Multiculturalism vs. Social Cohesion: "Trust" as a political concept.
12 October 2017 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
just finishing my breakfast having a
conversation about immigration politics that's a survey in the past we talked about the social science research associate especially with a guy named Putnam you really created a new academic sub-discipline talking about trust trust as a social science concept this is not trust in conventional sense guys like Francis Fukuyama a number of other popular authors and politics also weighed in on this and is interesting topic what's ironic is that general this discourse within the field of political science started off with the assumption that if we study this issue of trust of what is social trust how do you have trust within a community basically that this was going to approve of was going to rubber-stamp was gonna put the imprimatur of science on you know the liberal globalized cosmopolitan 21st century city and instead what all of the research proved was the exact opposite it found high levels of trust exactly where you have high levels of social cohesion so for example a small town in Spain or everyone's Catholic everyone goes to the same school everyone goes to the same church all speak the same language and there's absolutely zero immigration and you had lower and lower trust less and less trust in a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic society now so I just said to my girlfriend we were talking about this I said well look we should stop talking and we should but if I were to make a video about this for one thing so putnams research his first book on the topic was called a Bowling Alone Bowling Alone and there it wasn't framed in these racial terms it wasn't framed terms of immigration but it basically said look in the past in America in the 1950s or 1960s people at bowling clubs people had these units of social organization like going bowling together and they were important in terms of social capital trust social cohesion even the ability to organize something politically and he said today in America people still go bowling but they go bowling alone they go bowling just boyfriend and girlfriend they go bowling in these much smaller groups he was suggesting that people are becoming more atomized and more disorganized now first of all I actually profoundly disagree with that now with us because how did I meet my girlfriend the Internet you know actually I think he's already it's a profoundly false things they Oh back in the good old days I D fifties people had more more social capital and more ability to auratus the Internet has changed the game for everyone even your private romantic life but definitely our political if in your political life more than more than anything else right already this is already a question but he obviously was looking at that in terms of the disintegration of social capital the disaggregation of social and political life and at that point he was not thinking of it in terms of black versus white or immigrant versus older civil population or what have you but it's interesting of itself organically that's what that area of social science research became that's kind of what happened as the as the research quest as the discipline quest thanks Ari she was doing a lot more talking before I threw the camera I assure you but you know this is just a catch-up but basically what we're saying this conversation my girlfriend asked me served where do I stand on this and my first answer was look I actually don't see this in terms of a straight political decision I don't see this in the left wing versus right wing or all right versus wrong what I would want to emphasize in a YouTube video is I actually see this as a matter of personal character and I'm not saying my personal character is right and someone else is wrong I'm not saying my personal character is politically correct another cigarette but I said look in terms of the kind of guy I am my character just in that sense my character I want to live in a highly cosmopolitan low trust society I am NOT the kind of guy who would be happy in a small town in Spain where everyone's Catholic everyone goes to the same school everyone's the same Church they have a higher level of cohesion and by the way this is one of the criteria of a high trust study when you have a high trust society your neighbors know your secrets you know what was the example gave you from Canada your neighbors notice how many bottles of wine you're drinking from what's going out in your recycling bin you know the number of empty glass let's go and they talked about it like oh you know that guy then again it wouldn't be I was gonna say that guy down the block is drinking more wine than you used to it would be that guy Tom who we went to grade six with that guy Tom who you know from church that guy Tom who's in your bowling club like that's the point that's what a high trust aside is like oh he's been drinking more oh you know that guy Tom his wife is cheating on him they know that that's a high trust Society is the small town village in Spain where everybody's in each other's business nobody has any privacy nobody has any personal freedom and there's frankly from my perspective this is my character I feel there's not that much creativity I feel that stifling my creativity okay I would rather live in the kind of opposite extreme stereotype the low trust society which is the backstabbing rat race you know like the bad stereotype about Manhattan nobody knows anybody nobody trusts anybody you know International electro people are speaking 10 different languages you know I'm so critical I don't only see good things about that believe I grew up in a multicultural Robin in downtown Toronto downtown enough Toronto this the school I went to we had a lot of Chileans we had a lot of Asians we did have a lot of black people they were Caribbean black people where I was they weren't direct from Africa of black people and they also weren't black families who'd been in Canada for four hundred years they work they were pretty new immigrants revenge as mentioned I had a lot of ethnic never and even the Europeans we don't like we had new immigrants from Greece and they were just as foreign as the Caribbeans are more cement you have white people but there there's still really new immigrants they're still speaking Greek they're still speaking Italian they're still really new in words I had a lot anywhere it's a lot of diverse memory I do see the disadvantages I do I do I do within my school in terms of how my school ran there's no question that the lower quality of education than other schools where the students could speak English there's no question you know I really am aware that nevertheless for my character for Who