We’re not in North Vancouver any more, Toto.
We’re in London, a stop away from our ultimate destination in the south of France, a one-family undertaking to turn the tide of tourism going the other way, as far from France as they can before discovering they’ve come full circle.
It’s a bad year for tourism in France. Apparently there’s not even a lineup to get into the Louvre. Here in London, though, fear of terrorism hasn’t deterred anyone from clogging up the usual sites, especially now that the weather, much like Vancouver’s, has finally, grudgingly, turned summery.
Vancouver likes to think of itself as a poster child for diversity, but it’s got nothing on London where the national language appears to be everything under the sun. English isn’t exactly rare, but it’s only one of dozens of languages spoken in this teeming city of at least 13 million people.
As I write, I’ve just spent five minutes trying to communicate with a housekeeper on the topic of coffee, neither of us making much headway until I was able to show her a packet of what I was trying to describe. This in the cradle of the English language.
The English themselves are conflicted about being at the crossroads of the world, as the recent Brexit vote indicated.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Ukip Party who surprised everyone, himself included, by successfully engineering the referendum to leave the European Union, bluntly maintains that Brexit is all about immigration, not bureaucracy in Brussels or some other irritant. A slim majority of Brits, it appears, are irrevocably worried about being overwhelmed by streams of migrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, as well as the traditional Commonwealth sources.
It goes deeper than a simple search for economic opportunity. This is where East meets West, with unsettling implications. This was vividly illustrated yesterday as I toured the Natural History Museum which, with its Darwin Centre, is the global showcase of evolution. In the depths of the centre, a few metres from the specimens Charles Darwin collected to formulate his theory that all life evolved without the intervention of a Prime Mover or an Intelligent Designer or a Great Big Old Guy in the Sky, a group of Muslim women were kneeling toward Mecca in midday prayer to Allah.
As someone who agonized over the implications of his life’s work so much that he delayed publishing for decades, Darwin understood the compelling attraction of faith and religion, but ultimately succumbed to scientific evidence, and is now notorious as the man who hastened the death of the Deity, inspiring a modern cadre of radical rationalists, men such as Richard Dawkins and the now departed Christopher Hitchens. If Hitchens, the author of God is NOT Great, somehow hears from beyond the grave that people are declaring God IS Great in the temple of science, he must surely be twisting in it.
It’s a powerful juxtaposition, and one we’ll all encounter more often in everyday life as the world shrinks and the capacity to get around expands. If you can afford it, western civilization is just a few hours away. You can arrive with your entire culture intact, and find upon arrival that respect for all cultures and religions are enshrined in the Charter of Rights: you get accommodation without fear of assimilation.
Until recently, that is. Brexit is just part of a reactionary movement that has many faces: the right-wing National Front of Marie LePen in France to the Scary Clown Party of Donald Trump in the United States. Here in Canada, and particularly in Vancouver and on the North Shore, we’re still immersed in endearingly sunny ways, but you get the feeling we’re a single terrorist incident away from a change in the direction of the wind.
The trip from the North Shore to London takes less than a day, if you factor in the time it takes to get across the Lion’s Gate Bridge and the change in time zones (and they don’t call it Greenwich Mean Time for nothing), but it’s a full-scale flight into the future … at that critical point where diversity becomes something more than an ideal: a powerful challenge to the status quo.
Ultimately, I believe in the global chorus of language and culture, but I also believe just as fiercely in science and that includes evolution. Currently, there’s an uneasy coalition, but it’s fragile and could be easily elbowed onto the street and trampled.
And who does the trampling hangs in the balance.
Journalist and communications consultant Paul Sullivan has been a North Vancouver resident since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Madonna. p.sullivan@breakthroughpr.com
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