Do I Hate White Canadians? Do I Hate the Culture?
16 July 2018 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
a lot of people feel rejected
by the culture they grew up in and i think there's less discourse about the decision to reject the culture you grew up in not that i feel rejected by it but that i consciously and intentionally choose to reject it there's not a lot of discourse about that um when you talk about someone who grows up muslim deciding not just to reject the islamic faith become atheist or become buddhist to become something else but to really challenge and reject the cultural assumptions they grew up with there's not a lot of discourse about that if you say talk to someone who grew up in maybe a very loving warm and supportive jamaican immigrant family but they really at some point started to question jamaican culture and say do i want to be a part of this is this how i want to live my life i grew up around a lot of jamaicans and jamaican immigrants in in toronto and you know some of them chose to really remain a part of jamaican culture and some of them took another road remember i met and spoke to one jamaican guy who uh was working very hard to learn chinese and he was devoting his life to foreign policy relations in jamaica and china he really aspired to make jamaican culture more like chinese culture there were a lot of things he respected about chinese culture so it wasn't white western european culture that he idealized by contrast to the culture he grew up in but you know it's just as difficult if you're talking about scotland or white english speaking canada or or any culture it seems like in the 21st century in 2018 we're very eager to make a hero out of someone who for example grows up transgender and who feels that their culture rejects them and we don't maybe examine the extent to which they may be consciously and assertively engaged in a critique of a rejection of their own culture and the same goes for me and the same goes for so many of my my colleagues and contemporaries now i've started this out on uh i don't know a thoroughly grave and serious sounding you know tone but um there's a sense in which i think progress in this area largely belongs to stand-up comedy when i grew up there was a i don't know rich politically correct discourse about cultural relativism trying to teach people to regard all cultures as equal and interchangeable and the real voice i had to contrast that to was stand-up comedy people like chris rock people who were examining and contrasting cultures and whether the differences were small and subtle or deep and profound really drawing attention to what those contrasts were and why and how they mattered and of those two movements we've talked about cultural relativism or just the the mean streak of keeping it real being self-critical and critical of others that you see ongoing and stand-up comedy um i'd say there's no doubt that the tendency you see in stand-up comedy has proved to be more aesthetically durable and more meaningful for all of us there are two things that really spur me to make this video at this moment this is the same day when in france after about one month in france with my daughter i've just handed my daughter back to her grandmother now me and my girlfriend get on with our lives alone my period of custody my daughter has ended um you know one of the things just the realization this has been kind of an important issue bubbling away in the background of a lot of my videos whether my videos were talking about doing humanitarian work in southeast asia research into buddhism uh research into indigenous minority languages like creating ojibwe or what have you all the different decisions i made in my life the different attempts i made to make the world a better place or to make myself a better person by learning different things and pursuing different forms of activism bubbling away in the background is the question you know isil to what extent do you really just hate and reject the culture that you happen to be born into in the same sense that millions of people are born muslim or born into islamic countries not just again not just the religion but culturally muslim countries and and they have no no choice no matter i had no choice where i was born but what family i was i was raised and so on but i had a choice about what i was going to do about it how it was going to educate myself as soon as the questions of my education you know fell into fell into my own hands and um just a couple of days i met and spoke with a friend of mine i think i can call her a friend and not for the first time we met up and she was saying to me not for the first time that she she completely adores the culture of italy she loves living in italy she considers italy the greatest place to live in the world and she was born and raised in italy she's someone who really actively eagerly and passionately conforms to the culture that she happened to be to be pointed to um and by contrast you know talking to my mother again now my mother and i were not on speaking terms for many years i think we put it to about 15 years i don't want to count exactly on years we didn't talk for a long time but i can remember when i was a kid my mother really looked up to french culture really valued france as a modern nation and historically as a culture she she lionized or idealized french culture to some extent and i see her today and she doesn't just dislike french culture she isn't just a critic of french culture i think it's fair to say that she she hates french culture if we're going to be honest about how we feel and how we think about culture and how we live in a culture it's never going to be possible to live by the relativistic myth that all cultures are are equal um it's impossible for us to sit down and have an intelligent and honest conversation about cambodian culture and lotion culture and pretend that there aren't really serious deep differences that differentiate cambodia from laos that differentiate cambodia from china um but you need to have a certain kind of sensitivity detachment and insight to even get to the level of being a stand-up comedian who can really speak in an earnest and engaging and meaningful way about what those differences are what they matter how they shape our lives what we perceive and what we fail to perceive um my feelings about canadian culture now as a middle-aged person