“Hell Is Other People.” Why Personalised Attention Matters.
“Hell is other people.” That was Jean Paul Sartre’s conclusion in his 1944 play, “No Exit” in a succinct condemnation of personal relationships; especially those that create new identities. In Africa, we are very familiar with such. Many of our relatives are completely unknown by first-name basis and instead, we know them by the relationship they have with someone else. It is enough to try and name a particular aunt or uncle and the first name that pops up is something like, “Mama Wambui” or “Baba Otieno”. Relation is a fundamental category in African Identity, as it is attested to by the Ubuntu Philosophy, “I am because we are”. Although Ubuntu places personal identity as a function of community identity, it still speaks of someone knowing who they are and what they are, based on the context of the relationships they establish with others. In an Ubuntu setting, you can only imagine how much “Hell” Sartre would have had to put up with.
Personalised Attention: A New Year’s Resolution.
What does this have to do with anything? Yesterday evening, my colleagues and I received in our inboxes our company theme for the year: Personalised Attention. It is one of our core values at Strathmore University, and what better time of year than now, a time full of New Year’s resolutions, to introduce it with a bang? Well, we all know how New Year’s resolutions turn out as the days go by. As Mike Tyson reminds us, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Nevertheless, a rejoinder to these wise words from an unexpected source would be something like, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” So, at any rate, it’s good to have a plan or at least some grand vision that acts as a north-star to guide our day-to-day activities.
So, what is Personalised Attention all about? As we have seen in the introductory paragraph, personhood is a function of relational identity. It means envisioning our identity as a function of who and what we are to others, in a proactive way. In other words, “I am because you are”. In an institution and culture that is informed by a Christian worldview, we cannot forget that the identity of God in both the Old and New Testament is fundamentally relational. God presents himself for the first time to Moses as, “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” (Exodus 3:15) i.e., as “Baba Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” In the New Testament, God is “Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” i.e., relational Paternity, Filiation and Spiration. And the Christian ethos promotes the idea that a person thrives most through love and service for others: "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends," (John 15:13). But enough with the theory. Let’s get practical!
Personalised Attention: All Or Nothing.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, in his book “How To Know A Person” (Random House, 2023) gives us several hints at how to pave the way for deep and meaningful relationships, the kind that create or reinforce personal identity. Of the many he suggests, I would like to focus on just one of them, in keeping with the year's theme: Attention!
Brooks says that we often treat attention as a “dimmer” instead of an “on-and-off switch”. We’ve all been in that situation where you are in a conversation and suddenly the person you are talking to pulls out their phone and starts scrolling, while nodding occasionally to prove that they are still listening to us… (sigh!). When it comes to attention, it should be “all or nothing.” Either we are paying attention, or we aren't.
Thus, paying attention requires you to “sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod your head… listen with your eyes!”... “If you beam the light of your attention on me, I blossom. If you see great potential in me, I will probably come to see great potential in myself.” But if all the potential you see is in that little black screen in your hands, then it proves that what matters most to you is your phone.
Attention means getting into the other person’s world as they tell it to us, in real time, while not thinking of what we are going to say next or the ‘witty comeback’ that will one-up the other person. The eyes are the window to the soul, and we need to learn to listen with them and at them, to get into the soul of the other and form a bond that makes their joys ours, and their problems ours. In fact, it is only with the starting point of such a deep understanding that we can truly be of service to others, since we shall be solving their problems as though they were our own. Thus, we turn the instinct of self-preservation to good use, by serving the other person as our ‘alter-ego,’ our ‘other-self.’?
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Attention is the new currency.
Attention, then, is not just a skill but a profound affirmation of another's worth. Like a currency, it determines how much we value someone else and when we genuinely pay attention to someone, we validate their experiences, their concerns, and, ultimately, their humanity. In doing so, we reinforce the relations that create identity and that binds us to one another in love and service, making us thrive as persons in a community: "I am because we are!”
To finish, Jordan Peterson captures this truth beautifully in Beyond Order, reminding us of the unparalleled value of attention in shaping not only relationships but also our collective humanity:
“We compete for attention, personally, socially, and economically. No currency has a value that exceeds it. Children, adults, and societies wither on the vine in its absence. To have others attend to what you find important or interesting is to validate, first, the importance of what you are attending to, but second, and more crucially, to validate you as a respected center of conscious experience and contributor to the collective world.” (Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order, Penguin, 2021)
In a world that is often self-centred, distracted and disengaged, personalised attention is both a gift and a responsibility: one that we owe each other as a human community that wants to make each other blossom.
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Community Health Worker at Eastern Deanery AIDS Relief Program
1 个月Verily, personal attention is easily lived when we are in constant personal contact ????.
Director of the Masters of Applied Philosophy and Ethics and of the Centre for Academic Development
1 个月Great article, for a new year's resolution. Thanks