EXCERPT We will encounter the names of many philosophers and thinkers in the pages that follow. There is a common characteristic among so-called ‘liberal intellectuals’ of the humanist tradition over the past seventy years or so, both those that I mention in this book and those I do not: they have all deployed various types of rhetoric and logic in telling us to ‘respect the Other’. Of course, if we look closely, there are numerous differences as to how they understand ‘the Other’. For example, the German Jürgen Habermas said that the concept of the Other proposed by the French Derrida is far too abstract, while the American Richard Rorty argued that such a debate itself obscures the true Other. Still, we can say that all of the influential thinkers agree on one point: that we should all regard others, and those outside of the community, with respect. This was likely an ethic that emerged as the lowest common denominator from a humanity that had produced a harrowing number of deaths through the consecutive wars brought on by the rise of nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. We simply cannot continue to think only of our own country—until recently this has been the basic principle of human society (at least, the one that can be spoken about in public). However, this situation is changing rapidly. People are no longer so receptive to the simple imperative to ‘respect the Other’. I do not deal with concrete political situations very much in this book, but I would like readers to keep in mind that it was written between 2016 and 2017, a period during which England decided to leave the EU, Donald Trump rose to the US Presidency campaigning on ‘America First’, and Japan was engulfed in a storm of hate speech. By 2017, people were beginning to cry out: ‘We are tired of being with others’. They were beginning to say that they want to start by thinking of themselves and their own countries. The liberal message that the Other must be respected was no longer reaching anyone. This is why I want to venture a theory of the ‘tourist’ instead of a theory of the Other. From here on, I will seldom use the word ‘Other’, as it is weighed down by too much baggage. As soon as I invoke the Other, I will lose a significant number of readers as the arguments of this book become assimilated into a particular ideology. Still, the issue that I am exploring here is ultimately that of the Other. And this is a strategy of sorts on my part. By using the word ‘tourist’ instead, I hope to speak to those who insist that they are tired of being with others—that they just want to be with their friends, and are sick of being told to respect others—and ask them: But don’t you enjoy being a tourist? I would like to use that question as an entry point to drag them through the back door into the liberal imperative to ‘respect the Other’ once again. The aim of this book, then, is to imagine a new philosophy (of the Other) that begins with the tourist. …