Dear Editor,
A society’s viability and strength is dependent on the degree to which its citizens agree to co-operate with each other in supporting a common set of values and priorities. Therein lies the heart of the challenge inherent to Canada’s experiment in building a successful multi-cultural society: how to best encourage immigrants from cultures that can represent different and sometimes conflicting social, moral, ethical, and spiritual values to find a way to reconcile those differences and learn to cooperate with each other in building a respectful, inclusive society.
One of the issues that makes our particular experiment in multi-culturalism problematic is the fact different cultures have different concepts of what collaboration and co-operation should look like, and it is where these differing concepts intersect within the context of the Canadian ‘cultural mosaic’ or the American ‘melting pot’ that we find a clearly defined problem.
I believe that we have reached a point in our evolution where all such things have been synthesized into a simple equation that revolves around a basic binary choice: either we view the concepts of cooperation and collaboration in global, trans-cultural terms and search for a new social model that will serve us all equally, or we continue to be concerned with the idea of cooperation only as it applies within each of our own distinct tribes, ensuring that our future will not look much different than our past.
Ray Arnold
Richmond
