Eva Hoffman - Some Reflections on the Multicultural Cosmopolis Today

Cities are a locus of imagination, and also of identification and attachment – certainly, earlier and perhaps more powerful identifications than nations. When I emigrated with my family to Canada at age 13, it was Cracow rather than Poland that I palpably missed. I was still at a pre-ideological age, when the “imaginary community” of a nation meant little to me; but the place where I actually lived and which I knew meant everything. But cities, more than nations, are also places to which one can form later attachments and forms of belonging. Having moved to Great Britain in full adulthood, I can never really become English; but I can and do feel myself to be a Londoner. Nowadays, when people ask me where my home is, I say it’s between the Upper West Side and NW 6 – the neighbourhoods in New York and London where I have lived for extended periods of time. 

This brings me to my second, obvious point – and that is, that cities are natural landing places for immigrants like me, and therefore natural cosmopolitan, or multicultural formations. Urban centres have always been condensation clusters where individuals and groups from various places have congregated and coexisted with each other. We all know about the interwar artistic exiles in Paris, the political refugees in the 19th century London, the rich mix of populations in the early 20th century Istanbul, or Sarajevo, or for that matter, in interwar Warsaw or Lodz. 

So, when we talk about urban multiculturalism, in a sense there is no problem – until, of course, there is a problem. Cultural heterogeneity and coexistence have been, in many times and epochs, a normal condition. However, as the history of Wroclaw, or more recently, of Sarajevo, reminds us all too vividly, there are times when a seemingly natural and benign modus vivendi among different groups breaks down terribly, and co-existence transmogrifies into conflict and sometimes deadly violence. 

When I came to London almost fifteen years ago, it seemed to me that I was coming to a city well used to dealing with exiles and immigrants of all sorts – a city truly cosmopolitan in spirit, and neither overexcited, nor dismissive of the many foreigners, or others, in its midst. London’s sprawling urban topography, by the way, seems to me ideally suited to a live and let live attitude; the famous British tolerance that has been, equally famously, underpinned by the ethos of privacy and non-interference. But it also seemed to me that, besides the advantages of geography, there were also certain informal, but crucial containing structures for the many groups of immigrants sharing the city. There was, most evidently, a common and commonly cherished language; and a code of urban civility which could still be taken for granted, and which lubricated daily exchanges between people – however foreign they may have been to each other otherwise – in a very benign way. 

Since then, however, London and many other large cities in Western Europe have come under intense pressure, as they find themselves suspended between the realities of multiculturalism, the tensions of living with quite radical differences and, at the extreme, but important fringe, the threat of violence. For me, both the possibilities and the tensions were summarized by a particular moment, or day, about two years ago, when I went on a walk through the East Side of London. The East Side is traditionally an immigrant area, where various groups arriving on England’s shores have first settled. The neighbourhood saw successive waves of Huguenots fleeing from Catholic repressions in France, Irish immigrants fleeing poverty and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe coming there for a variety of reasons. These days, the area is home to a large Bangladeshi community; with is many colourful shops and excellent restaurants. A historian of immigration who was accompanying me that day pointed out proudly that the East Side was one of the few spots in the world where a Protestant church, a synagogue and a mosque could be found in close proximity, erected practically next to each other. 

But that day, as it happened, also witnessed a protest, launched by the Bangladeshi community, against the filming of a movie based on a novel by Monica Ali, called “Brick Lane.” Monica Ali is herself Bangladeshi; but nevertheless, the protesters felt that her picture of their community is unflattering, and insulting; and they wanted to stop the film from being made. The protest was serious in tone, the voices angry, the signs written in Urdu. I must say I felt chastened by the sight. 

Now, this may seem like a local event, but of course, conflicts revolving around issues of free speech have arisen in the last year in countries across Europe; and they have sometimes led to deadly violence. Moreover, it should be noted that such conflicts involve disagreements about absolutely fundamental values; and they are not easily resolved. Free speech is an absolute good in the Western context; respect for Islam trumps that good for many Muslims around the globe. 

