Puzzling Ethnicity

The most certain prediction that we can make about almost any modern society is that it will be more diverse a generation from now than it is today.
— Robert Putnam, E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century

A better world can be imagined, and, if for no other reason than to provide hope, our best thinkers must continue to conjure paths that lead us out of war and away from societal collapse, tribalism, or the final triumph of oligopolies. Iraq, Afghanistan, global warming, massive wealth disparities: there is rotten news everywhere, it seems. But thoughtful ways out cannot be oriented purely to the avoidance of this or that calamity; for sacrifices to be accepted and aspirations to blossom, people must feel they are building a more purposeful tomorrow, not just forestalling the end.

As it happened, the last great moment of hope, the ushering in of a new world order in 1989 after the collapse of Communism, turned into an aborted beginning of a millennial project. After twelve short years, the curtains were drawn on the practice of allowing national governments to sequester themselves in dark and increasingly insignificant talk shops, as markets expanded and capital and brand awareness went global. The incendiary events of September 11, 2001, struck fear in the heart of our commons, and everything changed. During the breathless months that followed, we lurched clumsily, reacted with haste, and looked to national governments for guidance, for a way out of the discontinuity.

Some became merchants of fear, their prescriptions reductionist, and, in the case of the Bush White House, the track record will remain a halting, imperial stain on a great republic. While Ottawa responded with questionable anti-terrorism legislation and security crackdowns, in the rest of Canada there was greater pause, and a somewhat comforting lack of certainty. The world had become difficult to understand, wars asymmetric, fail-safe approaches anything but ordained, and while discussion and debate was hardly a soothing balm it did temper the gathering storm.

I sense now, however, that we have forgotten those uneasy but more reflective years — roughly from the spring of 2002 to the beginning of 2004 — and have sunk into concerns of a more parochial nature and gossipy chit-chat about politicians and their questionable intents. We have allowed the temporal to overtake us, and have left clarion calls for purposeful government by the side of the road, and we are now in danger of thinking without analysis, of accepting government proclamations as resonant when they clearly are not.

I am not thinking here about Canada’s role in Afghanistan, which, while disputed, has a momentum of its own — and the decision-makers remain unchecked. Nor am I pondering one or another social program, contested or not, or how the taxation pendulum is swinging. Rather, I am considering our collective response to a phenomenon that has crept up on us (not unlike global warming), and to which we have paid too little attention for too long: the essential challenge posed by ever-increasing ethnic diversity.

We have colourful festivals, to be sure, but beneath them lurks a question: how can I embrace the other when his values might be hostile to my own?

Measured, contemplative, and based on solid empirical evidence, Robert Putnam’s E Pluribus Unum is a cautionary report about our ability to get along with those outside our own tribes. The Harvard sociologist and political scientist — and recent winner of the prestigious Johan Skytte Prize — is resolutely in favour of immigration, the main driver of cresting diversity, but, he maintains, in the short and medium term there will be trouble. Indeed, Putnam finds that most forms of social capital — volunteerism, basic trust, electoral engagement, a commitment to the very institutions upon which communities are based — suffer when local populations become more heterogeneous, when streetscapes become mixed and the smells and odours and skin colours suggest alien others in “our” midst.

Of course, as Putnam’s research is rooted in forty-one American communities, Canadian nationalists of a certain persuasion will be quick to dismiss his thesis as telling about the US but not pertinent here. In so doing, these purveyors of Canadian exceptionalism make a category mistake: multiculturalism as a government proclamation or a stated goal — customarily announced as a mark of distinction from the arrogant melting-pot insistence of the US — is just that, a hope or an ideology that might diverge demonstrably from what is happening on our streets. National borders, after all, are artificial constructs; people, whether black, white, or Asian, are not. We are made of flesh, blood, and bone, and wherever we reside, we require a sense of belonging. We are finding this in Canada, but mostly and increasingly among our own kind.

While there is talk of the gradual browning of modern societies, and racial harmony as creative miscegenation takes hold — with evidence of its happening on university campuses, for instance — there is a parallel development that may extend Putnam’s short and medium term to longer, more intractable realities.