Diverse Problems

It’s Chinese New Year and half-term break; I’m on holiday at a Thai beach paradise. It really is picture perfect; and it feels good to be somewhere a bit off the beaten track and engaging, in some small ways, with cultural differences. I did feel a bit of a sinking feeling though, probably familiar to many, when I saw familiar chains – Pizza Hut, Starbucks in this case – in town. I imagine many feel the same way – and worry about lack of diversity as ‘pure’ cultures become appropriated and diluted. We’d rather see different traditions preserved unsullied. 

But wait a minute! This world that I am pining after is one that I actually do not want for myself! I do not want to be limited to one culture with no additions – I want multi-culture; pad thai one day; pasta the next; tapas the day after. Washed down with French wine, or Japanese beer, while listening to a Chinese Opera/Andean Pan-Pipe fusion (that last one is an exaggeration). If everyone were like me and also wanted this, everywhere would be culturally mongrel, and there would be no ‘pure or ‘authentic’ national cuisine or music to dip into. 

 So it is clearly not true that I really want cultures to retain their purity – or if I am brutally honest with myself, it seems what I really want is for other people to be culturally monogamous so I can savour them with cosmopolitan promiscuity. If we feel this way – and I think many do, including myself – Julian Baggini, whose analysis this is, likens us to libertines who want our innumerable conquests to be chaste virgins. This is not, I suspect, the image we have of ourselves.  It’s certainly not a very comfortable one.

I am somewhat troubled that my apparently laudable desire to see local cultures preserved seems worryingly self-centred.  Then again, perhaps my own feelings are of little import here.  It’s not like Starbucks or Pizza Hut need my custom, after all, and it’s hard to imagine the clock turning backwards.  The issue does not go away however.  It has echoes in our school where we seek to engage with different cultures while retaining our own strong sense of our values and identity.  There is a tension there, and I do not think there is any simple answer; if there were we would have found it already.  And that is my point; that engaging with difference is problematic and internally inconsistent – which is why it is so important, of course and why it is worthy of intense study.

Gong Xi Fa Cai!