with all this experience of having lived in and worked in so many different cultures having a sense about what life is like him cambodia laos long list of other places i mean just this month you know living in france there are things i can appreciate about white english-speaking canadian culture but you know um i i think the main negative impact on people's lives of white english-speaking canadian culture is just that everyone lives alone in canada you can put so much effort into i don't know building up or creating a relationship with someone maybe it's someone you meet you know at a cocktail party let's say a party where people are standing around in and talking at length uh maybe it's something more like a conference for me it's often at the university campus you really put in a bunch of hours to talking about what are your research interests what's your work what are you doing what am i doing you talk this through and you might as well have taken that time and effort and just flushed it down the toilet and sooner or later even if people aren't consciously examining this people stop making the effort and they instead take that time and put it into video games or mountain climbing or playing ice hockey or watching football and television they will do something with their time other than learning from other human beings face to face and challenging themselves to learn from other people and you know it's a very fundamental part of the human experience that i feel white english-speaking canadians are lacking we live in a kind of doleful isolation a kind of invidious silence there are barriers that separate us and those barriers are built up by many factors by fear but above all else by this cumulative disappointment that you put in the effort to establish some kind of rapport or mutual respect or cooperation and nothing comes from it and by contrast earlier today these are really all examples from today or just the last couple weeks but today i sent emails to a number of chinese people and one of them i only met face to face once maybe 10 years ago but we stayed in contact by email after that uh you know and just now i was writing to him again he's given me useful advice at many points he's gotten in contact with other people on my behalf and introduced me to them and then i met them and useful things came from that i mean several different chinese people i mean obviously i didn't meet them all 10 years ago so about 10 years ago some of that five years ago and there's so much benefit mutual benefit there's so much exchange of information and experience and cooperation there's so much positivity that comes out of networking and interface and communication and collaboration with chinese colleagues that i absolutely do not get with white english-speaking canadians the french culture is very different i was just recently talking to my mother about what she hates about french culture given that recently she adored it and you know i can say though french culture two nights in a row my girlfriend and i went to the beach with my daughter and my daughter went out and played and two nights in a row different french people on the same beach invited us to sit down with them and talk with them in one case they offered us a bottle of wine uh you know to sit down and basically make friends you know and um in the other case we exchanged emails and what have you really you know with with there there be no such basis for this connection that i have when i go to an academic conference or an event at the university when i meet people where it's really clear we have common work interests research interest and so on and i really pointed out to melissa look look how different this is from the situation we're in right now in victoria bc canada in vancouver canada in these in these places again how hard it is to get over that that first barrier of of isolation um now i just want to say i don't think that sociability exists as an end in itself i don't think that people socialize just in order to socialize and for no other purpose i think it's crucially important for the vast majority of human beings to be confronted with the alienness of their fellow man again and again and again so that we question what do i really know how do i know that how did i learn that how did i become convinced of that myself how can i convince others of my beliefs and this is something much more simple and fundamental than than socratic method but questioning oneself questioning others i mean it's very sad when for example you meet communists who their whole lives have only spoken with other communists it's very sad when you meet libertarians who've only spoken with libertarians and they don't have that that human experience um but to some extent i really feel the sickness of white english speaking canada is much more generalized it's it's an isolation of all people from all other people of all ideas from all other ideas of every ideology no matter how air sats and undefined going unchallenged that after a very early period when white english speaking canadians are forced to socialize by being in the school system by being assigned to a room number in a class by being told you're in room 2f and therefore the this person sits next to you and you're laughing this person says after that ends this period of enforced sociability i think that canadians go into a type of a very dangerous intellectual and emotional isolation and maybe in the past this was medicated with alcohol and cigarettes and card games my grandparents generation sat around and played cards to an unbelievable extent many many hours before this type of past cards bowling uh darts and to some extent our current generation i think is medicating the problem through marijuana and video games and antidepressants um distractions some mind-altering and and some that are not but i say again i don't feel that socializing is important to make you feel good about yourself for you to be happy if anything what i'm trying to suggest you here is the opposite what i think is so crucially lacking in the the lives intellectual uh emotional and otherwise what i think is so crucial lacking the lives of white english speaking canadians is the business of being challenged of being shaken in your assumptions your assumptions about yourself the world you live in what you know what you aspire to do your cosmology what you think about the world your own