A Brief European Perspective on Race and Culture

[Dialectic]

I've recently gotten back in touch with one of my professors from my summer exchange in Europe from a few years ago. He was a business professor who also knew quite a bit about history, sociology, culture, and intellectual academic trends (a rarity among business professors in North America), and speaks and writes German, French, and English all better than most of you. He was one of the finest professors I've ever had the privilege of studying under.

I contacted him about some administrative information I needed about my time on exchange, and we ended up having (to me) a very interesting email correspondence about culture and society, which I'd like to share here. Since the emails are fairly long, I'll break them up one per post. This is also the sort of thing I'd like to see in some of our forums: not necessarily academic or verbose discussion, but well-considered discussion with an effort to expand knowledge and a clear mutual respect (except when cracking jokes or making fun of tastes in clothing, movies, and food).

So we'll begin with an excerpt of his response to my request for information. I apologize in advance if this exchange is not entirely coherent; I've taken out extraneous and personal details. I gave him an update on my life and mentioned some things in which I'm involved, including the exploration of minority self-identity and rights and responsibilities. I'll let the professor take it from here.

*****

I have often been wondering what you were becoming ....

Minority rights and responsibilities is certainly a passionating issue to focus on. And it definitely will grow in importance over the next years and decades. In Europe, the debate has focused too much on the first half of the expression, and now the pendulum is swinging back, especially in the Netherlands (I wonder if you have followed the current discourse there, which I presume will spread over the rest of Western Europe). The most interesting laboratory, as always :-), is France, which due to its egalitarian and unitarian dogma has a hard time acknowledging the very existence of minority communities, and where the religious aspects of quite a few of the minorities concerned puts heavy pressure on the radical separation of church and state and the philosophical principle of "laÔcitÈ" (always unsatisfactorily translated as secularism), which is a pillar of the constitution.

Here at [this school], things are in constant change, which is the nice thing about working in a place like this ... In September, [the school] will open a new (small) centre in Shanghai, but I am not directly concerned by this (it will mainly offer the possibility to some thirty students to follow a Chinese Business Track in their fifth year). Otherwise things are fine ... Concerning research, I will finally publish my book on some sociological aspects of international football

[Dialectic]

And now an excerpt from my response:

*****

I too have often found myself wondering what you and all my [school] mates are up to; when the EU expanded in 2004, I thought often about what you had taught us concerning the complex and monumental nature of the task, and its historical, cultural, and economic significance. I have even mentioned the story you told us concerning the "twin-city" student exchange program between Germany and France, and the emotions that brought up, when discussing European history and the miracle of a (fairly) united Europe ....

I have not been following the discourse concerning minority rights and responsibilities too closely in the Netherlands or Europe ....

I infer from what you're saying that the Netherlands may be somewhat "ahead of the pack" in taking a more balanced view in the minority discourse by emphasizing responsibilities and internal development (i.e. the development of cognitive and moral structures capable of understanding social responsibility and being "worthy" of those rights, in a manner of speaking), along with fair and supportive rights and "external"/systemic change? If so, that is a refreshing thing to hear; am I right to suspect they are taking a great deal of criticism from current "liberal" thinkers as being "conservative," "right-wing," "racist," and the like, or has the reception been warmer?

The same thing has of course happened in North America over the last few decades, creating a "culture of entitlement" in some sub-communities and infecting much of academia with a sort of vicious closed-minded openness, if you will (you may be far more familiar with this trend than I), though this wave of extreme postmodernism is passing. It seems that race, culture, and religion are now at the forefront of public discourse - with issues being routinely broached in news, political debate, comedy, drama, business, and science - which I take to be a very positive thing. Given the massive access to information much of the world now has, the next few decades (and centuries) will be very, very interesting, and my view of the future is fairly optimistic: now that much of the public consciousness has been "sensitized" to issues of culture, colonialism, and absolute vs. relative values, now that various culture and "value spheres" have been sufficiently differentiated, I believe that we will be successful in integrating them into a stable and wider whole, though not without bumps along the way. I will go further and say that rather than seeing any sort of End of History, all we have witnessed so far is the prologue to a far richer, darker, brighter, and more complex world to come.

....

I believe that we are reaching a point where "network-logic" or the capacity for self-reflexive and dialectical reasoning is going to become much more widespread in the population, with all the potential for both pathology and benevolence that that implies.

Would it be fair to say, then, that there has been insufficient differentiation and appreciation for cultural contexts and communities in the general French consciousness? And yes, I quite agree that "secularism" is a terrible translation of "laÔcitÈ"; in fact, I'd say that it's almost a mistranslation of the word, given their vastly different implications of their attitudes toward religion.