I am I would rather have the rough and tumble of a culturally diverse big city than the small-town Hydro Society and I'm not saying you're wrong I'm not saying other people are wrong if they choose to live in a small town monocultural society right yeah okay so when you were saying that I was like well you've made videos about veganism becoming a community what you want people to be connected and it would be nice to be able to go to a community center for veganism and you have to think about like you know it what you just described as a hydro society I think my mom grew up in that type of society and like my dad as well like they grew up and the suburbs of Detroit in like the 50s and 60s and everybody knew each other's business like my mom was best friends with her next-door neighbor like her mom still gossips yeah yeah so but I didn't have that experience like you know growing up in the 90s in the suburbs of Michigan like I could I couldn't just like go over to my neighbor's house and like I don't I don't think I've ever stepped foot in some of my neighbor's houses like my next-door neighbor is like you know what I mean so like I can see benefits to it because like and you and you have to think about like yeah you personally have this this you say this is your character but like what about when you have your daughter with you like where you want to be able to like drop her off with your baby like your next-door neighbor or something to babysit her and have that kind of trust like this person is trustworthy enough honestly no honest to god I'm a you know and again for me the cosmopolitan multi-ethnic multilingual so it works for me but like maybe I'm a complete you know but so I think more than one really interesting issue is is God not here but you know like I you know in some sense I want my daughter to have a good education but I actually feel it's my role to provide her with that not the schools because I've grown up with in such a terrible but my all my experience Loren situation is so terrible I assume the school is gonna suck and I have to educate her to raise my so that really is my assumption to say that that's how I view it it's like okay you go to school and it's garbage and then you come home and I'm gonna read through your textbook and tell you how it's all lies sorry that's what's important spiritual I key I understand you can't do algebra because the Canadian education systems incapable of teaching knowledge but the only way students can learn learn how to do algebra sitting out with their parents or to write this part of it but I think also I think you could make a criticism of my position by saying that my position reflects my own unique cultural experience which is true completely guilty is it not the case that I just come from a culture I despise that I'm profoundly uncomfortable with and profoundly dissatisfied with you know white english-speaking Canadian culture that I grew up as a dissident in that culture hating it and therefore I want to be in a multicultural setting maybe I would feel differently if for example I lived in Japan and I fundamentally liked and appreciated you and said you know what if federer's ampuls me South Korea there are a lot of things are just being our other a lot of things I like about so I don't Japan not so much you know III like South Korean culture of been to South Korea I started learning Korean as a language at two different points in my life quit you know both times but quit cuz I was gonna study in languages busy with other languages the real reason um long story short but you know okay let's say I really like South Korean culture then would it not be the case that within South Korea I would prefer to live in a high trust society you know so it's not Catholic small-town Spain I don't like Catholicism I'm an atheist I'm a nihilist I'm an intellectual there's reasons why small-town Catholic Spain wouldn't appeal to me but what about a high trust society within South Korea sake Buddhists South Korea let's say it's a Buddhist community and South Korea does hell it's dressed still no still within Korea still within South Korea let's just say I love South Korean culture bit of a bit of an exaggeration but if somebody but there are there a lot of things I preach about South Korean culture a lot of things still within South Korea I want to be where the action is I want to be in the entrepot City I want to be where South Korean culture is being challenged by European influence Chinese influence Japanese influence African influence Caribbean and both I want to be on the the multicultural edge of South Korean culture even if I love South Korean culture I want to be where the tough questions are being asked and that was even the case for me and Laos and Thailand but I'm not saying I'm right I'm not saying I'm right and the people in the small town wrong I'm not I'm saying it's a choice that reflects your character okay so I get what you're saying but you know what you're saying doesn't really line up with where you lived in the past so you moved to Taiwan when you've had your daughter do it small city you didn't I pay no that's true you know and and you live you would have talked about maybe living there in the future again because it has such a strong vegan culture yes there's so many great restaurants like wouldn't you want to live in a high trust community if it were to begin like if you could drop your from drop your kid off with a fellow vegan know that they wouldn't feed your kid meat or dairy so the veganism is very very important to me so this this kind of kind of slants the discourse but I think again part of the issue characters to what extent are you an individualist or to what extent are you a conformist or a commute communitarian you know in your character even if you have a vegan community which is impossible anywhere other than Taiwan and Israel right now i think i think these are maybe the only place in the world being communion exists maybe berlin shout-out to berlin I don't have anyone telling me I probably probably not Berlin maybe Berlin 20 years in the future but there were just a few place in the world we have enough of a mass of vegans to talk about talk about living in a in a vegan community and you're right in the town I was in there were people trying to come into our lives that way all of the members of vegan organized religions so there were vegans who were some kind of East Asian eccentric religion I'm not gonna say Buddhism I'm not gonna call it what is them but East Asian miscellaneous spirituality and they were trying to come into our lives and they were you know uh they were they weren't offering to babysit my daughter probably in the future they would have probably if we got more involved most of us people are pretty busy I don't that anytime