What happened to the Second World?
During a recent leadership hui, the terms First World and Third World came up in our conversation.
As often happens, my curiosity took me somewhere slightly different.
I found myself wondering, what happened to the Second World?
We hear people referring to First World and Third World countries, but where did the Second World go? Who decided which countries belonged in which world?
So, of course, I went exploring. Sorry if this might sound a little like a history lesson, but I will get to the point, promise.
I discovered that these terms originally came from the Cold War, when countries were grouped according to their political alliances. The Second World largely disappeared from everyday language when the Soviet Union collapsed.
But First World and Third World remained, and over time their meanings shifted. They became associated with wealth, poverty and how developed a country was considered to be.
Now that was when my pondering really began.
Who gets to decide what being developed actually means?
Even more importantly, developed according to whose understanding of what is normal?
I began thinking about Charles Darwin's visit to Aotearoa in 1835 and the way he described Māori.
His observations were influenced by his own European understanding of civilisation. He made judgements about appearance, expressions and cultural practices, interpreting differences through what he already knew and believed.
He was observing a society that wasn’t less developed, simply a society that had developed differently?
A society with its own sophisticated knowledge, values, relationships, systems of leadership and ways of understanding the world.
How much did he fail to recognise because it didn't fit within his understanding of what civilisation should look like?
Then I began thinking about how often we might do something similar.
Not necessarily on the same scale, or with the same consequences, but in the everyday interpretations we make about other people.
What is normal anyway?
I thought about Gabor Maté's book The Myth of Normal, in which he challenges us to question the things we have come to accept as normal.
Just because something is familiar, widely accepted or has always been done a particular way, does that necessarily make it right, healthy or even the best way?
I wonder whether the same could be said about the way we understand other people.
We all carry an understanding of what is normal. It comes from our upbringing, our culture, our experiences, the people who have influenced us and the things we have come to believe. Over time, these understandings become so familiar that we may not even recognise them as assumptions.
They simply become the way things are. But normal according to whom?
What happens when we encounter someone whose experiences, culture, beliefs or ways of being are different from our own?
Do we recognise those differences as opportunities to expand our understanding?
Or do we unconsciously begin measuring them against what we already know?
Perhaps that's the interesting thing about normal. It can become so familiar that we forget to question it.
The interpretations we make
I wonder how often our understanding of normal influences the interpretations we make every day.
We see someone behaving differently from what we expect, and we make an assumption. We encounter a perspective that challenges our thinking, and perhaps our first response is to question it rather than become curious about it. We observe a tamaiti whose learning or behaviour doesn't fit within our expectations, and we begin wondering what needs to change.
But what if, instead, we wondered what we might not yet understand? I think about this often in our mahi with tamariki, whānau and kaiako.
How easily our own expectations can become the measure against which we interpret someone else's experiences, capabilities or ways of being.
A tamaiti who needs to move rather than sit still.
A whānau whose aspirations for their tamaiti are different from what we might have anticipated.
A kaiako whose approach challenges the way things have always been done.
How quickly might we interpret these differences through our own understanding of what should be happening?
What might we discover if we became curious instead?
Because there is a difference between noticing something is unfamiliar and deciding that it is somehow less than.
There is a difference between recognising that someone does things differently and believing that our way is the better way.
There is a difference between genuinely seeking to understand another perspective and simply trying to fit it into what we already know.
Weed? Or something beautiful?
Making space for curiosity
I think this is where curiosity becomes so important.
Not curiosity that seeks to confirm what we already believe, but curiosity that allows our thinking to be challenged. A quick visit to the Above and Below the Line video would be good at this point, if you have not watched it already.
We want to foster curiosity that invites us to wonder:
What am I assuming?
What might I not be seeing?
Whose perspective is missing?
What might I learn if I was willing to see this differently?
I think there is something about recognising that our understanding of normal is not necessarily the only understanding.
It doesn't mean we need to abandon everything we know or believe. Nor does it mean that every perspective or practice is necessarily helpful.
But it might mean being willing to hold our own understandings a little more lightly. To recognise that what is familiar to us may be unfamiliar to someone else.
That what we consider important may not hold the same meaning for others. That there may be wisdom, knowledge and possibilities beyond what we have already experienced.
A pondering to carry forward
I began this pondering with a simple question about what happened to the Second World.
I found my answer.
What has stayed with me isn't the history of those three labels.
It's the realisation that the language we use, the judgements we make and even the things we believe to be normal are often shaped by the perspective from which we are looking.
I think the real opportunity lies in becoming more conscious of those perspectives.
In noticing when we are interpreting rather than understanding.
In recognising that difference does not necessarily mean deficiency.
It also means remaining open to the possibility that someone else's way of knowing, being or doing might offer something we have not yet considered.
Maybe we don't always need to change what we are looking at.
Perhaps sometimes we need to change the lens through which we are looking.
So, something to ponder...
How often do we interpret difference through our own understanding of normal?
And what possibilities might we discover if, rather than deciding what something means, we became curious about what else it could mean?
Mauri ora
Lynn Rupe
Reference
Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture. Avery.