Congratulations on getting to the publishing stage of the book! It must be very satisfying seeing a project of this scope come to fruition. Please let me know when it comes out, and whether an English version will be available; I could handle the French, but my reading speed would decrease considerably. I don't remember photos of a football session; if you can find one, I'd definitely like to see it!

[Dialectic]

His subsequent response:

*****

A lot of the issues you address would deserve a long discussion over a glass (or bottle) of wine - preferrably a cabernet franc from the Loire - but as you will imagine, I must unfortunately be somewhat briefer than I would like to. Let me just comment quickly on some of them:

The new discourse on cultural communities:
Your assumptions on how a new discourse on rights AND responsibilities of minorities would be received in Europe are very lucid. In the wake of the murders of politician Pim Fortuyn and director Theo van Gogh - both killed in the street - the Netherlands are indeed "ahead of the pack" as you say in taking a different stance on the integration of ethnic and cultural minorities. To cite just one example, they start to be much stricter on verifying everybody's working knowledge of the Dutch language. It sounds like a minimum requirement to make some efforts to learn the language of your host society, but the very fact that imposing this requirement is actually quite a revolution says a lot about the current status of the so-called liberal discourse. Germany and France are both feeling the same need for change, but are having a much harder time, for very different reasons. In France the dogmas of political philosophy have so far not allowed any intellectual or politician to recognise the very existence of cultural minorities in an unambiguous and official manner. Nicolas Sarkozy - whom I am far from being a supporter of - might be the first one to breach with this obsolete posture and to try and make French society face the obvious. But there are still a lot of lexical taboos in place (as well as a Parisian tradition for intellectual witch-hunting) - quite a pity. In Germany public conscience is still extremely sensitive on protecting minority rights for obvious historical reasons. But even there a prudent re-orientation of the discourse is taking place. What all European societies have in common is their awkwardness in these matters. Contrary to a nation like Canada which is conscious of being the product of immigration they have pretended not to be immigration countries although they of course have been for decades now. It will be more than interesting to follow how European societies are going to deal with these issues in the near future.

Postmodern world:
I am less optimistic than you are - a question of age? - when you derive the hope of a "stable and wider hole" from the information revolution and the massive access to information that more and more citizens have gained. I am not fully certain that man is able to deal with postmodern complexity and I would be more inclined to count on numerous and regular collective backlashes into modern culturalism. Norbert Elias has coined the phrase of the "fossilisation of social habitus", which to me describes very well how human beings, when their well-being would rationally and objectively depend on their capacity to take a further step towards a more abstract form of belonging (call it cosmopolitanism, if you wish), are incapable of taking this step collectively. And the European Union is an excellent testing ground for the evolution of social habitus. It would be great if, as you describe it very pertinently, "the capacity for self-reflexive and dialectical reasoning is going to become much more widespread in the population", but I have very strong doubts about this very capacity.

Football:
I don't think my book will ever be translated into English, and even here in France I am afraid it will be one these confidential outputs of academia that nobody buys and hardly anyone reads. But it was fun writing it and putting various thoughts together in a way to make sense out of precisely these questions of identity, belonging, the need to express them and the way popular culture gives an outlet to these expressions. All the tension between modern and postmodern behaviour patterns are there in this game and the way it is staged, especially in Europe.

And then it's a funny game, always an opportunity to make friends ....

[Dialectic]

And now my latest response, which may or may not be comprehensible:

*****

Haha, yes, a bottle of cabernet franc and a sunny day by the Loire are almost necessities for philosophical and intellectual discourse! Though I have no immediate plans to return to France, the Loire Valley has not seen the last of me, I assure you!

It's interesting that you bring up the requirement to have some working knowledge of the language of the host country. I of course completely agree with this stance; from both a moral and practical standpoint, it is only right and indeed, functional, that one puts in some effort to communicate in at least one host language. [In Canada,] one of the requirements for citizenship (for those under 55) is a working knowledge of one of Canada's two official languages. Now, the country is actually quite relaxed about this, and I can testify that quite a few people get in whose proficiency in English or French is debatable, to say the least, but it's a credit to our legislation that the requirement is there.

I only just found out last year that the U.S. does not have an "official language" per se (of course, the de facto one is English, and you can't sue them for not printing documents in French, as you can in Canada), and that there have been a group of advocates who have spent their lives campaigning against the establishment of an official language, stating that it goes against the fundamental democracy of the U.S. and creates systemic biases against immigrant communities. I was shocked to hear this, as it is insane, and it gave me an appreciation of just how far off the deep end some of these advocates have gone.