the babies pass to you but yeah and they were offering that to help us and become our friends and coming through and they were they these were mostly elderly people some of them some of them still in their 30s but mostly elderly people gone so it is it is coming up more in the hydrocity what are the advantages and disadvantages of this trust in in this sense people in political science people in academia they're mostly interested in measurable outcomes like there's a flood and with no government intervention with no money being paid by an agency the people in the neighborhood get organized and go out and lay down sandbags or they get organized go to the school and just to themselves spontaneously organize the school gym to take in refugees like people whose houses have been destroyed by the flood or something you know where people just do that why on the basis of trust like directly and indirectly this reflects the fact that you know these people from your church or you know them from school you know them from this this high level of social cohesion as opposed to be in a situation I think probably Hurricane Katrina in the States was an example of that where there was incredibly little ability for so for civil society civil society including quite a little ability for civil society to take care of itself and take on this humanitarian role where instead people were kind of totally dependent on the government and and and looking for government leadership and you know government institutions do this stuff now again I'm not saying this to to insult the the people of New Orleans but we're very low levels of trust and we're distrust I mean exactly would you open your home to these strangers and take them in if there's a flood that's a that's a real question of trust right yeah and whether or not you speak the same language as those people you're trying to help these are real questions of trust so a lot of it in terms of what are the advantages that's a lot of what what's looked at but you know I've got to tell you I guess on some level I am more of a more of a rugged individualist well you know I do want to have more vegans in my life on one exchange exchange views with vegans but know that life of living in a in a high trust community if anything I feel it I feel it impinges on me you know so we have one I think you do though you know what I'm talking we have one yeah Moore who knows what's going on my life but look yeah like look we'll just be working out and we're here from outside like hey what if you know we don't we don't go out for drinks we don't drink alcohol but if we went out for drinks and then brought another couple home with us or something she'd know about it or you Burwood know who you had these people over your apartment it's like anything we did that was in any way risque or unexpected what if was so I'm a teacher what if I have a student come to my apartment so let's say it's a female student my neighbor knows I had a female student over to my apartment you know I mean well you have this level of surveillance and intrusion in your life and so on and it is caring she helped she helps us with a lot yeah she really she really does she's giving me my job using these technical terms what I really like is a low trust society what I mean and that but this is this is not incompatible with all the emphasis I've put on going to City Hall City Hall isn't a trust based institution City Hall is a tax taxation and coercion based institution when City Hall comes to bail people out when there's a flood or something it's you know it's the power of the government's powers it even if it's democratic even if it's you know transparent or yes it's a very different thing I'm just being honest you vote about Who I am yeah I mean I totally understand because I didn't grow up and you know I didn't grow okay so I didn't grow up in a metropolitan city like Toronto but I also didn't have that experience of you able to you know go over to my friends house like if I if I wanted to go to a friend's house my parents would have to drive me five miles to get to the you know at least miles to get to my in front house I wasn't able to like maybe it was like the age of my neighbors or something but like I did not babysit like there seemed to be no young kids and they knew I was living in it so so I didn't have that experience like I did like dog sit or cat sit for some people so like you know there was a certain level of trust like for my direct neighbors but like past like the house right next to me I did not know anybody like I did not talk to anybody I did not know anything about them other than like when they mowed their lawn you know so yeah like I understand what you're saying and then and then I lived in Ann Arbor and I didn't talk to my neighbors yeah right I didn't want any civil society cohesion with rather with your neighbors yeah and I totally understand you know like I didn't want people in my business and even my even my roommates I it was kind of like sure it's too much of my business sure yeah sure like I just don't want to know what other people are doing sure hon right not sure one of our neighbors was a nudist Lucy so I got an email into this I got an email challenging me from from Maude vegan so I my vegan actually said she doesn't support like native language preservation which is interesting that's a big political diversity meter I care a lot about indigenous languages like like Korean Ojibwe but I just know time consisted in that - I don't want Cree people in a jib way people to be locked away in a museum you know I don't want them to be in small remote rural communities where they can't is very that world for me also it's crucial that we have education in those languages in Montreal and Vancouver and Toronto the only cities we have in Canada you know that Korean a g-way people can retain their language and be engaged with the modern world you know challenges and the challenges of other of other cultures and it's for me it's a forward-looking engagement but just say that too is consistent because my point is I'm not looking at preserving traditional culture right you want TM machines to have creative I want this to be part of modernity and part of the future I want there to be important questions asked in Korean at you I want there to be debates about nuclear power in Korean at your point you know what I mean whatever the issues are or solar power whatever the issues are being debated in the future in that it's not a and you know obviously for those questions if it's for me for those communities that's going to be a huge question because they'll start to lose their cohesion as they lose their isolation which is for them still to have in the future that's maybe an extreme case of cohesion isolation work yes everyone went