Conversation Companions

“Now boarding rows twenty-five through thirty.”

I put on my sweater, pulled on my coat, slipped my “purse” on backwards so it was across my chess, and hoisted my slightly-over-the-legal-size-for-carry-ons backpack onto my back. I breathed slightly easier after my boarding pass had been scanned and I was on the plane. It would have been really inconvenient to have to leave something behind because I had packed my backpack so tightly. I made it down the aisle without clobbering anyone with it, found my seat, and shoved the stowaway into the overhead compartment.

The window seat was already occupied by an Indian man in his mid-60s who greeted me by saying, “Well, I’m glad you’re not 300 lbs.”

It took me a brief moment to regain my composure and see his comment as an invitation to converse. So I told him about the question of whether it was ethical to charge obese people more for their plane tickets (since they take up more than their allotted seat space), which was one of the cases that I discussed last semester in Ethics Bowl. He then told me about his 110 lb. daughter, who invariably gets seated next to a 300 lb. man who takes up half of her seat in addition to his own. Once he tried to get her to move to another open seat, but she refused to go because she didn’t want to hurt the man’s feelings. He thought that was very admirable of her, and I had to agree. I’m not sure I would have done the same in her situation.

In the next few minutes I found out that he was an electrical engineer who lives in a suburb of Chicago and tests equipment for Case (sometimes in -10 ˚F) and was traveling to visit family in Bangalore for two weeks. When he learned that I was headed for Egypt he told me that he thought it was a very good idea for me to go now, since given the increase of fundamentalism it’s uncertain how much longer Egypt will be open to Westerners. That launched him into a lengthy conversation (which was essentially a monologue, but a very interesting one at that) about the political scene in the Middle East.

To hear him tell it, within the past thirty years or so Saudi Arabia has used some of the billions of dollars that it receives by selling its oil to the West (primarily the U.S.A.) as donations to fund madrasas (aka “schools”) in poor areas of (mainly) Afghanistan and Pakistan. But rather than a standard curriculum, these schools teach the Saudi brand of Islamic fundamentalism, which includes a strong hatred of the West. These donations are also given to mosques, along with a list of stipulations regarding which clerics are to speak and what is to be taught by the mosque.

Our conversation was periodically interrupted by announcements from the pilot to explain the reason for the delay of our departure. About fifteen to twenty passengers were being detained for additional security screenings. The pilot didn’t tell us this, but the additional security was put in place because of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to blow up Northwest/Delta Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day (just four days earlier).

I wasn’t bothered, though. We returned to our conversation and the time passed quickly. Shradir, the electrical engineer, was convinced that if the U.S. had anticipated that the Saudis would do this, it could have invested a fraction of the money that it has spent on its military actions in the Middle East on developing schools which taught standard curriculum, and avoided much of the current political turmoil. But since we cannot go back in time, the next best thing is to reduce the amount of money that the U.S. sends to the Middle East by developing alternative energy sources so we are less dependent on oil.

About 40 minutes later the delayed passengers were allowed to board the plane. One was the African American woman who sat right behind me because she was “so relieved” to be on the plane that she didn’t care if she didn’t get the window seat that was rightfully hers. The window seat had been filled by the college student who was traveling to Accra, Ghana to study Ghanaian literature for her Honors Thesis. The Indian man who was to be my seat companion had to put his carry on in the overhead luggage compartments in business class, probably because my backpack had taken up more than its fair share of space above our heads. The plane took off shortly after that. Shradir hypothesized that our seat companion had been detained because he had a Muslim last name. Some may call it discrimination, but Shradir called it common sense to scrutinize more closely those who are statistically a greater threat.

I found out later that my seat companion, Nashinth, was a second-year master’s student studying electrical engineering at UNC Charlotte and was two months away from finishing his thesis on a better way to stabilize semi tractor trailers (which he said are the most unstable vehicles on the road today). He was on his way to spend a month with his family in central India, about 2 hours east of Mumbai. When he found out that I was doing my undergraduate degree in Spanish and Philosophy, he asked me a question that he said has always intrigued him about those who study the humanities: “What do you plan to do with your degree?” It was funny for me to consider what he might have thought of me for spending at least four years of my life studying something when it was unlikely to prepare me for a job. He has a point: I admitted that studying Philosophy didn’t train me for any specific career in the way that his education did. I told him that if eventually I wanted to get a job directly related to Philosophy, I would likely get my Ph.D. and teach it. He seemed to gravitate toward that idea because it was concrete. Actually, right now I think I’ll most likely teach English somewhere in the world (probably not the U.S.) for at least a year or two after I complete my bachelor’s and before I consider graduate school and more long-term plans.

Nashinth did see value in studying the humanities, because he said that he would have studied history if given the chance. He was very interested in the history of the development of languages, and saw the Australian accent as a perfect test case, since it developed within the last two hundred years. When he learned that I was going on to study in Spain for the spring semester he started to tell me about the relationships between European languages. I listened to him talk about how “Aladdin” was translated into six different European languages for a few minutes before I realized that he was talking about how the Romance languages were all descendents of “Latin.”

When dinner arrived to the economy section of the flight, they only had beef meals left. Shradir set aside his cultural Hinduism and ate it, but Nashinth was unwilling to do so. There was something wrong with the vegetarian meal that they brought him, so he ended up with some seafood from first class, which he liked very much. By the smell of it I think I would have too.

