as a teacher without also touching on all of our obligation to love.
Why is it still so hard for some to understand that there are many and differing ways to live a good life? And I mean Good as in the Platonian sense of pure, true, enriching, beneficial.
In this information era, we can experience vicariously so many different world views. Through film, books, music. By joining various forum, social media and online activities. By looking around our streets, even here in Japan diversity is increasing. Once monocultured countries everywhere are seeing more and more migration. Most people these days can say the know someone who lives in a different country.
It is so easy to meet alternate world views.
Why is it that we are still so afraid of them?
We have had generations, now, of education about the need to be accepting of difference. About understanding that we don't have to like everything about someone's life to still like some part of them. To still recognize that there is some part of them that is valid, good and valuable as a human being.
Where are our soothsayers to calm boiling blood, to help us reflect on and understand the actions, agency and choices of others. To understand the outcome and consequences, desired and unintended, of our own actions.
While the West values freedom above most things. I think that peace is far more valuable than freedom. And sometimes to create peace, we must restrict ourselves. But that is my perspective, having been indoctrinated by the Japanese philosophy of harmony.