to the same school because there only is one school everyone knows each other and they even have problems with with the inbreeding it's hard for them to find someone to marry because everyone on the reservation maybe they're their cousin or what have you and it can be very difficult to even get to another reservation very difficult very expensive the travel reservations again the Internet has helped that a lot when I talk to First Nations people a lot of them said yeah their whole life is on Facebook that's the way they can they can be another people yeah but no I don't see myself as as as kind of fighting to preserve a high trust society there I think that I think that there are a lot of kind of philosophical advantages to living in a low trust society but I mean for both of us I think part of the question is you you didn't save it this way but you in effects we said we're asking would I feel differently about it if I had direct experience with it you know I mean what I think that's a real question for both of us would you feel differently about a valium or something if you had really lived in weather a small town in Spain or small town Korea and I'm going to ask that too would I value this would I value a feel feel but this more if I had a positive experience with great education and great healthcare and neighbors neighbors helping me yeah helping me because most of what I can imagine is neighbors hindering me neighbors judging me neighbors regarding me as insane because I'm vegan you know what I mean not not neighbors that are actually helping and loving and positive yeah I do like something that I just thought of when I was living in a suburb of Detroit so after I graduated from college for three years I lived in an apartment building outside of Detroit and it wasn't in Detroit I'm just repeating that I wasn't actually in Detroit um so yeah but still there was crime and you know I saw drug deals going on like outside my door all the time but like you know I didn't even talk to my neighbor at all like you know what I mean so um but what I was gonna say is my car it somebody almost stole stole my catalytic converter I guess they got spooked and ran off before they could actually like sawed off the whole thing so we're starting the removers yes cuz I turned on my car one morning and it was really loud you know like oh right so you know I took it to a shop and they saw that it had been like that the pipe leading to the catalytic converter had been sawed half way through and they had to they had to weld it weld it back in place so like after that I was really paranoid I was like I don't want my car to be stolen like I wish there was a neighborhood watch you know like I wish I could like get my neighbors so I kind of watch when they were in the parking lot like how can you have a meaningful neighborhood watch if you don't have a meaningful neighborhood rightful cohesion right right that's one thing so like at least when you're in a neighborhood like you have people looking out for just generally like looking out for the neighborhood so look you know my grandmother my grandmother was white he came yes in Toronto she was walking through a subway entrance and this is the single wealthiest subway entrance in Canada because it's the subway entrance for Forest Hill Village specifically a lot of people don't even know that exists it's a special entrance for a subway station so I just mentioned so it really is a very wealthy very white neighborhood it's a very unusual most neighborhoods are that in Canada don't have a subway it does mention Moe normally they you know they're kind of a downtown place and my grandmother was wearing her fancy long coat she was all dressed up that so she dressed when she was going out to do something you know she was all dressed up as fancy as a as a little old white lady can be and walking along there was a there was a little safety barrier that she didn't see and she tripped and fell on it and fell on her face and broke her collarbone so she was totally immobilized and she lay their face down on the floor with you know she turned her head sideways and called two people for help and there's on one videotape because you know in the subway they have security cameras it were yeah and she lay there for like more than two hours saying help me help me please and all these wealthy white people walk past her and in order yeah who helped her and the staff didn't give a so like the employees there was actually a question why not you should sue the subway system you know but this is a low trust Society oh you see a person lying face down crying for help in the subway just step over them keep going that's like the bad stereotype of the mean big city low dress Society it's a real example who helped them to poor black Caribbean immigrants who Elton and I forget I think the wife of the Gups was a husband and wife these two black people I think she was working on something like a like a house cleaner in the neighborhood I'm sorry I forgot it was some that was a very humble formal work she was doing and her husband had come to pick her up kind of thing and they walk through but they walked through these two black Caribbean people I think they were Dominican Republic immigrants as I recall immigrants bedico they see this little old woman and they pick her up and they help they took her to the hospital and they stayed with her in the hospital and they visited her repeatedly while she was in the hospital cuz she had no family coming to help her or visitor because I was living in Cambodia at the time probably I think it was yeah and they brought her flowers in the hospital and so so it's funny obviously partly this conversation we're having is a dead end because this issue that begins with Bowling Alone by Putnam this constructing the discourse in terms of social trust versus multiculturalism it evades the question of the particular cultures involved maybe there are uniquely wonderful things about Dominican culture Dominican Republic in the Caribbean maybe there are uniquely awful things about Scottish Canadian culture but I'm not gonna deny that because when you were talking about this thing not knowing your neighbors being cold and distant also people that's what Scottish Canadians are like that's what most white Protestant Canadians are like so it doesn't matter if you live in a monocultural all-white canadian neighborhood if you're in an Anglo Protestant why never get it it's isolating anyway you know you live in this hyper isolated non social state anyway you know what I mean and again there are unique things about South Korean culture you know is so on and so forth so to what extent you know what I've said here in this framed in this way to what extent is it only really applicable to particular contrasts between between particular cultures trusts no longer just a virtue political science it up for you