I hadn't realized that French society was having trouble even officially recognizing minority communities; what a profound difference there is in this respect compared to the U.S. and Canada, where minority interests and methods of integration (or, in the case of the U.S., assimilation) are discussed and debated daily. And with regard to the European countries' failure to acknowledge the significance of immigration, I would say that is related to the fact that most national identities in the world have not differentiated nationality, race/ethnicity, culture, and indeed, religion. They are all fused into one notion, where, for example, even if I were born and raised in Italy, I could never truly be "Italian," something which has at least been partially overcome in Canada and parts of the US (which is not to say we don't have our own significant problems).

A brief funny story: a few friends and I went to Japan in February 2005 for the wedding of a close friend from highschool. [Sothy], the groom, was of Sri Lankan descent, and the [Noriko], the bride, was Japanese. For some reason, all of Sothy's best friends in highschool were Chinese-Canadian. So here we were in Japan, and wherever we went, people thought that Bruce, Chun, [Lopan], and I (the Chinese friends) were Japanese and expected us to know the language; of course, we knew absolutely nothing, and would turn to Sothy for rough translations whenever he was with us, which confused the Japanese to no end. When they asked us what nationality we were, we would respond "Canada jin," or "Canadian," which they were completely unable to process, even though all we spoke was English, so we would then respond "Chu goku jin" or Chinese, an answer with which they were much more comfortable, though I'm sure they were still a bit mystified by the constant stream of English. You cannot of course be Japanese unless you have Japanese blood, so the idea of nationality being separate from race (and being separate from religion and culture, though all are interconnected, of course) was not a common notion to them.

(And I hear in Eastern Europe if a Chinese person presents a Canadian passport, you are almost guaranteed a more thorough customs interrogation, because, what could we be but some sort of crazy spy?)

I also enjoyed your phrase, "a Parisian tradition for intellectual witch-hunting"! The image of French-Puritan professors chasing down wayward academics entertains me.

Haha, I of course completely understand why your outlook for the future, and for the cognitive/ moral development of the species is perhaps not as positive as I painted it; I'm not saying that greater and greater enlightenment is guaranteed in any way, and there may be massive regressive bouts here and there (look at the U.S.), but I think it's at least possible, though it will take centuries. The internet itself brings with it its own potentials for growth and pathology; one phenomenon I find interesting and frightening is its capacity to bring together very screwed up people from all over the world (witness the Japanese "suicide forums" or any sort of racist communities) who can then reinforce each other's beliefs and enhance their pathologies. I do, however, view this "information revolution" as largely a good and happy thing, and it at least affords people a much greater opportunity to learn about whatever they wish, something which, I think, will have a "net positive" effect in the long run.

Very briefly, when we look at cognitive/ moral "macro" evolution (or "phylogenetic development"), we see that with every major socio-economic shift (the big examples being the agricultural and industrial revolutions), there also comes a shift in "interior" development: values, identity, worldviews. Societies moved from tribal/ agrarian structures and "magical" worldviews to the first national structures and "mythic" ethnocentric worldviews. While of course this paved the way for more ways to do bad things (more pathological potential) under a king or emperor or something similar, it at least integrated/ unified what came before, so that tribes and families weren't killing each other (but of course, it became nations). With the development of Renaissance and Modernist thought and the Industrial Revolution, people had a higher chance of becoming somewhat rational and at least partially transcending ethnic divides, though they did impose their own metanarratives on unfortunate populations. What's happening now with the internet and information will at least increase the chance that people will be able to recognize limited contextual thinking/ morality when it occurs, appreciate other modes of living, and make wiser decisions on the absolute morals and worldviews they do adopt. The socio-economic struture of a society and its modes of production exhibit a "pull" on its population up toward a certain moral or cognitive "centre of gravity" (as well as an unfortunate pull downward, if one is "ahead" of the curve), and the higher that is, the better, or more enlightened. WIth the development of the "information economy" and increasingly complex capitalism, I think we're at least increasing our chances for survival and the development of wisdom.

(I also realize that I may not have been too coherent here, but I hope at least the essence of what I'm saying is understandable, without giving the impression that I support simplistic "progress theories" which I do not.)

The book sounds like a very interesting read, professor, and I'd very much like a copy on my shelf some day, even if my ability to read it is somewhat limited (my French education ended at highschool, after all). It actually sounds like the sort of thing I'd want to write, though in my case I might do it on American superhero comics and how they have reflected social trends and discourse, and that would be a true example of academic obscurity!

....

