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PDF FormatThe elders approached the governor’s divan and bowed low (real low). “Your Honor, before presenting our petition, we have brought you a gift, as a token of our gratitude for these many long years during which we have been privileged to live quietly and obediently under your powerful protection.”
The governor liked gifts. Especially the kind one received from large delegations of rich and frightened Jewish merchants. “Enough of your pathetic truckling,” said he. “What have you brought me?” The elders immediately had both of the carpets brought in and unfurled at the ruler’s feet. “On behalf of the Jewish community of Kashan province, we beg leave to place these two humble offerings before His Excellency, and request that He choose one of them as our tribute.”
Both carpets were broad, plush, tightly woven, and made out of the most exquisite material. The first one was covered with colorful curving calyxes and designs of gold and green and turquoise, intricately intertwined with whirling waves of purple petunias which spiraled ceaselessly and centripetally towards the median. Splendid silhouettes of every size, shape and hue graced the corners, like an ornamental garnish surrounding and supporting a magnificent main course. The vast center was an alternately placid and surging sea of breathtaking royal blue, periodically punctuated by a cornucopia of gemlike little islands of the most elegant design, each embroidered in a different form and color and bordered by hundreds of finely interlaced, snow-white cilia swimming softly in agile and decorous understatement.
The second carpet was… red.
That’s all it was. The whole rug was just one sprawling, solid red mat, from warp to woof, from end to end. “What?” cried the governor. “How dare you! I should have you all decapitated for such insolence! Do you take me for a fool? What kind of choice is this? Who in his right mind would not choose the first carpet—and who in full possession of his faculties would choose the second?”
The hoariest head of the Jewish delegation stepped forward from amongst his peers and looked the governor straight in the eye. “The silk rugs, my liege, are the territories under your benevolent sway—Kashan province. Today that province is filled with peoples of every imaginable culture and creed—Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Manicheans, Azeris, Mandeans, Turkmen, Jews—and in this way it resembles the first carpet. Would Your Excellency, then, exchange the first carpet for the second?”
(“This gimmick,” my grandfather would conclude with a twinkle in his eye, “plus about one hundred and seventy five thousand gold tomans placed discreetly in the governor’s coffers, succeeded in averting the evil decree.”)
You know I have to ask: Which rug would you want? Which world do you want? The world of “Imagine,” where nothing of any significance separates us, where there are “no countries and no religions,” and where everybody is concomitantly possessed of the same tastes, the same loves, the same mind? The chiliastic BORGian paradise of Shira, Ofer and Doron, where all human beings blend into one another like some kind of massive, flavorless, mud-colored milk shake?
Or would you rather the world you live in be the diametric opposite of these worlds? A world of dazzling diversity, of independent and self-respecting societies and communities that value, retain and revel in their own uniqueness? Would you rather live in a world where real people unapologetically express real preferences for the company and society of particular persons with whom they have special cultural, historical and emotional bonds?
O, when will we stop striving to be the same, when will we stop “ever searching for the one”? (You guessed it, the Spice Girls again.) We’ll never get there anyway, but we’ll destroy so incredibly much of what makes life interesting and mysterious and exciting and beautiful along the way. Consult your biology book.It is mitosis which is the engine of creation, it is the proliferation of internal heterogeneity which is the substance and process of human life, of all life. It is increasingvariety and diversity that are the hallmark of growth, of evolution, of progress—not approaching ever nearer the great, all-encompassing One, but rather … fleeing it headlong like the plague.
Move over to psychology, and peruse your Piaget. This famous Swiss shrimp-shrink explained time and again how the deepening ability to distinguish between the self and others—and between others and others—is the most powerful indicant of infant maturation. In this manner, declared he, we go forward step by step, distancing ourselves further and further each day from our original, non-distinguishing, fetal disposition, that all-engulfing oneness which Freud dubbed “ocean consciousness.”
So what is it? Is regression your thing? Is life so bad and growth so scary that you want to make a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and head right back into the womb?
Divided we stand, my friends—united we fall.
VII
“Okay,” you might say, “point taken, but it isn’t exactly a new point. You’re simply preaching multiculturalism. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t have that concept shoved in my face.” Me, too, and I support it with all my heart. And I think you will agree that in order to promote and maintain authentic, polychromatic, humanity-enriching multiculturalism, we simply have to preserve and cultivate multiple, coherent, and distinctive cultures the world over. There’s only one thing that the vast majority of young, fiery and so very often Jewish advocates of the modern multicultural approach almost always seem to forget: That one of the foremost examples of such cultures is their own.
What kind of sense does it make when (among others) college-age, Jewish-born intellectuals espouse the toleration, nay, celebration of the international cultural mosaic, while at the same time entirely ignoring and neglecting almost everything even remotely Mosaic? Is it not astounding—along similar lines—that the same Jewish post-modernist professors who have for three decades and more decried “Western Cultural Imperialism” of every type, are in the overwhelming majority of cases themselves the very personification of the unconditional surrender of what is perhaps the most ancient and enduring non-Western culture—their own Jewishness—at the feet of that very same “Western Cultural Imperialism”? What is going on in the hearts and heads of Jewish students who ostensibly support constructive dialogue and illuminating interaction among different ethnic, national, cultural and religious groups—but identify only peripherally (if at all) with their own? How on earth can people be expected to tolerate, respect and eventually learn from each other’s sociocultural differences… if they don’t have any?
The Global Village is getting me down. I buy an outrageously expensive airline ticket, board the plane in New York and squirm around uncomfortably in my chair for ten hours, the bird lands, I deplane and, lo and behold, I’m right back where I started from: The same English language plastered all over the storefronts, the same Calvin Klein jeans plastered on everybody’s behind, the same rap music as back in the States issuing ever so rhythmically from the taxi driver’s radio (though neither he nor his passengers could ever possibly decipher a word of it—which, by the way, makes them very lucky people, if you ask me). Why are so many people driven by this lukewarm, lemming-like, perennial search for sameness? Why don’t they prefer being themselves—both individually and collectively?
Am I advocating that nations and cultures insulate themselves, that they dig in behind an ethnocentric and xenophobic fortress and erect all types of intellectual and ideological tariffs, the better to maintain their separate group identity, their “cultural purity” (to paraphrase Jimmy Carter)? Not on your life. Au contraire! I am specifically and passionately advocating that the various sociocultural units of the world interact and share, that they challenge, stimulate, edify, surprise, enlighten, influence, and open the eyes of one another.
But in order to share, you have to have what to share, you have to cultivate, and become knowledgeable about, and rejoice in, and build upon your own unique, accumulated heritage. You need to cherish and nourish specifically the distinguishing traits and characteristics that make you different and fascinating, and place you in possession of tantalizing and desirable gifts to bestow upon others—things they don’t already have! (Who wants to bring home a Bruce Lee or Michael Jackson T-shirt as a souvenir from Morocco? And yet these were the only two examples of Moroccan fashion memorabilia available at the Abu’l Hadi and Sons souvenir shop in Fez in the summer of 1987.) If you sow rutabaga and I grow kumquats, we certainly have every impetus to trade with each another; if we both plant kidney beans—what’s the point?