How have such situations arisen, and how can they be contained before they explode into even sharper conflict and even more violence? Much depends on how we envision our relationships within a diverse society; and the city is the crucible where such relationships are most immediately lived out and tested. And so, I want to probe a bit behind the immediate realities of specific cities today, and think about these relationships in a more systematic, or principled way. I would like to sketch a kind of anatomy of attitudes towards difference which, in my observations, have prevailed in recent decades; and also, to ponder the kinds of frameworks we might need to contain inter-ethnic or inter-religious conflicts, and create humane and tolerant environments as we jostle against each other in the close proximity of city spaces. 

Since my preoccupation with these questions comes from my own experience of emigration rather than from any scholarly expertise, I will allow myself to talk briefly about my own experience as someone who has been the Other in several countries – but who has also been acculturated or assimilated enough to see social issues from the other side of the equation. Certainly, exile – to use the broad term which includes many kinds of migration – is a condition which brings you right up against the problems of deep values; and which foregrounds both the potency of cultural specificities and the potentialities of cross-cultural encounters very sharply. 

Indeed, the first lessons of my uprooting were in the vital importance of language and culture – or rather, in the inseparability of these large and seemingly supra-personal entities from our most personal, most inward selves. For a while, I was in effect without language, as Polish went underground and English remained a terra incognita; and what that brief but radical interval brought home to me was how much our perceptions and understanding, as well as our sense of presence and even life – aliveness – depend on having a living speech within us. When we don't have words with which to name our inner experiences, those experiences recede from us into an inner darkness; without words with which to name the world, that world becomes less vivid, less lucid. On the other hand, the ability to name things precisely, to bring experience to the point of conscious articulation, gives nuance and colour to our perceptions, our sense of others, and of ourselves. In a very real sense, language constitutes our psychic home. As with language, so with culture: What that first period of radical dislocation brought home to me was how much we are creatures of culture, and how much incoherence we risk if we fall out of its matrix. By “culture”, of course, I do not mean only the shaped artifacts of literature or art, but the entire web-work of visible and invisible habits, of psychological codes and conceptual assumptions – a kind of symbolic system of shared meanings that structures our perceptions from early on, and that, within each culture, shapes the very shape of personality, and of sensibility. On that level, culture is not only something we live in, but something that lives within us, not only as easily changed ideas and beliefs, but as values encoded within our psychic cells. 

I stress this because it is the depth at which these things exist within us that makes the sense of cultural “difference” sometimes so intractable, and the process of cross-cultural understanding genuinely difficult. Now, it seems to me that within my own trajectory, I have seen quite profound changes towards difference on the part of the mainstream or majority cultures. I came to the US in 1963, that is, at the very moment when America was on the cusp of enormous change, when the very idea of America was about to splinter into many ideas and images, many of them in conflict with one another. But at the time I arrived, the country still had a confidently unified sense of itself, and the conviction that it represented progress and the desirable human norm. The ideology on questions of immigration was still unequivocally assimilationist. The melting pot ethos was premised on the belief that new arrivals would be only too happy to leave their pasts behind, and to accept all America had to offer instantly and gratefully. And many were. America, after all, offered considerable numbers of people new opportunities, upward mobility and a refuge from various forms of persecution and oppression. I have certainly been the beneficiary of American egalitarianism and mobility – and I am truly grateful for that. But the unexamined assumption that America was the norm to which others should be all too glad to accommodate, meant that the imagination of difference was neither nurtured nor strongly developed, that deep cultural difference often simply fell outside the pale of consideration or notice. The new arrival was often greeted with the kind of incomprehension which ignored the fact that there was anything to comprehend. And that, in turn, meant that assimilation carried with it a strong threat of colonization, of having one’s first self, so to speak, undervalued and stifled by a very powerful force. My own project was, in a sense, to transpose myself into the American vein, to really enter into the sensibility of my new world. Such an undertaking is exciting and enlarging; but I felt that it could not be done superficially or abruptly; that to shed my past too quickly would be doing a kind of violence to myself. 

