There are more than eight billion people on earth. Every one of them has an internal life, an entire world that exists only inside their head.
When we interact with one another, each of us only sees a sliver of that world. And even then, each of those worlds has been highly modulated in order to fit together with the social norms of our shared existence on this planet.
We have a general sense that the totality of the “experienced world” is vastly larger than the filtered down version that we all share in physical reality. But we only get to see the fullness of that vastness in glimpses, in the form of novels, memoirs and other ways that people have found to reveal their inner world.
I wonder — will advancing communication technology will make it ever more possible for us to truly visit each others’ internal world? Or will it just enable us to create the illusion that such visits are taking place?
I have spent about half of my life in my country of birth, and the remaining half living in 2 other countries. Because I moved for work reasons, out of necessity, I learned the language and, to some extent, the culture of those foreign-to-me countries, though, to my shame, explicit and intense cultural study was not really a priority for me — so cultural understanding only happened slowly through osmosis, over years and decades.
Recently, still living as an expatriate, I saw a modern adaptation of King Lear, in a foreign language and with foreign pop-culture references thrown in. Though I caught only about 25% of the pop-culture references, those few that I did catch were quite gratifying. There’s something oddly wonderful about naturally laughing with the rest of the audience when an odd joke comes up, then after a moment of reflection, realizing that the joke is not in your mother language and is making pop-culture references to a culture that is not your native one but into which you have become integrated enough to intuitively understand some of its irony and humor.
So one way to approach an understanding of someone else’s world view is (1) to speak their language (2) to absorb their history and culture through their language, and (3) to live in their society. Achieving all three may be difficult depending on one’s circumstances, but there should be nothing preventing anyone from taking a shot at learning one or multiple foreign languages. It slightly widens your sliver of perception.
That, however, is only one side of the coin — how you perceive the world, colored through the lens of another language. The flip side of the coin is how you will be perceived by others within that world. But that’s another discussion.