Why We Need the Other

Last week, Pauline Hanson used her inaugural address at the National Press Club to call for Australia to become a “monocultural society,” whatever that means. When asked, Liberal party leader Angus Taylor could not even confirm that he supported multiculturalism. What is going on?

Into this bizarre discourse, Korean/German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has something important to say: modern society is gradually losing what he calls the Other. By “the Other,” he doesn’t simply mean other people. He means everything that stands outside ourselves, people who think differently, cultures unlike our own, ideas that challenge us, and ultimately anything that resists our preferences. Healthy human life depends on encountering genuine otherness. We grow when we meet people who surprise us, disagree with us, and force us to see the world differently. Love, friendship, learning, and even faith all require us to move beyond ourselves.

Han’s 2016 book, The Expulsion of the Other, traces this loss with precision. Contemporary society has undergone a fundamental shift. On one side was a world structured by the friction of genuine difference, the resistance of what is foreign, the challenge of the Other. On the other is a smooth, frictionless space dominated by the Same. Where older societies were threatened by infection from outside, ours suffers from something more like obesity: an excess of the familiar. And unlike an infection, which triggers an immune response, this excess produces no antibodies. It simply accumulates until we are too heavy to move.

The Ego Loop

Technology has accelerated this flight from otherness dramatically. Social media algorithms show us content we already enjoy. News feeds reinforce existing opinions. Streaming services recommend what we have already watched. Our digital world increasingly reflects ourselves back to us.

Han calls this the “ego loop.” Digital media draw us into an endless cycle of self-reflection, a kind of auto-propaganda in which we indoctrinate ourselves with our own ideas. Digital communication eliminates distance, but the abolition of distance does not create closeness. It creates what Han calls “gaplessness,” a condition in which the aura and enigma of the Other are destroyed. We begin to mistake our own preferences for reality. People who disagree become irritating rather than interesting. Political opponents become enemies rather than neighbours. Conversations grow harder because we have lost the habit of listening to views we do not already share.

This goes deeper than politics or social media. Modern culture shapes how we think about life itself. We are encouraged to ask, “What works for me?” or “What suits my identity?” The self becomes the measure of all things. Otherness is gradually domesticated until nothing truly interrupts us anymore. The result, Han argues, is not freedom but exhaustion. Ironically, this leaves us lonely. Real relationships require difference. Friendship exists because another person brings something we do not possess. Every meaningful relationship involves receiving something from outside ourselves.

Said’s Warning: The Other We Invented

Han’s diagnosis of modernity has a crucial historical antecedent. When I was studying postcolonial history, a book that really influenced me was Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979). Said argued that the West had not simply neglected or misunderstood the cultures of the East. It had systematically constructed them, producing a fictional “Orient” that said far more about Western desires, anxieties, and will to power than it ever did about actual people living in Egypt, India, or the Middle East. He called this construction Orientalism: a body of scholarship, imagery, and institutional practice through which European culture managed, domesticated, and ultimately dominated the Other.

For Said, the Other was never truly encountered. It was invented. British administrators like Lord Cromer in Egypt described the “Oriental mind” as irrational, childlike, and given to intrigue, not because they had listened carefully to the people they governed, but because they had read it in books written by other Westerners who had read it in earlier books. The Orient became what Said called a “textual universe,” a self-reinforcing archive of projections that insulated Western knowledge from any challenge by actual Oriental reality. Knowledge, Said showed, was not innocent. It was an instrument of power.

Read alongside Han, Said’s work illuminates a fascinating and troubling paradox. Han worries that we are expelling the Other, eliminating difference until we live inside a frictionless bubble of the Same. Said shows that the West has historically done something subtly different: it retained the category of the Other but filled it with a projection of its own fears and fantasies (like the One Nation immigration policies). The Other was not encountered; it was manufactured. In both cases, genuine otherness is destroyed. Han’s West smooths the Other away. Said’s West domesticates the Other by defining it on Western terms, granting itself what Said called “flexible positional superiority” in every encounter.

