Right after college in the seventies I had a job as a deckhand on a charter boat that worked in the West Indies. It sounds better than it actually was. The interesting thing for me,though, was the island hopping, which gave me the opportunity to experience the various island cultures and to see how they differed depending on their colonial histories. And I was struck most vividly by how dramatically the French islands differed from those colonized by the English, Dutch, and Spanish.
There was poverty on the French islands, but not the squalor and restless anger that was so evident on the other islands. The ordinary people on the French Islands, at least the ones I had some experience of near Guadeloupe, had a kind of dignity and joy that the islanders with other colonial histories did not have. I thought I could live in a place like this. I did not think that about the other islands. The French-speaking islanders knew who they were, and they were ok being who they were. And I wondered why this was true for them, but not the others.
Subsequently I read an explanation that made some sense to me, and if there are readers out there who want to dispute it, I'm glad to hear about it. What I have to say is hardly authoritative, but it makes sense to me. The idea is that the French differed from the English in their attitudes toward the indigenous people they colonized in that they were cultural imperialists, not racial imperialists. In the period after the Revolution, the French looked upon themselves as having a world-historical mission to civilize the world, which meant spreading French culture.
What mattered to the French was not so much the color of people's skin, but the willingness of those they colonized to be absorbed into the grand and beautiful thing that French civilization was. To resist was a sign of incurable barbarism. "We are not here to conquer you," thought the French, "but to baptize you into French citizenship." And for this reason there wasn't as much of a separation between the French and the people they colonized; the typical French colonizer didn't think of the indigenous people they colonized as genetically inferior, just in need of being brought into the French family.
This of course had more to do with the way the French thought about those they colonized rather than the way the colonized thought about the French. And it was for this reason that the Algerian War in the fifties was such a shock to the French understanding of itself--it was as if Provence declared its independence. The Algerians were not Algerians; they were French. How could they want to be separated from France? How could anybody wish for such a thing?
I'm sure that's something of an oversimplification, but most of what I have come to understand about French culture since then supports it. And it contrasts favorably with the English and American attitudes toward the indigenous people they colonized, which for the most part they perceived as subhuman savages. The English tended to see the American and African aborigines as their genetic inferiors; the French saw them as their cultural inferiors, a condition easily cured by conferring French citizenship.
And this might in part explain the riots in France right now. The French are magnanimous and greet the world with open arms so long as those who come to France agree to become French. That explains the thinking behind the French ban a couple of years ago on Muslim women wearing head scarves. If you live in France, you must behave and look as the French do. From an American perspective, this seems crazy. We have developed an almost instinctive sense of respect for the cultural habits of the different people who have immigrated here, and we wouldn't think of insisting on such a thing. We call it multiculturalism, but it's really common sense at a time like the one we're living in.
It struck me then that the U.S. for all of its historical problems with racism and nativism was far ahead of the French in having developed the basic ability to live with diversity. This kind of cultural flexibility will be essential in the coming century as the world globalizes. The "clash of civilizations" is a regressive idea that must not be fed. It otherwise becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We must all become cosmopolitans; it's an essential adaptation that we must all make in a world that will be going through enormous cultural fusion in the coming century.
What we are seeing in the Muslim world right now is like the behavior of a cornered animal knowing that its demise is imminent. The French attitude toward the indigenous people it colonized might have been preferable to that of the English in the 18th and 19th centuries, but now it too has become dysfunctional. And the idea of preserving some kind of sacrosanct French culture in this time of enormous cultural transition is futile. Let the Muslims and other minorities be; don't force them to assimilate. Eventually they will give up their traditional identities and assimilate, maybe not into French culture, but into the emerging global fusion culture.
National identity is something that no longer has much of a future. It will linger probably at least until the end of this century, and it will kick and scream and be the cause of a lot of things getting broken before it finally submits to the inevitable reality. The task is not to cling to traditional forms but to retrieve from all the great world traditions what is essential and to integrate them into a new synthesis.
Something new will slowly emerge out of the chaos. My sense of it is that a different kind of values matrix is now developing that will have more to do with transcultural religious or spiritual beliefs than it will with traditional culture-bound religious identity. But if it's coming, it won't be here any time soon. In the meanwhile we are going to have to contain the chaos as best we can without aggravating the understandable confusion and anger so many people feel in a transitional period such as the one we are in.
Update: I've been reading and listening to some experts about what's going on in France, and they insist it has nothing to do with Islam--that it's a problem with minorities of all sorts, not just Muslims. Anybody know what percentage of minorities in France are from places other than North Africa? I'd be surprised if it were more than 25%. Nevertheless, I should probably have entitled this post "Minorities in France."
There is a politically correct thing going on here that we have to be careful about. No one wants to stigmatize an entire religion. I'm sure there are lots of decent Muslims who feel as negatively about the minority of Islamic extremists as I feel about Christian fundamentalists and the other extremists on the Christian right. Neither group speaks to what is best in either religious tradition, but both groups find a kind of twisted cultural or group identity in their religious profession. And that is something that is real and has to be taken very seriously. The extremists might be a minority, but they are a minority with power.
As I've said before, I'm sure that the majority of Iraqis want peace and stability, but they don't have the power to overcome the minority that wants war and destruction. It doesn't matter what the majority thinks if they don't have power. It matters what the minority thinks if the minority has the power.