conversation about immigration politics that's a survey in the past we talked about the social science research associate especially with a guy named Putnam you really created a new academic sub-discipline talking about trust trust as a social science concept this is not trust in conventional sense guys like Francis Fukuyama a number of other popular authors and politics also weighed in on this and is interesting topic what's ironic is that general this discourse within the field of political science started off with the assumption that if we study this issue of trust of what is social trust how do you have trust within a community basically that this was going to approve of was going to rubber-stamp was gonna put the imprimatur of science on you know the liberal globalized cosmopolitan 21st century city and instead what all of the research proved was the exact opposite it found high levels of trust exactly where you have high levels of social cohesion so for example a small town in Spain or everyone's Catholic everyone goes to the same school everyone goes to the same church all speak the same language and there's absolutely zero immigration and you had lower and lower trust less and less trust in a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic society now so I just said to my girlfriend we were talking about this I said well look we should stop talking and we should but if I were to make a video about this for one thing so putnams research his first book on the topic was called a Bowling Alone Bowling Alone and there it wasn't framed in these racial terms it wasn't framed terms of immigration but it basically said look in the past in America in the 1950s or 1960s people at bowling clubs people had these units of social organization like going bowling together and they were important in terms of social capital trust social cohesion even the ability to organize something politically and he said today in America people still go bowling but they go bowling alone they go bowling just boyfriend and girlfriend they go bowling in these much smaller groups he was suggesting that people are becoming more atomized and more disorganized now first of all I actually profoundly disagree with that now with us because how did I meet my girlfriend the Internet you know actually I think he's already it's a profoundly false things they Oh back in the good old days I D fifties people had more more social capital and more ability to auratus the Internet has changed the game for everyone even your private romantic life but definitely our political if in your political life more than more than anything else right already this is already a question but he obviously was looking at that in terms of the disintegration of social capital the disaggregation of social and political life and at that point he was not thinking of it in terms of black versus white or immigrant versus older civil population or what have you but it's interesting of itself organically that's what that area of social science research became that's kind of what happened as the as the research quest as the discipline quest thanks Ari she was doing a lot more talking before I threw the camera I assure you but you know this is just a catch-up but basically what we're saying this conversation my girlfriend asked me served where do I stand on this and my first answer was look I actually don't see this in terms of a straight political decision I don't see this in the left wing versus right wing or all right versus wrong what I would want to emphasize in a YouTube video is I actually see this as a matter of personal character and I'm not saying my personal character is right and someone else is wrong I'm not saying my personal character is politically correct another cigarette but I said look in terms of the kind of guy I am my character just in that sense my character I want to live in a highly cosmopolitan low trust society I am NOT the kind of guy who would be happy in a small town in Spain where everyone's Catholic everyone goes to the same school everyone's the same Church they have a higher level of cohesion and by the way this is one of the criteria of a high trust study when you have a high trust society your neighbors know your secrets you know what was the example gave you from Canada your neighbors notice how many bottles of wine you're drinking from what's going out in your recycling bin you know the number of empty glass let's go and they talked about it like oh you know that guy then again it wouldn't be I was gonna say that guy down the block is drinking more wine than you used to it would be that guy Tom who we went to grade six with that guy Tom who you know from church that guy Tom who's in your bowling club like that's the point that's what a high trust aside is like oh he's been drinking more oh you know that guy Tom his wife is cheating on him they know that that's a high trust Society is the small town village in Spain where everybody's in each other's business nobody has any privacy nobody has any personal freedom and there's frankly from my perspective this is my character I feel there's not that much creativity I feel that stifling my creativity okay I would rather live in the kind of opposite extreme stereotype the low trust society which is the backstabbing rat race you know like the bad stereotype about Manhattan nobody knows anybody nobody trusts anybody you know International electro people are speaking 10 different languages you know I'm so critical I don't only see good things about that believe I grew up in a multicultural Robin in downtown Toronto downtown enough Toronto this the school I went to we had a lot of Chileans we had a lot of Asians we did have a lot of black people they were Caribbean black people where I was they weren't direct from Africa of black people and they also weren't black families who'd been in Canada for four hundred years they work they were pretty new immigrants revenge as mentioned I had a lot of ethnic never and even the Europeans we don't like we had new immigrants from Greece and they were just as foreign as the Caribbeans are more cement you have white people but there there's still really new immigrants they're still speaking Greek they're still speaking Italian they're still really new in words I had a lot anywhere it's a lot of diverse memory I do see the disadvantages I do I do I do within my school in terms of how my school ran there's no question that the lower quality of education than other schools where the students could speak English there's no question you know I really am aware that nevertheless for my character for Who I am I would rather have the rough and tumble of a culturally diverse big city than the