There is a direct line from Said’s colonial archive to Han’s ego loop. The Orientalist scholar who never looks up from his books is the nineteenth-century version of the social media user who never steps outside their algorithm. Both encounter only a mirror. Both mistake their own reflection for reality. The mechanisms differ; the structure is identical.

A Christian Reading

From a Christian perspective, both Han and Said are illuminating. The gospel begins with an encounter with the ultimate Other, God himself. Scripture consistently calls people out of themselves and into relationship with the God who is wholly other yet wonderfully near. We do not invent God according to our preferences; rather, God confronts, challenges, comforts, and transforms us. This is precisely the structure both thinkers are gesturing toward: an encounter that cannot be domesticated, that interrupts the ego loop, that shatters the textual universe we have built around ourselves.

Said’s critique should also unsettle the church historically. The colonial Christianity he observed was often deeply Orientalist: it arrived with the assumption that it already knew the Other, that the missionary’s culture was naturally superior, that the “native” must be civilised before being truly Christian. That is the opposite of the gospel. Jesus did not manage the Other from a position of positional superiority. He became the Other, taking on flesh, entering a particular culture, speaking a particular language, dying as an outsider. Where Han calls for Eros and Said calls for genuine encounter that refuses projection, the New Testament calls it incarnation.

Han’s greatest warning is that when we lose otherness, we lose our capacity to be changed. He puts it bluntly: “to have an experience of something means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. Its essence is pain.” Said would add: and we must be honest about the ways we have historically avoided that pain by turning the Other into a manageable object of knowledge. Every significant moment of growth begins when we allow someone genuinely outside ourselves to speak, on their own terms, into our lives.

The Wrong Question

The Canberra debate, for all its noise, is asking the wrong question. The real threat to Australian life is not too much difference or too little diversity. It is our collective flight from genuine otherness. Whether we are curating our social media feeds, choosing friends who think exactly like us, or dreaming of a monoculture where no one challenges our assumptions, we are all capable of the same mistake. And Said reminds us of an older, harder version of the same temptation: the impulse not just to avoid the Other but to define them, to speak for them, to ensure they can never truly surprise us.

Jesus told a story about a man beaten on the road to Jericho and made the hero a Samaritan, the one person his audience least wanted to identify with. He ate with tax collectors, spoke with Samaritan women, welcomed children, healed the servants of Roman soldiers, and consistently crossed every boundary that everyone else accepted. His ministry was one long refusal of both impulses Said and Han describe: the impulse to project, and the impulse to erase. “Love your neighbour,” he said, and when asked who that meant, he deliberately chose someone his listeners would rather have avoided.

So What About Us?

At Merri Creek, are we genuinely becoming the kind of church where the Other is welcomed? Or are we subtly erasing difference? Do our closest friendships mostly consist of people our own age, education level, politics, or stage of life? Are newcomers expected to become like us before they truly belong? Do we make room for awkward people, difficult people, lonely people, people who vote differently, people from different cultures, or people whose life story is very different from our own?

And do we listen? Not just hear. Han calls listening a “temporal revolution”: the act of giving the time of the other, of entering their world rather than requiring them to enter ours. Said might frame the same challenge like this: do we let the Other speak for themselves, or do we keep doing the speaking for them? Do we give people that kind of hospitality? Or do we wait for a pause in the conversation so we can return to our own story?

The gospel does not simply reconcile us to God; it reconciles us to one another. Christ has brought together people who would never naturally choose each other and made them one family. A healthy church should be one of the few places in our society where genuine otherness is not erased and not domesticated, but truly embraced. If our church never stretches us, never surprises us, never forces us to love across difference, then perhaps we too have begun to lose the Other. And if that is true, we are not just missing diversity. We are missing one of the very ways God intends to make us more like Christ.