Peripheral Visions

Personhood arises from a long process of welcoming closeness and continues to grow and require nourishment over a lifetime of participation.
    A willingness to offer full participation to all its people is in some sense the criterion of a good society, yet societies vary in their ideas of where membership begins and how it comes into being. As I write, debates about the rights of the unborn and of those impaired beyond all capacity for participation are ebbing and flowing in different places in the world. The recognition that personhood is socially constructed means that there is no single, self-evident answer to these debates. Almost everywhere, however, a person is one who knows others even as she or he is known: more than living tissue, a participant. Exclusion and second-class membership, when full humanity is denied, are assaults, bloodless murders. Just as the creatively responsive eye implies responsibility to preserve natural beauty, the fact that personhood is culturally constructed increases responsibility rather than decreasing it. There is no alternative method.
    Not only is a fetus contingent, a part of a woman’s body, but an adult, man or woman, is also contingent, part of a larger whole, family or community or ecosystem. We cannot afford to carry emphasis on the individual too far, for no one—fetus, child, or adult—is independent of the actions and imaginations of others. Persons are human individuals shaped and succored by the reality of interdependence.
    Those who see personhood as coming into being at a single point in time, whether through a divine act or through the biological events of conception or birth, uphold a lonely vision of the self rather than the self in relationship. Such an absolute vision is likely also to be static, playing down (and often subverting) ongoing development and learning. The self in relationship is necessarily fluid, held in a vessel of many strands, like the baskets closely woven by some Native American tribes, caulked tightly enough to hold water. The possibility of being freely welcomed and cherished may seem trivial compared with life and death, but emphasizing birth rather than participation leads to a society that supports the life of patients in irreversible coma yet denies adequate education and health care to vast numbers of children.
    The business of human community includes the shared construction and conservation of meaning and compassion that exist only as they are lived. No legal definition can free us from the need to bring one another into being. I am only real and only have value as long as you are real and have value. What would happen if we learned to read Descartes’s cogito beyond the first person concealed in the Latin verb forms: “You think therefore I am. I think therefore you are. We think…” Every ergo conceals a different theory of the intermingling of lives. In Pilipino, there are two forms of we , one including and the other excluding the listener. It may be that the more closely one is defined by membership in a group, the more difficult it is to recognize the personhood of the “other” coming from outside.
    During the months when the revolution was building up in Iran, I was on the Caspian coast at the campus of a new university. We were set down in a small community where the Iranian faculty were also outsiders, newcomers from the big city; feeling vulnerable themselves, they feared that foreigners would act as lightning rods and asked us not to circulate in the town and to be as inconspicuous as possible. That request had to be honored, but I found that over time seclusion had an insidious effect on my morale, showing me what is meant by referring to many urban environments as dehumanizing. Sometimes I began to believe I was necessarily an object of hostility, susceptible to attack at any moment. Sometimes I felt invisible, a nonperson, all my effort in learning Persian canceled, and unable to fend for myself. Barkev had teased me when we first traveled to the Middle East about the fact that blue eyes are regarded as bad luck, saying that women snatched their babies away when they saw me coming, and now that joke felt true.
    On visits to Tehran, however, no loyalty to colleagues held me back. There I went and walked among the crowds. Sometimes a passerby would make a hostile comment, but when I responded without contention in Persian the tone would change. As I walked along a main street, full of demonstrators surging out