Altruism is an honored word. Otherism is only recently coined and has not yet become widely current in good speech. We need, however, a word that has more inward depth than altruism usually carries, and perhaps otherism will eventually take that vacant place.
Not merely in these days of war, but in all our human relations all the time we greatly need to get the interior vision which enables us to understand from within those with whom we live and work. Nobody sees life correctly until he has corrected his own views by a true appreciation of the views of others. From the outside it is impossible to estimate any life fairly. We have long ago learned that we can get no true account of any historical character unless we have a historian who can put himself in the place of the person he is describing. He must have imagination and be able to see clearly the conditions and forces, the influences and the atmosphere in which the man lived. The problems which he had to deal with, the conceptions which governed men’s thoughts when he lived—all these must be understood, before we can get any estimate of the man himself. The same sort of imagination is necessary to judge the person who lives next door. We dare not pronounce upon him until we know all that he has to face. If we could once feel his quivering spirit and could see his inward struggles, we could not set up our private tribunal and pass our cold individual judgment upon him. The real remedy for this hard critical spirit which breaks society up into independent units is the spirit of love, the spirit of otherism.
The moment we put ourselves in the place of others, and pronounce no judgment upon persons until we have seen all the circumstances of their life, a new state of things at once appears. Genuine sympathy, clear interior insight into the personality of others, immediately creates a new world. The trouble too often is that we see all the defects in others and forget our own. We want to take the mote out of another person’s eye while all the time there is a whole fence rail in our own. Christ’s rule is to make oneself perfect before one goes to correcting others. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
There is another situation also which would be remedied if we learned to put ourselves in the other person’s place—if we had the spirit of otherism. Christ sums it up in the proverb about casting pearls before swine, i.e. giving what is a misfit. Many of our well-meant charities are of this sort. We blunder in our efforts to help poor needy people, because we do not get their point of view. We do not live our way into their lives. There is no fit between our gift and their need. They get a stone for bread.
The same thing happens in much of our public speaking. Many persons have the barbarous habit of never imagining the listeners’ point of view. They go on speaking as unconscious of the condition confronting them as the hose pipe is when the water is turned on. The remedy again is otherism. It is impossible to help anybody with a message until you can in some measure share his life.
“The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
In whatso we share with another’s need.”
This teaching is all summed up in the golden rule, “All things that ye would that men should do unto you do ye also unto them.” It is clear at once that to do this one must cultivate both his spirit of love and his power of imagination. It is never enough to want to help a person. We must put ourself in his place and be able to do what really will help him. It would appear, therefore, that the most difficult and at the same time the most heavenly attainment in the world is sympathy—the spirit of otherism.