Fear of the Other
The Ottawa Citizen - Jul 26, 2006
Don Sawyer
About a year ago, I took a taxi from downtown Ottawa to the train station. My driver was a Lebanese-Canadian, and we chatted pleasantly about his favourite Lebanese restaurants as we drove through the city.
I noticed a cross hanging from his rear-view mirror. "So," I commented, "I see you are a Lebanese Christian."
His voice cooled: "All real Lebanese are Christians," he said.
"Really?" I asked in some confusion. "I thought most Lebanese were Muslims."
"The Muslim Arabs invaded us in the 900s," my driver replied in the same cold tone. "They pushed us south into the mountains."
I did some quick calculating. "But that was more than 1,000 years ago! Surely it's time to let that one go."
I could almost see his back stiffen against the seat. "We will never forget," he said fiercely."My father showed me where our land was, and his father showed him. I will show my son. We will never forget."
I stared out the window at the very Canadian landscape. I remembered a workshop I had attended many years before, given by a leading multicultural proponent, Jack Kehoe. Jack (who always said "multiculturalism is a descriptor, not a policy") took a kind of applied cultural relativism approach in his training, alerting us to cultural differences we might encounter and how to accommodate them.
Toward the end of the session, one woman raised her hand. "Dr. Kehoe," she asked, a trace of exasperation in her voice, "isn't there anything we should ask immigrants to do to better join mainstream Canada?"
Jack thought for a few moments. "Yes," he said at last."Yes, there is. We can ask them to leave their old hatreds at the door."
As we've seen in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, as well as Rwanda and Nigeria, tribal ties don't die easily. Perhaps, as some suggest, this is the result of thousands of years of "fearing the other" as a survival strategy. Perhaps it's due to the hasty tossing together of a global cultural salad we are neither prepared for nor willing to adjust to. Ancient hatreds along racial, religious, cultural, national and tribal lines fuel appalling attacks in every corner of the globe.
As Canadians, we are quite rightly proud of our relative success in creating a working multicultural society. One advantage we have, of course, is that the Canadian tribe, unlike the Dutch, Swedish or Yoruba, just isn't that old or homogeneous. We have a harder time defining a single group as "real" Canadians and everyone else as "the other."
But will that last? We are already seeing gangs forming along ethnic lines in many parts of the country. Unlike their grandparents, third- and fourth-generation visible minorities, still feeling like -- and being treated as -- outsiders, are less willing to assimilate at any cost. As Canadian society in general becomes more complex, confusing and atomized, there is a growing tendency to seek out a "community" of like-minded people, often to the exclusion of others.
This is a worldwide phenomenon. But whether the issue is local, national or global, the solutions remain elusive, difficult, little discussed -- and absolutely essential to our survival. The "old hatreds" Jack Kehoe spoke of are in all of us. They are the momentary flinching when we see a group of Caribbean youths walking toward us on the sidewalk. They are the slight shaking of our heads when we see pictures of a gay marriage. They are the vague sense that that families up ahead with the men wearing turbans are somehow just visiting. They're the unacknowledged sense of trepidation as houses in our neighbourhood are bought by people who don't look quite like we do. They're the relief, the comfort we feel when we hunker down in our churches, mosques or synagogues. When we visit our cultural clubs. When we seek out neighbourhoods, or even towns, where we are in the majority.
They are, quite simply, that old "fear of the other."
But the truth is these divides, if they ever did serve a useful function, are obsolete.
The desperate clinging to tribal identities is understandable in a world characterized by the dizzying exposure to all kings of different things and people, but they are counterproductive in today's global society -- and in today's Canada. Whether the hatred is for Arabs who invaded 1,000 years ago, or for the Jewish family that just moved in down the street, we can no longer afford these fears, this bigotry (a term probably first applied to invading Vikings by the French some 1,200 years ago) and have any hope for national or global peace.
It won't be easy. As an anthropologist commented on CBC a few years ago, "Those tribes who saw strangers and said, 'Look, new friends; let's invite them to dinner' are probably no longer in the gene pool." Over the centuries, we have self-selected for intolerance, suspicion and distrust of those different from ourselves.
If we're going to make it as the human tribe we really are, we've got a lot of evolving to do in a short time.
Don Sawyer is a writer and educator living in Salmon Arm, B.C.Print (Microsoft Word Document)