My conversation with Shradir about reducing the amount of U.S. oil money that is used to fund extremism led to a lengthy discussion about the environment and global warming. After he found out that I attend a Christian university he was particularly interested in the Church’s stance on the environment. I told him that there are those who try to justify not protecting the environment by appealing to God’s special favor for humanity and his sovereignty. But I identify more with a quotation that I saw on Dr. Guebert’s door in the Randall Environmental Science center at Taylor, “If we really believed that it was His world, shouldn’t we be taking better care of it?” Shradir liked that, because as a “man of science,” he seemed to think that religion was useful primarily as a means of influencing people toward doing things here on earth. He retained some of his background as a cultural Hindu, but said he liked to keep an open mind and intentionally never shoved his beliefs down someone else’s throat.

He was a skeptic of all religious claims, he said, because they cannot be proven in the same way as scientific propositions. He admitted that science is not infallible, but still sees it as the best way to know things, since its theories are continually revised. It’s simply not possible to know for certain what, if anything, is ultimately “out there.” Since we simply cannot know what Moses smoked before he went up the mountain and “heard from God,” the Ten Commandments are best understood as a window into a historical culture rather than divinely authoritative laws. (He did apologize for that after he found out that I was a Christian, by the way. But I told him that I wasn’t offended, but was rather curious to hear his opinion.)

I’ve heard enough chapel speakers tell stories about their experiences sharing the gospel with their seat companions that that was probably on my mind, but I was more interested in talking to an interesting person and passing the time. So I dug into my mental Metaphysics and Principles of Ethics course files and pulled out some comments about the significance of realism and the question of whether there is objective truth to his argument for religious relativism. “If there is objective truth and religions make contradictory claims, then it’s simply not possible for both of them to be correct,” I wagered. “That doesn’t mean that one religion has it all correct, but it does mean that it’s not enough to say that because we can’t know for sure which is closest to the truth, all religions are equally valid.” He seemed to agree, but didn’t say much in response.

He mentioned how we tend to look condescendingly on the religious beliefs of the Greeks and the Romans, because we think we now “know better.” But how do we know that our religious beliefs are “superior” (he used the quotation marks) to theirs? How do we know that monotheism is “superior” to polytheism? I thought that was a rhetorical question, but he sat there waiting for an answer. So I prefaced my answer with a disclaimer that I hadn’t formulated it very well, and said something about how a plurality of deities seems to me to be a less satisfactory answer of ultimate origins, especially if they are thought to proliferate. I also said something about how the imperfect gods of polytheism seem to be a less suitable explanation for the origin of morality. He nodded, but seemed more pleased with my uncertainty than with my answer. Perhaps rightly so.

From there the conversation shifted to cosmology and the question of ultimate origins. We talked about the idea that it all began from a gravitational singularity which exploded with the Big Bang, the development of the planets from the condensation of gasses rotating around the sun, and geological evidence for the age of the earth. I snuck in some Taylor lingo about the “Integration of Faith and Learning” and Dr. Kesler’s “All Truth is God’s Truth” by emphasizing the importance of seeking truth in all spheres. It doesn’t make sense if one’s religion requires one to view the world through blinders which limit one from seeking to understand all aspects of the world. If there is truth, truth is truth, regardless of how it is discovered. He seemed to agree with that too. Or at least he didn’t disagree.

Then we talked about the Multiverse, which explains the incredibly improbable fine tuning of the universe by supposing that our universe is one among many other parallel universes in which the physical laws are different from our own. (The idea is that if there are many universes, it’s not as improbable that ours could have come to exist by chance.) His interest in it had been piqued by the most recent edition of Scientific American, whose cover article purportedly presents some scientific evidence for these alternative universes. That was news to me, since I’ve only discussed the Multiverse as a philosophical idea. But even if there is evidence for the Multiverse (which I can’t fairly comment on, since I haven’t read the article), the proof of its existence is far from conclusive. So where does that leave us?

Well, for Shradir, it left him right about where he started: as a scientific man, a skeptic. And for me? That’s more difficult for me to say. I still think that God is the best answer for the ultimate origin of everything, whether that be one universe or many. But that’s not the sort of thing that I think you can prove philosophically. In reflecting on the conversation I’ve realized several things that I could have said. I wish I had talked more about Jesus and that which occurred in history. I wish I had talked about the witness of personal experience, and perhaps even shared some of my testimony. But I’m not convinced that I “should” have done those things. The conversation went well, I learned a lot, and I think he did to.

I hardly slept at all on the plane. I think I might have slept once for about five minutes, because I startled myself awake from a dream about touching a stovetop by suddenly retracting my right hand from the hand rest. By the time I gave up on sleeping it was midnight CST and nearly breakfast time. Our plane landed in London about an hour later, at 7:15 am local time. But then we had to wait for a staircase so we could disembark, because the first one that we were to use was broken. While we waited the one year-old two rows in front of us was holding emptied her stomach-full of milk onto her dad and the family tried to wipe down his jacket with baby wipes.
Nashinth playfully turned up his nose at the smell and Shradir turned to me and said “You know, you have the gift of disagreeing without being disagreeable. I wish more people could do that.” I thanked him, and we talked a bit about the influence of talk radio stations on people’s ability to discuss civilly.

When it was time to get off the plane at about eight o’clock I shouldered my oversized carry-on, bid farewell to Shradir, and stepped out into a rainy London morning. But when we got off the bus at Terminal 5, I met both Shradir and Nashinth again. As we rode up the escalator together Shradir talked about the beauty of Heathrow’s new (as of 2007) Terminal 5. He was probably right that I should have been running ahead in order to catch my flight for Cairo (which left from Terminal 1 at 9:15 am, but I wasn’t interested in running or in leaving my companions any earlier than necessary. But soon we arrived at my escalator, so I turned and waved good-bye. As I rode down to wait for the bus to Terminal 1 I couldn’t help thanking God that I had switched my seat to 29G the night before on Grandma’s computer.