Story as Skin // the Puzzle of Multiculturalism
What does a multicultural village need?
Since we’re narrative creatures, societies traditionally form around stories of shared origins & shared ideals.
The story acts as a skin that holds together the organs of the social body, allowing an experience of common identity. Without that common identity, we have no compelling incentive to orient toward a greater good, leaving individual interests (and fears) to select our personal choices. As in, every-man-for-himself.
Living as we now do at such a speed of trade and transit, our societies are increasingly comprised of people from disparate origins with disparate ideals — this is multiculturalism, and whether or not that word warms your heart, it’s not going away. In fact it’s always been in the mix of human life somewhere on the globe or other, it’s just that it used to be more like one piece of the puzzle, and now, in these globalized times, evolving multicultural fluency has become the puzzle itself.
To me this is a storyteller’s challenge.
What would be our skin, if not the beliefs we share in common?
I very much honor the beauty & value of ancestral traditions — heck, Hybrasil House grew from an enthusiasm for the carrying on of my own family’s heritage.
But HH was also born of a desire to celebrate a diversity of stories among neighbors who don’t necessarily share my Irish background. I think of it as a narrative potluck — the nourishment of offering & tasting the “recipes” our predecessors have passed down ::: songs / proverbs / miracles / holy days ::: myriad folk technologies used to pull through the darkest times, never forgetting the Light.
So I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can intelligently build a polyculture that neither forces us to abandon the treasures of our specific spiritual legacies, nor pressures us to abandon spirituality itself for a sterile sense of order.
How can we have it both ways?
Well, there are some measures that can be legislated. For example, reimagining school curriculum to include inter- and intra- personal Diplomacy as a core subject from Year One …
But sitting here on the olive green velour of my Hybrasilian banquette, the mind gets pretty lofty, too. Wondering about what could grow this new skin, beyond the realm of “policies” — what can we reach for existentially, that could hold us together in these times?
In America, we recite a pledge to our flag describing us as “one nation under God”.
It was President Eisenhower that added the “under God” language in 1954, part of a campaign to distance ourselves from the atheism of communist societies. You could say this was an attempt to strengthen our national body — “God” being our “skin” … Personally, I would rather be under God than above it (which sounds like a nightmare), but I also empathize with my compatriots who have no positive affiliation with God, and correctly call out the dissonance between such a declaration and the values of a free society, which can’t coerce metaphysical conformity.
What I propose — and I know this might inspire some pearls to be clutched — is that we muster the courage to put something above God ::: Mystery.
This is not by any means a new idea. You could even say most religions originally grew out of an explicit reverence for the unknowability of the cosmos. But I mean it here as a framework to illustrate a new central story — that What We Have In Common, is we’re all subjects of a grand Mystery. Thus the skin that holds us together is no longer our certainty of any creator or theology, but our desire for certainty in this uncertain world. And every lineage has survived this walk through Mystery by the magic of its own traditions, which deserve our gratitude and naturally elicit fondness and pride where they have served our kin.
In this model, the familiar faces of the Divine do not need to be renounced (as per communism), or collapsed into one we all agree on (as implied by Eisenhower), nor do they even need to be considered at odds with unpersonified sources of hope, like love & music — the gods of our histories become an orchard of life-giving trees, growing from the soil of our common ground, the immeasurable plane of Mystery.
Can we imagine this? That it’s not our gnosis but our vulnerability that can hold together the complexities of a multicultural self.