"As is evident just from the look on his face," observes The New Yorker in a recent reflection on the Lincoln Memorial, "[Lincoln] would have liked to live out a long life surrounded by old friends and good food." Good food? New Yorker readers have an interest in successful soufflés, but it is hard to recall the most melancholy and spiritual of Presidents giving them much thought. New Yorker editors no doubt dream of living out their days grazing in gourmet pastures. But did Lincoln really long to retire to a table at Lutéce?
Solipsism is the belief that the whole world is me, and as Mathematician Martin Gardner points out, its authentic version is not to be found outside mental institutions. What is to be found outside the asylum is its philosophic cousin, the belief that the whole world is like me. This species of solipsism—plural solipsism, if you like—is far more common because it is far less lonely. Indeed, it yields a very congenial world populated exclusively by creatures of one's own likeness, a world in which Lincoln pines for his dinner with André or, more consequentially, where KGB chiefs and Iranian ayatullahs are, well, folks just like us.
The mirror-image fantasy is not as crazy as it seems. Fundamentally, it is a radical denial of the otherness of others. Or to put it another way, a blinding belief in "common humanity," in the triumph of human commonality over human differences. It is a creed rarely fully embraced (it has a disquieting affinity with martyrdom), but in a culture tired of such ancient distinctions as that between children and adults (in contemporary movies the kids are, if anything, wiser than their parents) or men and women ("I was a better man as a woman with a woman than I've ever been as a man with a woman," says Tootsie), it can acquire considerable force.
Its central axiom is that if one burrows deep enough beneath the Mao jacket, the shapka or the chador, one discovers that people everywhere are essentially the same. American Anthropologist Samantha Smith was invited to Moscow by Yuri Andropov for firsthand confirmation of just that proposition (a rare Soviet concession to the principle of on-site inspection). After a well-photographed sojourn during which she took in a children's festival at a Young Pioneer camp (but was spared the paramilitary training), she got the message: "They're just . . . almost . . . just like us," she announced at her last Moscow press conference. Her mother, who is no longer eleven but makes up for it in open-mindedness, supplied the corollary: "They're just like us . . . they prefer to work at their jobs than to work at war."