But since my own emigration, there has been a great sea-change in attitudes to questions of difference and unfamiliar Others. The changes have happened on several levels – and although I’ve been speaking within the American context, I think the same observations, with some obvious corrections, can apply to Britain, or indeed to Western Europe. On one, rather rarefied level, there has grown up a vast body of commentary and theory that is rethinking and revising the concept of exile. The basic revision has been to attach a positive sign to exile and the cluster of mental and emotional experiences associated with it. At least within the framework of a certain kind of post-modern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands – uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this conceptual scheme, exile becomes – well, sexy, glamorous, interesting. 

On the broader scale, too, in the realm not of high theory but of more general attitudes, one can also sense, say in the last two decades, a considerable shift. There has been the rise of identity politics, with its attendant demand for the full recognition of each group’s particular character and history. The prevailing ethos on questions of immigration has transmogrified from the melting pot to the beautiful mosaic, from assimilation to multiculturalism. 

But I think there has been a further move as well, both in the realm of high theory, and in broader attitudes – and that is, a kind of romance of difference; the sense that it is marginality, or the outsider position which brings with it interest or wisdom; that rightness, or the good, or the nobility of victimhood, exist in the Other, and that it is We – the putatively normative we – who are a priori in the wrong. 

This further twist of the story became particularly evident since 9/11. There was of course a spectrum of reactions to that event everywhere; but in the supposedly progressive interpretation of the events, the Al Qaeda attacks were seen as an expression of justified fury on the part of victimized people; while it was “we” who had to “learn our lessons” from this attack. Since then, certainly in Great Britain, one can discern, in the putatively progressive sections of public opinion, a flirtation with, or even an embrace of clearly extremist tendencies – as long as they come from the putatively victimized Other. Just to give you a concrete if perhaps epiphenomenal example: Recently, “Time Out”, a magazine which lists all possible forms of cultural events and entertainment, and which as much as anything symbolizes groovy, cool and happening London, devoted an issue to the idea of the city becoming Islamic in its codes and laws. The editorial voices, and the leading essay in the issue suggested it would not be a bad thing at all if this happened, because there would be less drunkenness and lewd behaviour, more hygienic personal habits and more true respect for women, who would of course be required to cover themselves according to sharia regulations, and to wear the veil. This struck many readers of the magazine as particularly incongruous, since “Time Out” is the great bastion of liberated life-styles, listing gay bars and events, and featuring naked bodies with some regularity – all of which it would have to renege on if London were to become truly Islamic; and all of which it was notionally willing to renege on for the frisson of supposedly radical, but actually very conservative chic. 

Now, of course, I understand that these attitudes coexist with the more standard forms of prejudice and even bigotry, which should be countered and fought by any means possible. But I am talking about a set of ideas and attitudes which compel our moral attention and set the tone for a more liberal discussion of these matters. 

And so again, I want to go behind the immediate realities and polemics, and think about these attitudes and their implications more systematically. On the ethical level, it could be said that our willingness to criticize the sins of our own tribes and to place moral merit in others, as well as the privileging of the outsider, and of certain kinds of under-privilege bespeaks a heightening of our ethical sensibilities. And, to some extent, I think it really does. It seems to me that British society, for example, really has become sensitized to its own history of colonization, and to the legitimacy of other cultural perspectives. Our awareness of the diversity within our societies means that we are less susceptible to the tyranny of some notional normative identity. Very few of us think that our nation is the only one to possess legitimacy, or the genius of the people we belong to is superior to all others. That is all surely to the good. 