purpose in your life um and i've got to tell you illiterate people in laos who i mean i knew one family and they went from town to town selling baskets hand woven baskets and their other business their involvement was shoes they went from village to village to some extent they were illiterate to some extent they were alert they're not not people who read but you know um i met all kinds of characters in in third world countries like laos and cambodia i met all kinds of characters who were living in a much more stimulated and stimulating mode than the depressed isolated fatuous self-deceiving mode that i see my fellow my fellow canadians living in and it's uh it's a way of life that i feel my own friends and colleagues the people i went to school with people went to high school it's a mode of living i feel that nobody has chosen but those of us who rebel against it have consciously chosen to opt out of it in the same sense that i had to choose sobriety that chose to reject alcohol that i chose to reject eating mead thus to become vegan um in the sense that i had to consciously reject all of the excuses for a life of conformism and mediocrity that were built into my my culture um those who step out of this are definitely choosing something but i think the tragedy you know that i see written in fine print on the faces of my my fellow white canadians is precisely that they didn't choose this and they don't embrace a culture and they don't in their own minds engage in either a critique of that culture or any kind of active appreciation for a culture and even the way that my italian friend does when she can sit there and really explain to me why it is she loves life in italy in contrast to germany france china other countries around the world that she's lived in i'm going to close this video by saying i chose to be an optimist about human nature i chose to judge people not by their past actions but by their potential to do good in the future and by that standard i can still look at white english speaking canada and say they have the potential to do something good but by the other standard judging a culture by its past actions judging a person or people by their past actions it's inescapable the sense in which all of canada is is marked by the stain of genocide by the history of colonialism and let's face it folks we didn't build the pyramids we didn't accomplish something great or wonderful and impressive there's not a lot in the other side of the scale of that balance the history of this country in that sense if you're going to judge it by its past actions and not by its potential to do something positive in the future i i don't see how any thinking feeling person who takes themselves seriously could fail to judge a country like canada a country like australia a country built on this this kind of genocide very differently from a country like switzerland which certainly has its own violent history especially of wars between uh different forms of christianity and what have you but fundamentally switzerland remains a multi-ethnic multilingual democracy and canada is instead a colonialist multicultural um built on top of the history of genocide that we in our doleful isolation in my generation have utterly failed to deal with democratically or otherwise
by the culture they grew up in and i think there's less discourse about the decision to reject the culture you grew up in not that i feel rejected by it but that i consciously and intentionally choose to reject it there's not a lot of discourse about that um when you talk about someone who grows up muslim deciding not just to reject the islamic faith become atheist or become buddhist to become something else but to really challenge and reject the cultural assumptions they grew up with there's not a lot of discourse about that if you say talk to someone who grew up in maybe a very loving warm and supportive jamaican immigrant family but they really at some point started to question jamaican culture and say do i want to be a part of this is this how i want to live my life i grew up around a lot of jamaicans and jamaican immigrants in in toronto and you know some of them chose to really remain a part of jamaican culture and some of them took another road remember i met and spoke to one jamaican guy who uh was working very hard to learn chinese and he was devoting his life to foreign policy relations in jamaica and china he really aspired to make jamaican culture more like chinese culture there were a lot of things he respected about chinese culture so it wasn't white western european culture that he idealized by contrast to the culture he grew up in but you know it's just as difficult if you're talking about scotland or white english speaking canada or or any culture it seems like in the 21st century in 2018 we're very eager to make a hero out of someone who for example grows up transgender and who feels that their culture rejects them and we don't maybe examine the extent to which they may be consciously and assertively engaged in a critique of a rejection of their own culture and the same goes for me and the same goes for so many of my my colleagues and contemporaries now i've started this out on uh i don't know a thoroughly grave and serious sounding you know tone but um there's a sense in which i think progress in this area largely belongs to stand-up comedy when i grew up there was a i don't know rich politically correct discourse about cultural relativism trying to teach people to regard all cultures as equal and interchangeable and the real voice i had to contrast that to was stand-up comedy people like chris rock people who were examining and contrasting cultures and whether the differences were small and subtle or deep and profound really drawing attention to what those contrasts were and why and how they mattered and of those two movements we've talked about cultural relativism or just the the mean streak of keeping it real being self-critical and critical of others that you see ongoing and stand-up comedy um i'd say there's no doubt that the tendency you see in stand-up comedy has proved to be more aesthetically durable and more meaningful for all of us there are two things that really spur me to make this video at this moment this is the same day when in france after about one month in france with my daughter i've just handed my daughter back to her grandmother now me and my girlfriend get