On Multiculturalism and Responsibility

Day 22

I once had a thought, a sort of realization about the place that I grew up in, or at least some parts of the culture. I generally grew up in a bit of a ghetto. Or, at least we called it ghetto. After traveling around to some other parts of the county, I started to think that perhaps I lived in a pretty upper-class sort of ghetto. The place where grew up had a lot of poor folk and a lot of kids with one parent. It wasn't the absolute safest part of the county, and I know a few kids who were expelled from school for bringing booze, and a lot who found marijuana at a pretty young age, a few friends that were mugged on the street, one that was robbed at gunpoint in his front yard, and and a lot of homeless people sleeping in the park. For all that though, absent the occasional fight, worrisome school dropout rate, and broken bottles of glass on the sidewalk, the walk home was pretty safe. There were of course areas of town that you didn't wander around while alone at night, but little me never got into any real trouble biking around all round the city during the day. Our town used to be a bit nicer several decades ago during the cold war when there were military bases and rocket testing facilities nearby, with a football team that was one of the better ones in the state, but while I heard, constantly, about how good the team 'was' from the older folk in town, during my four years in high school, we managed to win a grand total of, I think, ten games. Now, my town was also a bit strange in one more way. I didn't realize that this was at all strange growing up of course, because I didn't know any better, but now that I've traveled a bit I realize its a mite weird. See, my town has, traditionally, been one of the places that the government resettled refugees and new immigrant families in. So, there were a lot of languages spoken in my school. Only about half the kids I grew up with had parents that were born in the country. I had a pretty mixed upbringing in this way, and while there were racial and cultural divisions, as a kid growing up I didn't notice a whole lot of them. I've been told by other kids who grew up with me that there were issues, but I'm afraid that I just wasn't that observant as a kid about stuff like that. Regardless, I think that we had fewer problems than a lot of places I've been to since.

This has mostly just been reminiscence so far, but I reminisced for a reason. It turns out that criticism is hard. One of the issues that we grow up dealing with is multiculturalism. On one level multiculturalism is easy to understand and easy to follow – To understand it, in my experience, is just to realize that different people have different values. This is just an offshoot of what we already know about everybody that we deal with. If I want to make my brother mad, then I know what buttons to push. I know how far I can go, and when to stop. I know which of these toys I can mess with and which I cannot mess with. He knows the same about me. Thus, we come to an understanding that we are different people with different ideas about the world and different reactions to stimuli. I've been a vegetarian since I was fourteen, while my brother eats almost nothing but meat and bread. That doesn't mean that meat and bread are bad, or that vegetables are good, but rather that we two are different people that react to different things differently, and have different values. We have different morals, different histories, and different goals. Again, nothing new – we are different people, and anyone growing up with family knows this. Shoot, anyone who has a co-worker knows this, and that some jobs are better done by different people, and some jobs anyone can do, but that you, yourself prefer one aspect of your work over another, or value one things that you get from your work , such as money, self-respect, and enjoyment, above the others. This doesn't mean that you value the other things not at all, but that there is some sort of a balance. In your life you generally reach some sort of equilibrium and mostly live like that. We all change, but change mostly happens very slowly. Catastrophic change is a quality of rather unstable worlds after all. Multiculturalism is this, writ large.

I've found that, generally speaking, people are mostly the same everywhere. There are different personality types, but by and large the thousands of people you met and dealt with growing up encompasses most of these types. Or at least, they are close enough that you can have a conversation with just about anybody without immediately causing mutual hatred or talking past one another to an ultimate extent. We can get along one-on-one, or at least, we can understand each other. You occasionally meet an absolute asshole that you can't stand, but you at least understand that he is an asshole, and what his goals are. Mostly screwing you over in some way, but it isn't like he's a total alien. However, where we do often run into problems is with groups. People do not act the same when they are alone, as they do when they are part of a group. Try talking with just about anybody about their culture or their countries history, and nine times out of ten you can have a decent conversation. You'll disagree, but you can manage to get to the point of agreeing to disagree, as it were. However, try that same talk with a group of people, and you start to have issues. Areas where talk can't be clear because the group won't stand for those ideas for one reason or another. You can also run into issues when trying to get a group to do something. One on one, you can work with just about anybody. But once you get to one-on-many, once you have to start to work with a specific group and work ethic, you can start to have issues that you don't know how to fix. The majority of issues you have with one person you can, if you really want to, iron out in a few conversations, a few drinks, and a few fights. A come-as-you-go, or take-it-or-leave-it situation, where you either put up, shut up, or get out of town. It might not be a satisfactory or a happy conclusion, but you can reach a conclusion of some sort. When it comes to working with another culture however, rather that be on the level going to another country all by yourself, entering a new corporate workplace, going to a out of town college, or talking with a gang on the street, sometimes you can figure out how to solve those problems, and sometimes you can't.

Now, the easiest way to solve most of these problems is honesty. Seriously, it works. In fact, sometimes you need too much honesty. The key is to interact with people on a personal level. This doesn't mean that you learn the names of everybody's kids or their favorite type of ice cream, but rater it means to reveal yourself. It requires a lot of courage to do this, because when I say reveal yourself, what I mean is you reveal yourself to be a giant ignoramus that's really trying. You need to be humble, talk about what you think you understand and what you know you don't get. Indicate that you mean no harm, you're just a sort of giant lost puppy. Occasionally this means you stick your foot in it, and say something that is incredibly insulting, dumb, or condescending. The key is to indicate that you don't mean to do so. I read a book about etiquette once,a whole four hundred pages on the right kind of fork to use or how to address a letter to a duke. I remember almost none of it, except for the essence of the very last page. I haven't been able to find the book since, and I don't remember the last words, but it went something like this: If you forget the right kind of fork to use or how to address a letter to a duke, don't worry. These forms are proper and show respect, but they are only the veneer of politeness. If you treat every human as a human being, then you will never be too far wrong.