small-town Hydro Society and I'm not saying you're wrong I'm not saying other people are wrong if they choose to live in a small town monocultural society right yeah okay so when you were saying that I was like well you've made videos about veganism becoming a community what you want people to be connected and it would be nice to be able to go to a community center for veganism and you have to think about like you know it what you just described as a hydro society I think my mom grew up in that type of society and like my dad as well like they grew up and the suburbs of Detroit in like the 50s and 60s and everybody knew each other's business like my mom was best friends with her next-door neighbor like her mom still gossips yeah yeah so but I didn't have that experience like you know growing up in the 90s in the suburbs of Michigan like I could I couldn't just like go over to my neighbor's house and like I don't I don't think I've ever stepped foot in some of my neighbor's houses like my next-door neighbor is like you know what I mean so like I can see benefits to it because like and you and you have to think about like yeah you personally have this this you say this is your character but like what about when you have your daughter with you like where you want to be able to like drop her off with your baby like your next-door neighbor or something to babysit her and have that kind of trust like this person is trustworthy enough honestly no honest to god I'm a you know and again for me the cosmopolitan multi-ethnic multilingual so it works for me but like maybe I'm a complete you know but so I think more than one really interesting issue is is God not here but you know like I you know in some sense I want my daughter to have a good education but I actually feel it's my role to provide her with that not the schools because I've grown up with in such a terrible but my all my experience Loren situation is so terrible I assume the school is gonna suck and I have to educate her to raise my so that really is my assumption to say that that's how I view it it's like okay you go to school and it's garbage and then you come home and I'm gonna read through your textbook and tell you how it's all lies sorry that's what's important spiritual I key I understand you can't do algebra because the Canadian education systems incapable of teaching knowledge but the only way students can learn learn how to do algebra sitting out with their parents or to write this part of it but I think also I think you could make a criticism of my position by saying that my position reflects my own unique cultural experience which is true completely guilty is it not the case that I just come from a culture I despise that I'm profoundly uncomfortable with and profoundly dissatisfied with you know white english-speaking Canadian culture that I grew up as a dissident in that culture hating it and therefore I want to be in a multicultural setting maybe I would feel differently if for example I lived in Japan and I fundamentally liked and appreciated you and said you know what if federer's ampuls me South Korea there are a lot of things are just being our other a lot of things I like about so I don't Japan not so much you know III like South Korean culture of been to South Korea I started learning Korean as a language at two different points in my life quit you know both times but quit cuz I was gonna study in languages busy with other languages the real reason um long story short but you know okay let's say I really like South Korean culture then would it not be the case that within South Korea I would prefer to live in a high trust society you know so it's not Catholic small-town Spain I don't like Catholicism I'm an atheist I'm a nihilist I'm an intellectual there's reasons why small-town Catholic Spain wouldn't appeal to me but what about a high trust society within South Korea sake Buddhists South Korea let's say it's a Buddhist community and South Korea does hell it's dressed still no still within Korea still within South Korea let's just say I love South Korean culture bit of a bit of an exaggeration but if somebody but there are there a lot of things I preach about South Korean culture a lot of things still within South Korea I want to be where the action is I want to be in the entrepot City I want to be where South Korean culture is being challenged by European influence Chinese influence Japanese influence African influence Caribbean and both I want to be on the the multicultural edge of South Korean culture even if I love South Korean culture I want to be where the tough questions are being asked and that was even the case for me and Laos and Thailand but I'm not saying I'm right I'm not saying I'm right and the people in the small town wrong I'm not I'm saying it's a choice that reflects your character okay so I get what you're saying but you know what you're saying doesn't really line up with where you lived in the past so you moved to Taiwan when you've had your daughter do it small city you didn't I pay no that's true you know and and you live you would have talked about maybe living there in the future again because it has such a strong vegan culture yes there's so many great restaurants like wouldn't you want to live in a high trust community if it were to begin like if you could drop your from drop your kid off with a fellow vegan know that they wouldn't feed your kid meat or dairy so the veganism is very very important to me so this this kind of kind of slants the discourse but I think again part of the issue characters to what extent are you an individualist or to what extent are you a conformist or a commute communitarian you know in your character even if you have a vegan community which is impossible anywhere other than Taiwan and Israel right now i think i think these are maybe the only place in the world being communion exists maybe berlin shout-out to berlin I don't have anyone telling me I probably probably not Berlin maybe Berlin 20 years in the future but there were just a few place in the world we have enough of a mass of vegans to talk about talk about living in a in a vegan community and you're right in the town I was in there were people trying to come into our lives that way all of the members of vegan organized religions so there were vegans who were some kind of East Asian eccentric religion I'm not gonna say Buddhism I'm not gonna call it what is them but East Asian miscellaneous spirituality and they were trying to come into our lives and they were you know uh they were they weren't offering to babysit my daughter probably in the future they would have probably if we got more involved most of us people are pretty busy I don't that anytime the babies pass to you but yeah and they were offering that to help us and become our