on with our lives alone my period of custody my daughter has ended um you know one of the things just the realization this has been kind of an important issue bubbling away in the background of a lot of my videos whether my videos were talking about doing humanitarian work in southeast asia research into buddhism uh research into indigenous minority languages like creating ojibwe or what have you all the different decisions i made in my life the different attempts i made to make the world a better place or to make myself a better person by learning different things and pursuing different forms of activism bubbling away in the background is the question you know isil to what extent do you really just hate and reject the culture that you happen to be born into in the same sense that millions of people are born muslim or born into islamic countries not just again not just the religion but culturally muslim countries and and they have no no choice no matter i had no choice where i was born but what family i was i was raised and so on but i had a choice about what i was going to do about it how it was going to educate myself as soon as the questions of my education you know fell into fell into my own hands and um just a couple of days i met and spoke with a friend of mine i think i can call her a friend and not for the first time we met up and she was saying to me not for the first time that she she completely adores the culture of italy she loves living in italy she considers italy the greatest place to live in the world and she was born and raised in italy she's someone who really actively eagerly and passionately conforms to the culture that she happened to be to be pointed to um and by contrast you know talking to my mother again now my mother and i were not on speaking terms for many years i think we put it to about 15 years i don't want to count exactly on years we didn't talk for a long time but i can remember when i was a kid my mother really looked up to french culture really valued france as a modern nation and historically as a culture she she lionized or idealized french culture to some extent and i see her today and she doesn't just dislike french culture she isn't just a critic of french culture i think it's fair to say that she she hates french culture if we're going to be honest about how we feel and how we think about culture and how we live in a culture it's never going to be possible to live by the relativistic myth that all cultures are are equal um it's impossible for us to sit down and have an intelligent and honest conversation about cambodian culture and lotion culture and pretend that there aren't really serious deep differences that differentiate cambodia from laos that differentiate cambodia from china um but you need to have a certain kind of sensitivity detachment and insight to even get to the level of being a stand-up comedian who can really speak in an earnest and engaging and meaningful way about what those differences are what they matter how they shape our lives what we perceive and what we fail to perceive um my feelings about canadian culture now as a middle-aged person with all this experience of having lived in and worked in so many different cultures having a sense about what life is like him cambodia laos long list of other places i mean just this month you know living in france there are things i can appreciate about white english-speaking canadian culture but you know um i i think the main negative impact on people's lives of white english-speaking canadian culture is just that everyone lives alone in canada you can put so much effort into i don't know building up or creating a relationship with someone maybe it's someone you meet you know at a cocktail party let's say a party where people are standing around in and talking at length uh maybe it's something more like a conference for me it's often at the university campus you really put in a bunch of hours to talking about what are your research interests what's your work what are you doing what am i doing you talk this through and you might as well have taken that time and effort and just flushed it down the toilet and sooner or later even if people aren't consciously examining this people stop making the effort and they instead take that time and put it into video games or mountain climbing or playing ice hockey or watching football and television they will do something with their time other than learning from other human beings face to face and challenging themselves to learn from other people and you know it's a very fundamental part of the human experience that i feel white english-speaking canadians are lacking we live in a kind of doleful isolation a kind of invidious silence there are barriers that separate us and those barriers are built up by many factors by fear but above all else by this cumulative disappointment that you put in the effort to establish some kind of rapport or mutual respect or cooperation and nothing comes from it and by contrast earlier today these are really all examples from today or just the last couple weeks but today i sent emails to a number of chinese people and one of them i only met face to face once maybe 10 years ago but we stayed in contact by email after that uh you know and just now i was writing to him again he's given me useful advice at many points he's gotten in contact with other people on my behalf and introduced me to them and then i met them and useful things came from that i mean several different chinese people i mean obviously i didn't meet them all 10 years ago so about 10 years ago some of that five years ago and there's so much benefit mutual benefit there's so much exchange of information and experience and cooperation there's so much positivity that comes out of networking and interface and communication and collaboration with chinese colleagues that i absolutely do not get with white english-speaking canadians the french culture is very different i was just recently talking to my mother about what she hates about french culture given that recently she adored it and you know i can say though french culture two nights in a row my girlfriend and i went to the beach with my daughter and my daughter went out and played and two nights in a row different french people on the same beach invited us to sit down with them and talk with them in one case they offered us a bottle of wine uh you know to sit