But there are several reasons why the idealization of difference, with its inversions of the older, triumphalist dogmas seems unsatisfying both as a description of our world, and as an ideal to aspire to. First of all, the glamorization of exile, diasporism and nomadism ironically underestimates the costs and hardships of such conditions. Real dislocation, the loss of all familiar external and internal parameters, is hardly glamorous, or cool. It carries great psychological and existential costs, and it is something that I think most immigrants want to get over and beyond; they want to find new ways of feeling at home. But also, I think that envisioning the conditions of displacement and immigration as ennobling, or radicalising, underestimates the opposite, conservative potential of these circumstances. The outsider position does initially have certain bracing, or subversive potential; but great upheaval and dislocation can sometimes produce some rather more rigid impulses of self-preservation and insularity. They can lead to a kind of psychic fundamentalism, whereby one orients oneself towards an ideal and purer past or lost home, while remaining detached and separate from the compromised and conflict-ridden locality where one actually lives. I think such tendencies could be observed, for example, among the wartime generation of Polish émigrés in Britain; and they can be seen again among segments of Islamic communities in London today. Moreover, envisioning yourself perpetually as the object of prejudice or as oppressed by Them, can lead to a kind of separatism from the society at large, and to a defensive, basically conservative world-view, whereby one feels oneself to be always the outsider and the victim – even when that is no longer so. Several Muslim commentators in Britain have recently noted this tendency towards “victimology” among the Muslim communities – most notably Kenan Malik in a response to our controversial Mayor Ken Livingstone, who is a great advocate of multiculturalism, and has warmly welcomed some very extremist imams on their visits to London. 

But also – to return to the mainstream, or the “majoritarian” point of view – it seems to me that to envision the Other always as “our” victim, and always as acting in reaction to the putative “us,” is implicitly patronizing. Such a view underestimates the agency of individuals and groups, even if they are in minority positions. It ignores the force precisely of other cultures and ideologies, as well as internecine differences among other cultures and sub-cultures. In the conflict about the filming of Brick Lane, for example, there were Muslim voices protesting the protests – and even expressing outrage at them. 

Indeed, it is often commentators from minority groups who note that the model of a homogeneous majority, and the perennially oppressed minority no longer corresponds to the realities of our fast-changing and ever more mobile world. As our societies become more internally fluid, as centres of power or influence, or interest, multiply and criss-cross with each other, the very notion of a representative insider and a permanently excluded outsider, no longer seems to apply. 

In literature too, it is writers like Richard Rodriguez, a Hispanic American essayist, in his book “Brown”, or Zadie Smith in “White Teeth”, who come close to depicting the syncretic and multi-dimensional topography of the new multiculturalism – a topography in which characters from various ethnicities intermingle and divide, affect each other for good and ill, while all the time dealing with problems and conflicts in their own lives and affinity groups – so that it is difficult to say that there is one centre of authority, or power, or oppression, or victimhood. 

But I am struck by the fact that there is much less of this new multicultural topography, much less representation or elaboration of it, in literature written either from the American or the British mainstream. We have become much more delicate about entering into cross-cultural, or cross-ethnic dialogue from that position, more aware of the pitfalls of condescension or arrogance – of a kind of perceptual imperialism. The pitfalls are there, and yet, I think we need to be able to talk to each other even across awkward boundaries, to take the risk of misunderstanding in order to extend our understanding. 

Really, what I am saying is that idealization of the Other is as insufficient to the occasion as denigration, and that both are a form of projection and a way of preventing a richer understanding and a fuller engagement with other cultures and collectivities. And engagement – from both, or all sides of the equation – is what we badly need if we are to coexist not as separate enclaves inhabiting the same territory, but as members of the same society, or urban space. Possibly, as we deal with differences in situations of close proximity, and sometimes tension or conflict, tolerance as benign indifference is not enough. We need a more strenuous effort of understanding and imagination – one that does not erase differences, but grapples with them in active and dynamic dialogue. And dialogue, by the way – if it is to be more than the kind of anodyne and cursory exchange in which everyone professes high respect for the others’ values without in the least coming to grips with them – is a difficult and demanding concept. That all-too-familiar form of cross-cultural conversation is no more than what Trevor Phillips, the race equality chief in Britain, called “cultural tourism”. 

