I am sitting in a panel discussion in a tiered hall at the University of Toronto whose theme is Pico Iyer’s ecstatic tribute to multicultural Toronto in The Global Soul. At one end of the long table, with its microphones, its demoralizingly polite allotment of bottled water, is Pico himself, who interrupted a sojourn to a monastery in Santa Barbara, California, just to come to Toronto, sprite-like and preternaturally young in his pressed grey suit despite his legendary jet-lag. In between is a buttoned-up, Hong Kong born political scientist, vaguely embarrassed for having sported a green tie; a university research chair in film and media who has an off-hand casualness born of familiarity with the avant garde; an afro-Canadian performance artist; and a moderator from Bombay who had reported on the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide for a newspaper in Singapore. The global soul, wounded and encompassing, encapsulated.

When not commending Torontonians and Canadians in general for not indulging in what was comfortingly supposed to be the rank ignorance, racism, and divisiveness that has defined the United States in the wake of September 11, 2001, discussion centered on how Canadian institutions can and should facilitate diversity and understanding. After all, there is little reason for ordinary Canadians, whether in Toronto or Rimouski or Saskatoon or Red Deer, not to know the basics of the core cultural and religious beliefs of immigrants from Congo, Yemen, or Albania. Yet I found myself, surveying an audience as diverse as the panel, bristling and uneasy. When it was my turn to speak, I acknowledged, immediately that in fact I found Pico’s celebratory account of the fluidity of cultures in Toronto naïve and annoying. An American who grew up in rough, complicated neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and lived on New York’s Lower East Side and then Brooklyn for more than a decade, I had always understood cultural difference in terms of conflict — an Iranian Shiite’s view of the world is fundamentally different from that of, say, a Hasidic Jew in Montreal or a Hindu in South India, in ways that thin, anecdotal cultural knowledge is most likely powerless to translate or bridge.

Then suddenly, binging on bottled water, squinting out at the smattering of graduate students, twitching and scowling with the moral exuberance and rage of small-town preachers, it suddenly struck me that the premises upon which I had been operating when thinking about “culture, “diversity,” and the “global soul” no longer make sense in the twenty-first century. I remembered a comment of the great philosopher Donald Davidson made to me, that “there is no such thing as language, only sounds and the interpretation of sounds,” and it occurred to me that now, for us, there is no such thing as “culture” or “heritage,” but only an intricate and fluid web of causalities, the sum of our intimate encounters as neighbors, as people who share restaurants, street cars, and streets, which cannot be codified into anything other than themselves. Maybe we have to give up the idea of culture, and of history as something ponderous and inflexible; maybe we need to acknowledge and think about what we already know: that looking at the faces and into the eyes of others — the Chinese peasants who are my neighbors, the orthodox chomer of the Minsker synagogue, the skeletal, crack-addled prostitutes trolling alleys — provides a deeper and more important form of knowledge than any quick course on cultural diversity could ever provide. Maybe we don’t create cultures any more, only vortexes of interrelations; and maybe that is a moral achievement.

Daniel Baird
Arts & Literature Editor, The Walrus

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Posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 10:29 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.