down and basically make friends you know and um in the other case we exchanged emails and what have you really you know with with there there be no such basis for this connection that i have when i go to an academic conference or an event at the university when i meet people where it's really clear we have common work interests research interest and so on and i really pointed out to melissa look look how different this is from the situation we're in right now in victoria bc canada in vancouver canada in these in these places again how hard it is to get over that that first barrier of of isolation um now i just want to say i don't think that sociability exists as an end in itself i don't think that people socialize just in order to socialize and for no other purpose i think it's crucially important for the vast majority of human beings to be confronted with the alienness of their fellow man again and again and again so that we question what do i really know how do i know that how did i learn that how did i become convinced of that myself how can i convince others of my beliefs and this is something much more simple and fundamental than than socratic method but questioning oneself questioning others i mean it's very sad when for example you meet communists who their whole lives have only spoken with other communists it's very sad when you meet libertarians who've only spoken with libertarians and they don't have that that human experience um but to some extent i really feel the sickness of white english speaking canada is much more generalized it's it's an isolation of all people from all other people of all ideas from all other ideas of every ideology no matter how air sats and undefined going unchallenged that after a very early period when white english speaking canadians are forced to socialize by being in the school system by being assigned to a room number in a class by being told you're in room 2f and therefore the this person sits next to you and you're laughing this person says after that ends this period of enforced sociability i think that canadians go into a type of a very dangerous intellectual and emotional isolation and maybe in the past this was medicated with alcohol and cigarettes and card games my grandparents generation sat around and played cards to an unbelievable extent many many hours before this type of past cards bowling uh darts and to some extent our current generation i think is medicating the problem through marijuana and video games and antidepressants um distractions some mind-altering and and some that are not but i say again i don't feel that socializing is important to make you feel good about yourself for you to be happy if anything what i'm trying to suggest you here is the opposite what i think is so crucially lacking in the the lives intellectual uh emotional and otherwise what i think is so crucial lacking the lives of white english speaking canadians is the business of being challenged of being shaken in your assumptions your assumptions about yourself the world you live in what you know what you aspire to do your cosmology what you think about the world your own purpose in your life um and i've got to tell you illiterate people in laos who i mean i knew one family and they went from town to town selling baskets hand woven baskets and their other business their involvement was shoes they went from village to village to some extent they were illiterate to some extent they were alert they're not not people who read but you know um i met all kinds of characters in in third world countries like laos and cambodia i met all kinds of characters who were living in a much more stimulated and stimulating mode than the depressed isolated fatuous self-deceiving mode that i see my fellow my fellow canadians living in and it's uh it's a way of life that i feel my own friends and colleagues the people i went to school with people went to high school it's a mode of living i feel that nobody has chosen but those of us who rebel against it have consciously chosen to opt out of it in the same sense that i had to choose sobriety that chose to reject alcohol that i chose to reject eating mead thus to become vegan um in the sense that i had to consciously reject all of the excuses for a life of conformism and mediocrity that were built into my my culture um those who step out of this are definitely choosing something but i think the tragedy you know that i see written in fine print on the faces of my my fellow white canadians is precisely that they didn't choose this and they don't embrace a culture and they don't in their own minds engage in either a critique of that culture or any kind of active appreciation for a culture and even the way that my italian friend does when she can sit there and really explain to me why it is she loves life in italy in contrast to germany france china other countries around the world that she's lived in i'm going to close this video by saying i chose to be an optimist about human nature i chose to judge people not by their past actions but by their potential to do good in the future and by that standard i can still look at white english speaking canada and say they have the potential to do something good but by the other standard judging a culture by its past actions judging a person or people by their past actions it's inescapable the sense in which all of canada is is marked by the stain of genocide by the history of colonialism and let's face it folks we didn't build the pyramids we didn't accomplish something great or wonderful and impressive there's not a lot in the other side of the scale of that balance the history of this country in that sense if you're going to judge it by its past actions and not by its potential to do something positive in the future i i don't see how any thinking feeling person who takes themselves seriously could fail to judge a country like canada a country like australia a country built on this this kind of genocide very differently from a country like switzerland which certainly has its own violent history especially of wars between uh different forms of christianity and what have you but fundamentally switzerland remains a multi-ethnic multilingual democracy and canada is instead a colonialist multicultural um built on top of the history of genocide that we in our doleful isolation in my generation have utterly failed to deal with democratically or otherwise