Correspondent: I was so impressed by your e-mail, so interested to hear these personal facts about your background. What a strange world we live in. Because of Communists taking over your country decades ago, you grew of age in England, and then ended up in Canada, where you, an Ethiopian by birth, found yourself identifying with the countries that were really the only countries you knew.
How can we understand the disorder of human existence, without seeing that it is somehow a distortion of God’s order?
Kidist: Yes, it is a little mystical.
But, I am actually an optimist by nature. I think part of my “mission,” although I am not making it part of my life’s plan, only putting it in where it is obviously asked for, is to tell my relatives that their best bet is their own country.
I think in a strange way I also bring these insights, more intuitive than intellectual at the moment, to the West.
Plus I love the West. I have studied under it—the music, the art, not just studied them but practiced them as well. I am a part of it. I have never met an immigrant who has passed my rigorous criteria for being part of the West. It is a tough call.
Kidist: As I re-read my last email to you, where I wrote: “I think part of my ‘mission,’ although I am not making it part of my life’s plan, only putting it where it is obviously asked for, is to tell my relatives that their best bet is their own country,” it sounds as if I’m evading the issue.
Not at all. Even a quiet word of “Well, there is always going back” resonates, as shown by feedback I get months later. Also, I am not going to hold slogans saying, “Go back home,” but will repeat my position. Also, my general behavior and interpretation of things shows people my position. To be big-hearted about it, I just think that minority immigrants (and their off-spring) will be happier where they came from. I can see generations of discontent people otherwise. So, I’m saying this for THEIR benefit.
Correspondent: I thank you again for this contribution to our discussion, and I want to add something. What is it that made it possible for you to see clearly this important truth about most non-Western immigrants’ lack of fit in the West—this truth that most contemporary white Westerners do not see? It is that for you, the West is not an abstraction. It’s not an idea of freedom. It’s an actual cultural tradition and way of being, which you yourself loved and chose to join. Furthermore, it’s not just the West that you see in real, concrete terms, but the cultures of the immigrants. They also are not abstractions but real people with real cultures and real ways of being. Therefore you understand that these two cultural substances, the West and the respective immigrant cultures, are distinct from each other and cannot happily co-exist in the same society.
Westerners cannot see this basic, obvious truth, because the modern Western mind only allows for universalist abstractions. In the name of the “equal dignity of all human beings,” liberalism strips away our actual humanity.
Kidist:
You say:Another correspondent: I’d be gilding the lily by adding anything to your fascinating discussion with Kidist. I just thought you should hear that it is edifying reading.It is that for you, the West is not an abstraction. It’s not an idea of freedom. It’s an actual cultural tradition and way of being, which you yourself loved and chose to join. Furthermore, it’s not just the West that you see in real, concrete terms, but the cultures of the immigrants. They also are not abstractions but real people with real cultures and real ways of being.That’s exactly right. Why is it so hard to see that? :-)