This is obviously a version of 'treat people as a mean, not an end'*, but in my experience it's a little more concrete than that. When I said to be honest and confess your ignorance, I don't mean to only do that. After all, we also have pride and for good reason. Not everything you say and understand will be wrong. Not every vision you have of the proper way of things will be disastrous. We are not all fools, and have intelligent brains and plenty of life experience of our own. Take every bit of advice with a grain of salt, and when you think something is wrong, speak up. However, be aware that you can also go wrong. You can, I can, easily be locked into a certain world and a certain vision of how things are and have a devil of a time getting out of that mindset. This isn't, always, because we are idiots. We are sometimes idiots, and sometimes not. Rather, this is because to really consider a new way of thinking is to destabilize the world. It is to, slowly, commit a type of suicide. It is to change who an what we are. Thus, we find ourselves in a sort of balancing act much of the time, a sort of tendency to move in a certain direction and accept certain way of learning and change easier than other ways. I have talked about how important a stable world is, but the instability of the world is often times just as important. I don't mean today that one is more important than the others, but rather that just as we exist between two unknowns, so to do we move in spaces of possibility, spaces that are always changing. Even to walk forward is a type of falling, a way of being out of balance that threatens to make us fall. Even merely standing still is the same sort of thing. Have you ever had to stand at attention or behind a counter for eight hours straight? You sort of get used to it after a while, but we all have our limits and need to sit down sometimes. We rest, but we are almost never completely at rest. Always the hart pumps and the brain thinks. Always our bodies decay and are placed back together again. So to is it with the world, with our very selves.

The method of working with a new group by presenting yourself as a human being works because almost everybody has been in that position before. I would be surprised if you can find me one person who has always known how the world around them worked. Who has never met someone who did not understand, or been in a situation that they knew they did not fully comprehend. We have all been the confused but earnest and well-meaning child in a strange situation, and by showing yourself to be that person, you can connect with just about anybody. This doesn't mean that they'll like you, tell you the truth, or or value you as a person, but they will be able to, just a bit, understand you and where you are at the moment. They begin to trust you, and the only way to gain that trust is honesty. I just said that honesty doesn't mean they'll be nice to you, though most people are kind enough to do so. Remember though, that trust is a two-way street. That is often said in an attempt to show that if you want to earn trust you must act in a trustworthy manner. I also hold this, but I want to point out another direction that the road can go. To the extent that you trust another, to the extent that you understand them, you also need to trust and understand yourself. This isn't easy or comfortable, it isn't something that is always safe, but rather it is the beginning. If you trust somebody, then you also trust yourself. To the extent that you can do one, you can do the other. If you don't trust other people, then you won't get very far on the road to life. If you don't trust yourself, then you will constantly fall off the road. If you don't trust yourself or others, then you won't even be able to find the road. If you feel that something in another culture or of another person is wrong, evil, stupid, lazy, blind, or any number of negative epithets, then trust that you have the right view and opinion of it. Do not accept what somebody else tells you is right or wrong, is proper or effective, is honorable or disgusting, without first running it by yourself and asking yourself if they are right or wrong. At the end of the day, you make the decision, and have the opinion. You alone are judge and jury. This great power, this absolute ability to think and question, to make up your own private mind about the pronouncements of wise men and fools, priests and kings, scientists and politicians, elders and philosophers, comes with a corresponding great responsibility: To also question yourself. You are judge and jury, you are the tester, but you are also the one being tried. “We break and are broken; We test, and are tried”. With the ability to break the world also comes the cost of willing to be broken yourself. We will make mistakes. We will be by turns brilliant and blind, intelligent and ignorant, magnificent and malodorous. If you criticize the world, then since you also are the world, take and judge that criticism with a grain of salt. The world will criticize you in turn, and sometimes the world will be right. It has been said that 'those who lives in a glass house shouldn't throw stones', but we all live in glass houses. Glass worlds.

You want to criticize some other culture or some other persons world? Their way of doing things, their order of values, their goals and personality, their words and actions? Go ahead and do so. Just be aware of two things. One, someone, somewhere, is being an idiot. Always. It might be you, it might not be you, but things will go a lot better for you if you can find out who that idiot is. There are economic and historical reasons for why a thing is the way it is, and if those aren't understood well then not much is going to be done. Things are often 'good' or 'bad' in relation to a goal, and if it isn't clear what the goal is, then most conversations aren't going to go very far. I mean 'idiot' in the old fashioned sense of 'ignorant about a topic'. I say 'idiot' instead of ignorant' because idiot, in the vernacular, has another meaning – stupid. Two, someone, somewhere, is being stupid. Something blindingly obvious wasn't put together, somebody lied because they thought it would be better for them, somebody is being short-sighted, or somebody has something that they thought was a brilliant and original idea. It has been said that a fool will learn things that a wise man never will. Be a fool, but be aware that you are a fool, or else you shall be the fool.

The most foolish things of all to do is to abjure your own will. If you truly do so, and are not just taking the piss, then you are a dead man walking, and I see no need to be polite to you. I live in hope that the rock may wake up and talk to me one day, but until that day, I am also pragmatic and will crush the rock to gravel if need be. We are ultimately responsible for our own actions and opinions. You may not know what you've done, may have helped your enemies and harmed your allies at the end of the day, but you can always say that you tried. We can only control our actions and the effect of our actions to a certain extent, but we always have a rudder on the handle. We can always have our intentions. “Thy will is the very, the only, the only, The solemn event of things; the weakest of hearts defying is stronger than all these Kings”**

* Immanual Kant

** The Kings by Louise Imogen Guiney