AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET

Having just returned to Australia after some hard traveling through a large chunk of South East Asia, I was more convinced than ever of the unbridgeable gulf separating radically different races and cultures. In the final analysis, a common ground of understanding does not exist.

For instance the endemic practice of accosting foreigners in a country like Vietnam, be it by taxi drivers, ‘cyclo’ drivers, motor cycle taxi drivers (by far the most impervious to the word ‘no’) hawkers, vendors, shoe shine boys and sundry touts can, after intense reflection, only be understood either in terms of their seeing the foreigner as so completely alien (almost as in other planet alien) that they do not share the same human feelings, or that they do indeed recognize a commonality but simply do not care. That is, the foreigner, and here what is really meant is ‘Westerner’, being so much ‘the other’ is not worthy of the same consideration as would be shown a member of the native people.

Presupposed here is a system of manners, mores and general civility that lubricates the workings of every society and, moreover, without which a society would not be able to peacefully survive. So assuming that Vietnam is not an aberrant society lacking this social lubricant and that the behaviour shown to foreigners would be seen as offensive and be morally disapproved of if exhibited amongst one’s own, either one of the aforementioned dynamics must be operative.

Before one, nearing despair, reaches for the coin to be flipped, it may be more profitable to enlist the aid of ‘Ockam’s razor’, the philosophical imperative that the simplest answer is more than likely the right one. It could be safely assumed that the razor would cut away the foreigner-as-visitor-from-outer-space theory, leaving the more mundane but less palatable concept of the foreigner as sucker to be exploited for all he or she is worth.

Here though we are getting perilously close to what anthropologists would recognize as a ‘tribal’ moral system, that is, a dual system dictating moral behavior depending on whether it is related to the members of one’s own tribe or to members of an ‘out group’. The two systems are more often than not polar opposites with robbery, cheating and even rape, murder and torture of ‘the other’ being not only sanctioned but praiseworthy.

This, needless to say, is becoming a dark picture but, it must be said, has only been arrived at after a long, hard, exasperating effort to understand the complete ease with which the foreigner can be viewed as an insensate being with none other than the economic value of say a pig trussed for market – of no other value than can be extracted for the benefit of another.

The implications of this train of thought for the crowding together of diametrically opposed races and cultures in the experiment of Australian multiculturalism are truly deadly. For, conversely, just as the behaviour of the Vietnamese towards foreigners in their midst – the cheating, the rudeness, the harassment, the stalking, the inability to take ‘no’ for an answer is seen as morally justified, it would be seen as just as morally justified, if not legally, in Australia to react to this behaviour with physical retaliation.

This currently is an abstraction, a projection because groups such as the Vietnamese are still relatively small minorities in Australia with a long way to go before any kind of critical mass can be achieved. This status engenders caution and hobbles the urge to fly true colours.

For argument’ sake however, let’s assume that critical mass is being achieved, or because a state of denial will forever preclude this acceptance for some, let’s simply play the ad absurdum game. The number of Vietnamese has achieved parity with that of ‘Australians’. (More than likely the first ‘minority’ to achieve parity with the majority, because of subtle but irresistible pressure placed on compliant Australian political leaders to accept ‘excess’ population, will be the Chinese, but let’s just for the moment stay with the Vietnamese.) A law of nature states that two distinctly different groups sharing the same territory will be in conflict. Parity suggests an equal contest. If this equality did exist a type of mutual deterrence may preclude a degeneration into deepening, more chaotic violence. Equality however will not prevail. As has already been noted, a tradition of dual morality with long historical roots will be practised by one group while the other will be hamstrung by a universalism animated by 2,000 years of Christianity, with humanism and the new religion of anti-racism now receiving the baton of social control (some would say mind control) – of white people – the ‘Australians’.

As realisation dawns that Australians are losing the battle that was never even conceived of as a battle, and bleeding from a thousand small wounds inflicted by guile and stealth, protection against which they have been deprived, an escalation into outright, non-pretend violence will be inevitable.

But even before critical mass has been achieved it may well be the little things – the small darts that sting and scratch in that no man’s land of non-understanding that marshal the tribes into opposing armies.

In Vietnam when, as a foreigner, you are harassed and stalked by cyclo-drivers and hawkers, you take it (more or less). In Vietnam, when someone is trying to force his way onto a train while you’re trying to alight laden with luggage, you take it. Or when someone is simply standing in the doorway of a train while you’re trying to board laden with luggage, you take it. When someone blithely invades your personal space, you take it. When someone routinely pushes in front of you in a queue, you take it. When there seems to be a law that prevents traffic from stopping for pedestrians at so called crossings – the contempt of the horseman for the dismounted never so egregious – you take it. When you see cruelty to animals, you take it.

In Australia, you don’t. Therein lay the seeds of impending disaster.