friends and coming through and they were they these were mostly elderly people some of them some of them still in their 30s but mostly elderly people gone so it is it is coming up more in the hydrocity what are the advantages and disadvantages of this trust in in this sense people in political science people in academia they're mostly interested in measurable outcomes like there's a flood and with no government intervention with no money being paid by an agency the people in the neighborhood get organized and go out and lay down sandbags or they get organized go to the school and just to themselves spontaneously organize the school gym to take in refugees like people whose houses have been destroyed by the flood or something you know where people just do that why on the basis of trust like directly and indirectly this reflects the fact that you know these people from your church or you know them from school you know them from this this high level of social cohesion as opposed to be in a situation I think probably Hurricane Katrina in the States was an example of that where there was incredibly little ability for so for civil society civil society including quite a little ability for civil society to take care of itself and take on this humanitarian role where instead people were kind of totally dependent on the government and and and looking for government leadership and you know government institutions do this stuff now again I'm not saying this to to insult the the people of New Orleans but we're very low levels of trust and we're distrust I mean exactly would you open your home to these strangers and take them in if there's a flood that's a that's a real question of trust right yeah and whether or not you speak the same language as those people you're trying to help these are real questions of trust so a lot of it in terms of what are the advantages that's a lot of what what's looked at but you know I've got to tell you I guess on some level I am more of a more of a rugged individualist well you know I do want to have more vegans in my life on one exchange exchange views with vegans but know that life of living in a in a high trust community if anything I feel it I feel it impinges on me you know so we have one I think you do though you know what I'm talking we have one yeah Moore who knows what's going on my life but look yeah like look we'll just be working out and we're here from outside like hey what if you know we don't we don't go out for drinks we don't drink alcohol but if we went out for drinks and then brought another couple home with us or something she'd know about it or you Burwood know who you had these people over your apartment it's like anything we did that was in any way risque or unexpected what if was so I'm a teacher what if I have a student come to my apartment so let's say it's a female student my neighbor knows I had a female student over to my apartment you know I mean well you have this level of surveillance and intrusion in your life and so on and it is caring she helped she helps us with a lot yeah she really she really does she's giving me my job using these technical terms what I really like is a low trust society what I mean and that but this is this is not incompatible with all the emphasis I've put on going to City Hall City Hall isn't a trust based institution City Hall is a tax taxation and coercion based institution when City Hall comes to bail people out when there's a flood or something it's you know it's the power of the government's powers it even if it's democratic even if it's you know transparent or yes it's a very different thing I'm just being honest you vote about Who I am yeah I mean I totally understand because I didn't grow up and you know I didn't grow okay so I didn't grow up in a metropolitan city like Toronto but I also didn't have that experience of you able to you know go over to my friends house like if I if I wanted to go to a friend's house my parents would have to drive me five miles to get to the you know at least miles to get to my in front house I wasn't able to like maybe it was like the age of my neighbors or something but like I did not babysit like there seemed to be no young kids and they knew I was living in it so so I didn't have that experience like I did like dog sit or cat sit for some people so like you know there was a certain level of trust like for my direct neighbors but like past like the house right next to me I did not know anybody like I did not talk to anybody I did not know anything about them other than like when they mowed their lawn you know so yeah like I understand what you're saying and then and then I lived in Ann Arbor and I didn't talk to my neighbors yeah right I didn't want any civil society cohesion with rather with your neighbors yeah and I totally understand you know like I didn't want people in my business and even my even my roommates I it was kind of like sure it's too much of my business sure yeah sure like I just don't want to know what other people are doing sure hon right not sure one of our neighbors was a nudist Lucy so I got an email into this I got an email challenging me from from Maude vegan so I my vegan actually said she doesn't support like native language preservation which is interesting that's a big political diversity meter I care a lot about indigenous languages like like Korean Ojibwe but I just know time consisted in that - I don't want Cree people in a jib way people to be locked away in a museum you know I don't want them to be in small remote rural communities where they can't is very that world for me also it's crucial that we have education in those languages in Montreal and Vancouver and Toronto the only cities we have in Canada you know that Korean a g-way people can retain their language and be engaged with the modern world you know challenges and the challenges of other of other cultures and it's for me it's a forward-looking engagement but just say that too is consistent because my point is I'm not looking at preserving traditional culture right you want TM machines to have creative I want this to be part of modernity and part of the future I want there to be important questions asked in Korean at you I want there to be debates about nuclear power in Korean at your point you know what I mean whatever the issues are or solar power whatever the issues are being debated in the future in that it's not a and you know obviously for those questions if it's for me for those communities that's going to be a huge question because they'll start to lose their cohesion as they lose their isolation which is for them still to have in the future that's maybe an extreme case of cohesion isolation work yes everyone went to the same school because there only is one school everyone knows each other and they