As for more genuine forms of dialogue, they remain to be decoded and described. How do we stretch towards others, and incorporate their subjectivity, their view of the world, without losing some perspective from which we can perceive, or principles on which we are willing to stand? Those are difficult questions and challenging tasks. But the city is the ideal forum for such exchanges; it is a place where casual forms of conversation happen in any case in the natural course of events; and where a more strenuous dialogue could and should be encouraged. Schools are one obvious place. But it seems to me that one could create specific sites for dialogue – one can imagine, for example, intercultural centres, for conversation, shared activities and the arts. I realize even as I say this that I’m reinventing the wheel already invented at Sejny – but that’s a very good wheel. 

However, where diversity exists in the same space and the same body politic rather than across borders, another element and perspective needs to be taken into account – and that is, the perspective not only of the particular individuals or groups trying to understand each other, but of society itself, of what can still perhaps be called the common good. From that third, but crucial vantage point, the question becomes not only how we can understand each other in all of our differences, but how can we sustain a notion of commonality, of some social cohesion, in the face of those differences – particularly the differences which are quite sharp and not easily reconciled. 

It is precisely when we confront those sharp and extreme differences that a common sphere becomes very important – that is, a domain within which we act primarily as citizens, or, say, Londoners, rather than as members of particular groups; and where we are treated primarily in that role, rather than as representatives of some communal “identity”. The acknowledgment of a need for such a domain does not mean that there may not be other places – community associations, religious institutions, special schools, etc. – where distinctive ethnic or cultural identities can be expressed and enacted. 

From the individual end as well, I think we also need to acknowledge that we are not monolithic, and to accept the notion of spheres or strata of identity, and of recognition. The need for both individual and collective recognition is deep – and there are situations and contexts in which we want to share and receive an exact and intimate understanding of our past, of the things that form us, and give us our distinctive personalities. In our multiethnic societies, as long as we expect new generations of immigrants, we need to make room for forums in which such particular pasts and cultural sensibilities can be lived and recognized – if only to give people that crucial transitional time in which they can make choices about the degree of acculturation or assimilation they want to pursue. We cannot and should not forcibly extract from people the elements which shape their selves and souls. 

And yet: for the newcomers and minority groups, especially if their immigration was in some sense voluntary, some engagement and participation in the society they have entered is surely no more than a consequence of that decision. We can be Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, Polish or Albanian – and at the same time, identify ourselves as citizens of whatever country and society we have chosen to live in, and act in that role, where common interests are concerned. 

Beyond that, it seems to me that the very idea of that common realm may be changing as social realities change; and that the phenomenon of radical differences and of increasingly complex cultural mosaic calls on us to do something very challenging and interesting: to rethink, and perhaps to redefine – or sometimes reassert – the very basic principles on which our societies stand or fall. What do we mean by civility, free speech, democracy; why do we value the separation of church and state – if we do; in the light of what principles do we object to honour killings, or to a garment which covers women’s faces – if we do. It would be good, of course, if we could forge the underlying principles for a new agora together, and in mutuality; and subscribe to them willingly, so that the ordinary life of our cities and societies could proceed an atmosphere of some basic trust, rather than mutual suspicion. 

I do not mean to exaggerate the degree of that suspicion, or conflict, or even discomfort. On an ordinary day, London is still a wonderful place to live, with many surprising and enlivening encounters. The London of Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” – multiethnic, rollicking, with vectors of power and attraction going in every which direction has become as much a part of our collective imagination as the London of Charles Dickens. Cities are multiple organisms, and we can come to appreciate them and love them from many directions. Unlike national patriotism, which is based on ideological symbols, local patriotism is based on actual attachments, and can be a wonderful thing, But we do need to nurture this multiple organism in common, and to make sure that its connective tissue continues to be strong enough to sustain us, rather than fracturing or breaking under the strain.