[Dialectic]

So if you've managed to wade through most of that, it's interesting to note the similarities and differences that North America and Europe are going through in terms of the cultural discourse and how various peoples are dealing with minority communities and post-colonialism.

Europe takes a distinctly different stance from North America (with some similarities, of course, which increase or decrease depending on the specific country), and it's funny how Europeans are much more enlightened than Americans in some ways, and far less in others.

What seems to be happening on both continents is that the hyper-liberalism and social advocacy of the 70s - 90s has encountered its own defects; the question now is whether it will be replaced by simple moderation, a hyper-conservative turn (US, Australia, a tiny bit in Canada and parts of Europe), or something beyond liberalism in its current popular form.

[maogirl]

you are one optimistic motherfucker :P

[Dialectic]

As with rights and representation, it comes down to being something of a numbers game. Minority populations will improve their financial, political, and self-esteem/ emotional positions as those populations grow.

In the case of development, Don Beck, the main proponent of Spiral Dynamics, estimates that 20 - 25% of the American population is at "Green" or the stage of the "Sensitive Self." About 10% of the world population is here, and they hold approximately 15% of the power. So-called "Second Tier" memes starting at Yellow only make up 1% of the population and hold 5% of the power.

This 1% can only increase with the rise of the internet and massive information flow. The question, however, is how the Tier II memes will act when they hit, say, a "critical mass" of 10% of the population, and what's happening with all the other waves at the time, particularly Blue and Orange, who comprise the majority of the world population and hold most of the power.

Remember, Tier II can do pretty much anything Tier I can do (go to war, be violent, be peaceful, be loving), just for deeper and more complex reasons. So in the short run, a large Tier II population may actually result in bad times (Wilber's actually writing a fiction novel about this), but in the long run, a higher percentage of more enlightened people can only be good for humanity (assuming we make it to some long-run point in time).

[Sothy]

another awesome thread...

France is interesting because it doesn't acknowledge "hypenated" nationality (ie. Chinese-Canadian), while at the same time having a large population that comes via their colonial/post-colonial days...

so you had the Muslim-French rioting about the 30 percent unemployment they face (about 4x that of the rest of the population or 3x the national average), and the "elite"-French youth rioting about the prospects of losing lifetime employment post-graduation (from schools only they attend in numbers)...the latter was called something along the lines of a Revolution for Mediocracy in Time or a similar magazine...

one "solution" that a politician suggested was applying to jobs without your name on the C.V., just a number. That way the obvious (de)selection process Muslims were facing wouldn't occur, but on the other hand, the education disparity would still exist of course...

any book about football has my interest...World Cup is taking up a lot of time...I'll try and add more in a bit...

[Sothy]

England/UK always viewed themselves as the most modern in Europe regarding immigrant integration, but the terrorist attacks that occurred last year which were performed by people from immigrant populations have them wondering...I think that they screwed up when they stopped granting automatic citizenship to anyone born in the country in 1982...it's funny because Canada and the States still do that because of the Anglo tradition we inherited.

Canada will now ask similar questions...

Oh, even our most right-wing province, Alberta, is left of the Democratic party in the US (looking at issues like medicare, public school funding, post-secondary education, etc.)...it's funny, the "liberal" gov. in BC (which is an amalgam of the federal lib and con parties in essence) is probably more right-wing...what's in a name afterall...

[Infectious]

England/UK always viewed themselves as the most modern in Europe regarding immigrant integration, but the terrorist attacks that occurred last year which were performed by people from immigrant populations have them wondering...I think that they screwed up when they stopped granting automatic citizenship to anyone born in the country in 1982...it's funny because Canada and the States still do that because of the Anglo tradition we inherited.

Canada will now ask similar questions...

Oh, even our most right-wing province, Alberta, is left of the Democratic party in the US (looking at issues like medicare, public school funding, post-secondary education, etc.)...it's funny, the "liberal" gov. in BC (which is an amalgam of the federal lib and con parties in essence) is probably more right-wing...what's in a name afterall...

Yeah, but wasn't citizenship in Britain only transferred to the child through the father in the case of British expats until recently as well?

My BC friends always say the politics in BC is a big load of suck ever since the BC NDP fucked the government up.

[Sothy]

yes, that's true regarding the father only thing...also, illegitimate children were not (and are still not I believe) automatically citizens...they need a declaration form from their British parent

go figure

Yeah, politics in BC blows because it is a two-party system. Everyone crowds the centre when they unveil their platform, then swing hard to the right/left afterwards...

BC might bring in proportional representation before the next provincial election though, which would be interesting as it would probably mean minority governments in many cases...but since it would be the norm, people would actually try and cooperate (or it could end up like Italy with annual elections)...