even have problems with with the inbreeding it's hard for them to find someone to marry because everyone on the reservation maybe they're their cousin or what have you and it can be very difficult to even get to another reservation very difficult very expensive the travel reservations again the Internet has helped that a lot when I talk to First Nations people a lot of them said yeah their whole life is on Facebook that's the way they can they can be another people yeah but no I don't see myself as as as kind of fighting to preserve a high trust society there I think that I think that there are a lot of kind of philosophical advantages to living in a low trust society but I mean for both of us I think part of the question is you you didn't save it this way but you in effects we said we're asking would I feel differently about it if I had direct experience with it you know I mean what I think that's a real question for both of us would you feel differently about a valium or something if you had really lived in weather a small town in Spain or small town Korea and I'm going to ask that too would I value this would I value a feel feel but this more if I had a positive experience with great education and great healthcare and neighbors neighbors helping me yeah helping me because most of what I can imagine is neighbors hindering me neighbors judging me neighbors regarding me as insane because I'm vegan you know what I mean not not neighbors that are actually helping and loving and positive yeah I do like something that I just thought of when I was living in a suburb of Detroit so after I graduated from college for three years I lived in an apartment building outside of Detroit and it wasn't in Detroit I'm just repeating that I wasn't actually in Detroit um so yeah but still there was crime and you know I saw drug deals going on like outside my door all the time but like you know I didn't even talk to my neighbor at all like you know what I mean so um but what I was gonna say is my car it somebody almost stole stole my catalytic converter I guess they got spooked and ran off before they could actually like sawed off the whole thing so we're starting the removers yes cuz I turned on my car one morning and it was really loud you know like oh right so you know I took it to a shop and they saw that it had been like that the pipe leading to the catalytic converter had been sawed half way through and they had to they had to weld it weld it back in place so like after that I was really paranoid I was like I don't want my car to be stolen like I wish there was a neighborhood watch you know like I wish I could like get my neighbors so I kind of watch when they were in the parking lot like how can you have a meaningful neighborhood watch if you don't have a meaningful neighborhood rightful cohesion right right that's one thing so like at least when you're in a neighborhood like you have people looking out for just generally like looking out for the neighborhood so look you know my grandmother my grandmother was white he came yes in Toronto she was walking through a subway entrance and this is the single wealthiest subway entrance in Canada because it's the subway entrance for Forest Hill Village specifically a lot of people don't even know that exists it's a special entrance for a subway station so I just mentioned so it really is a very wealthy very white neighborhood it's a very unusual most neighborhoods are that in Canada don't have a subway it does mention Moe normally they you know they're kind of a downtown place and my grandmother was wearing her fancy long coat she was all dressed up that so she dressed when she was going out to do something you know she was all dressed up as fancy as a as a little old white lady can be and walking along there was a there was a little safety barrier that she didn't see and she tripped and fell on it and fell on her face and broke her collarbone so she was totally immobilized and she lay their face down on the floor with you know she turned her head sideways and called two people for help and there's on one videotape because you know in the subway they have security cameras it were yeah and she lay there for like more than two hours saying help me help me please and all these wealthy white people walk past her and in order yeah who helped her and the staff didn't give a so like the employees there was actually a question why not you should sue the subway system you know but this is a low trust Society oh you see a person lying face down crying for help in the subway just step over them keep going that's like the bad stereotype of the mean big city low dress Society it's a real example who helped them to poor black Caribbean immigrants who Elton and I forget I think the wife of the Gups was a husband and wife these two black people I think she was working on something like a like a house cleaner in the neighborhood I'm sorry I forgot it was some that was a very humble formal work she was doing and her husband had come to pick her up kind of thing and they walk through but they walked through these two black Caribbean people I think they were Dominican Republic immigrants as I recall immigrants bedico they see this little old woman and they pick her up and they help they took her to the hospital and they stayed with her in the hospital and they visited her repeatedly while she was in the hospital cuz she had no family coming to help her or visitor because I was living in Cambodia at the time probably I think it was yeah and they brought her flowers in the hospital and so so it's funny obviously partly this conversation we're having is a dead end because this issue that begins with Bowling Alone by Putnam this constructing the discourse in terms of social trust versus multiculturalism it evades the question of the particular cultures involved maybe there are uniquely wonderful things about Dominican culture Dominican Republic in the Caribbean maybe there are uniquely awful things about Scottish Canadian culture but I'm not gonna deny that because when you were talking about this thing not knowing your neighbors being cold and distant also people that's what Scottish Canadians are like that's what most white Protestant Canadians are like so it doesn't matter if you live in a monocultural all-white canadian neighborhood if you're in an Anglo Protestant why never get it it's isolating anyway you know you live in this hyper isolated non social state anyway you know what I mean and again there are unique things about South Korean culture you know is so on and so forth so to what extent you know what I've said here in this framed in this way to what extent is it only really applicable to particular contrasts between between particular cultures trusts no longer just a virtue political science it up for you