Umberto Eco's Pakistani driver

I recently came across an essay by Umberto Eco, the pre-eminent Italian philosopher, essayist, professor and author who died in 2016. The essay was in fact a lecture given in 2008 at Bologna University. It later came out in a book that collected some of his lectures and essays. The essay, titled "Inventing the Enemy" starts with a story. Eco was in New York a few years before the said lecture and got into a taxi that had a Pakistani driver. The driver, after asking Eco about where he was from, and how many people lived in his country, inquired who were the enemies of his country. Eco recalls in his essay that the driver "wanted to know who were the people against whom we have fought through the centuries over land claims, ethnic rivalry, border incursions, and so forth". Eco was unsettled by the question, and said that his country was not at war with anyone. The driver remained unsatisfied – "how can a country have no enemies?" he said. The ride ended soon after.

Later on, Eco realised that his answer to the driver was not quite accurate, and told himself that instead he should have said that "it is true that we Italians have no enemies. We have no outside enemies, or rather we are unable to agree on who they are, because we are continually at war with each other." Launching with this experience in a taxicab, Eco spends the rest of the essay on how communities have invented enemies – and not just the ones who are at war, but also those who we dislike. His analysis is sharp, rigorous and rich with specific historical examples from Cicero to Mussolini, and from a wide range of literature ranging from Shakespeare to Orwell to Koestler. Eco's argument is not entirely an unfamiliar one. We know that in the intellectual structure of us versus them, they are portrayed as being filthy, or morally inferior, or driven by false virtues, or inherently evil. This is not particularly a new phenomenon of the present time or limited only to politics. In medicine and public health, Syphilis, a disease associated with moral depravity, was long called "the French disease" by the Italians. The French called it Neapolitan (or Italian) disease, the Russians called it the Polish disease, the Poles called it the German disease and the Turks called it the Christian disease. Similar parallel names existed in north India among Hindus and Muslims.

Eco ends his essay by quoting from another extraordinary mind of the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre, who in his play, No Exit, focuses on the afterlives of three people stuck in a hotel room, and how each one will torment the other two, by assuming that they are different, or the "other".

It is this concept of the other that increasingly defines us today for our ideals about ourselves to have substance, and for our organisations to exist. The other to us is someone who is different by virtue of their skin colour, faith, sect, ethnicity, social status or even political views – or maybe this other is perhaps identical to us in nearly all respects that actually matter, but we need to imagine something different for us to operate. It made me think about people or communities we do not like, and the kinds of stereotypes we associate with them. These stereotypes range from their physical traits (that we do not like to have amongst ourselves in height, skin colour, facial features), to their hygiene habits, to their sense of right and wrong (or patriotism) and beyond. Further, as Eco points out and as we all know too well, any effort to seriously understand the other, or to see the world from their eyes is strongly discouraged and often simply unacceptable.

I never got a chance to meet Eco, but I have benefitted tremendously from his work in both fiction and non-fiction. But I think here the real teacher is not Eco, but the unnamed Pakistani taxi driver who is asking Eco, and us, to recognise who we are by getting to know who we choose to otherise.