Many identities
Living
in the Greater Toronto Area is quite nice, especially for a city boy
like me who doesn't even want to own a car but takes the public transit
wherever he goes. Of course a car gives you freedom and convenience and
we take full use of one whenever we borrow one, but I think I rather
take the money that I save from not owning a car. With public transit,
my monthly transportation costs are capped to the maximum of about
$160, which is how much the GTA Weekly Passes would cost for a month.
With a car, parking alone would probably cost that much.
Even though I came from Finland where essentially everyone is white, I had a relatively mild culture shock and have since become quite jaded to the whole concept of ethnicity. For example, different races don't even register to me any more when I get on the bus. Now, I have learned that such lax attitude is not shared by most white people throughout the world, but in Toronto it seems to be the norm. Even though Toronto is heavily multicultural, it seems to almost completely lack the standard problems that the American cities have, for example, the inner city deterioration and the consequent white flight to the endless suburban sprawl and exurbia. Toronto has a living downtown in which various races coexist happily and peacefully. (This year's highly mediagenic epidemic of gun violence is just gangsters and wannabes shooting other gangsters and wannabes --- nothing that regular people really have to worry about any more than, say, slipping in the shower.)
Why is Toronto so exceptionally peaceful? A while back one possible answer came to me, relating to the highly touted multiculturalism of this place. When I thought about it, most other places in the world that do have conflict between groups are not multicultural at all: instead, they are bicultural, so that there is a large majority population and another homogeneous minority population different from it so that this minority is large enough to be visible and able to isolate itself to develop a closed self-identity. This has been a recipe for strife and conflict throughout the history.
In a proper multicultural society, there is no single minority group but a vibrant mix of genuinely different groups that are small enough so that no group can totally isolate itself but has to constantly interact with the other groups in its daily life. It is hard to have an "us vs. them" conflict when both "us" and "them" are so amorphous that neither gets to develop much of a group identity. This is what fortunately has come to work in Toronto, and I hope that it remains that way.
Of course, strong economic growth doesn't hurt, and neither does the fact that most people here seem to be such very recent immigrants, selected with a filter that lets only useful people in. Because these different groups have lived together during the civilized modern times where the principle is "you can be any ethnicity as long as you subscribe the values of classical Western liberalism and behave accordingly", things go a lot smoother than if there were hundreds of years of shared history that was lived in the cruel and bloody way that people used to live until the recent history.
Even though I came from Finland where essentially everyone is white, I had a relatively mild culture shock and have since become quite jaded to the whole concept of ethnicity. For example, different races don't even register to me any more when I get on the bus. Now, I have learned that such lax attitude is not shared by most white people throughout the world, but in Toronto it seems to be the norm. Even though Toronto is heavily multicultural, it seems to almost completely lack the standard problems that the American cities have, for example, the inner city deterioration and the consequent white flight to the endless suburban sprawl and exurbia. Toronto has a living downtown in which various races coexist happily and peacefully. (This year's highly mediagenic epidemic of gun violence is just gangsters and wannabes shooting other gangsters and wannabes --- nothing that regular people really have to worry about any more than, say, slipping in the shower.)
Why is Toronto so exceptionally peaceful? A while back one possible answer came to me, relating to the highly touted multiculturalism of this place. When I thought about it, most other places in the world that do have conflict between groups are not multicultural at all: instead, they are bicultural, so that there is a large majority population and another homogeneous minority population different from it so that this minority is large enough to be visible and able to isolate itself to develop a closed self-identity. This has been a recipe for strife and conflict throughout the history.
In a proper multicultural society, there is no single minority group but a vibrant mix of genuinely different groups that are small enough so that no group can totally isolate itself but has to constantly interact with the other groups in its daily life. It is hard to have an "us vs. them" conflict when both "us" and "them" are so amorphous that neither gets to develop much of a group identity. This is what fortunately has come to work in Toronto, and I hope that it remains that way.
Of course, strong economic growth doesn't hurt, and neither does the fact that most people here seem to be such very recent immigrants, selected with a filter that lets only useful people in. Because these different groups have lived together during the civilized modern times where the principle is "you can be any ethnicity as long as you subscribe the values of classical Western liberalism and behave accordingly", things go a lot smoother than if there were hundreds of years of shared history that was lived in the cruel and bloody way that people used to live until the recent history.
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