Vigilant Tolerance

A lot of people would prefer that I blog about tech issues that I matter to them, or categorize for what they really need. Sorry, skip this post. It's a thing that matters when you go beyond the techno-utopian threads of the Valley, or go beyond being a tourist in the rest of the world.

The other night we were walking through the most public place in beautiful Old Town Tallinn, Estonia, and something reminded me how ugly this place can be. Some guy, presumably for his bachelor party, was dressed up as black man, face painted and wearing an afro wig. One of his friends was having him giving him a shoe shine.

I don't have pictures, for fear of smacking the ignorant son-of-a-bitch with my cell phone. Instead, I gave him the word. Many of the words were not nice, and the main one was racist. At risk, I freaked them out.

A friend of mine once told me that when she saw her first black man in Estonia, she thought he was made of chocolate. The problem is pure ignorance, not a superiority complex or more pure intolerance that you find in other countries.

Maybe my problem is that I come from the most vigilantly tolerant of cultures, that of the Bay Area (yes, America is actually made up of many regional and distinct cultures, you can't blame us all for Bush). It's not my problem, but I make it my own, because it really is. To be sure, this place is changing and it is more diverse than ever. In fact, it isn't even a racist culture, but it needs to change from where they are on the scale, damn quick. Ignorance is solvable.

Estonia has had a real issue with occupational Russian minority (30%, the rational-at-a-time source of legal barriers for inclusion), but it seems to easily forget that with the fall of the wall it sought inclusion from the rest of the world for more than security. Now their economic freedom is at risk, not just for the need of immigration reform, but cultural tolerance. Accession should be an uplifting process. The EU will see to that, as immigrants will come from all stripes. So be ready, little country, because you can.

UPDATE: Please read this thoughtful comment by Kalju Rüütli.  Taken together, this conversation provides a more complete picture of the issue.  Americans would also do well to consider his comments on our Administration.

Comments

[Romeo Bravo]

Or even worse here in America, when a black "entertainer"can say the President of the United States doesn't care about black people on national TV. What a disgrace and actually showing much more ignorance than your Estonian friend.

[Kalju Rüütli]

Ross,

I though about the issue you described and the first reaction is to quote old Russian saying: don’t go to others monastery with your own prayer.
Estonians do not have national shame to feel because of their history of black slavery. I think that just the feeling of that shame is pushing Americans to find racism there where it’s not present. The Estonians saw the stupid joke played on the poor bachelor – you saw the racist behavior… So you are vigilant and we are racists? I don’t think that by ripping out the “black” issue from the context and serving that in an “American” way is a correct thing to do.

Because of Estonia’s history we are very tolerant towards other races and nations – as a matter of fact Estonia was the first country in the world to grant cultural independence to Jews – that’s about 40 years before the segregation was deemed illegal in US.

We don’t feel that the usage of Estonian word “neeger” (i.e. Negro in English) is a racist behavior. It has nothing to do with the color of ones skin – it’s a description of the race similar to Caucasian and Asian – that’s what we were taught in the schools for three generations. Estonians are not using the term of “black person/nation” just because the translation can be understood as “dirty (dingy, impure) person/nation”. Similarly we don’t see racist behavior in dressing as Chinese and serving the tea on the street. Or dressing as black and shining the shoes. We are laughing at ourselves while telling to each others the jokes that Latvians are making on Estonians. I have T-shirt with the Russian joke about the Estonians which I like to wear to let people laugh at me i.e. at Estonians.

There is only one thing that I do demand from the people from other races and/or nations who would like to live in Estonia – respect our people and culture by learning the language. Then you will be OK.

I know you did learn some. And thank you for that.

P.S. As I told you on the forum in Pärnu – you are wrong about Estonian immigration laws – Canadians can have visa with no problems - as well as the people from India. You as an American citizen don’t need visa at all. However - I as an Estonian citizen need a visa to go to US – that is difficult to get. Regardless that we are allies in NATO. Regardless that our soldiers have died in Iraq together with the American soldiers. How’s that for racism? Good for dying but not for visiting US?

[Jens-Olaf]

In November 91 I had the chance to go to Estonia. Got a visa for a multi-month stay. That one was issued in Bonn, Germany, but not authorizied in Estonia. Later I found out that I was staying in Estonia illegaly. Some offical in Tallinn had confirmed that. I had to get a new one to be able to leave the country without problems. So, no problem. The border authorities were still the Soviet ones, and I, with visa number 400x from Germany was probably the first who stayed that long.
Two years later I came back with my Korean spouse. And I my must add that either with the Estonians nor the Latvians we were bumping into there were any negative impressions. Rather openness. The Korean in Tallinn we met at that time, he from Usbekistan, was telling us his unfortunaty among the Russian speaking community.

[Jüri Jüri]

Here comes a long one. If I'd had more time, I'd have written a shorter comment.
Dear Ross, you arrived in Estonia with a set of beliefs cultivated in the place that you were born and raised, and there is nothing surprising in that. "I am what I am,” says Popeye. Still, one size does not fit all, and it is an unkind cut to apply the Procrustean bed to the country that is your new home.
Since there is more than one way to skin a cat, perhaps there can also be other valid word views besides yours.
Let me focus a little further below on things that have nothing to do with racism. Before I do that, I do want to dedicate a sentence or two to the topic of racism that you raised. It is ugly and closed-minded to dislike or hate a person you don't know, simply because of the color of their skin and nothing more. Enough said.

Change of topic: what is vigilant tolerance?

Does this mean that if you don't subscribe to a view of tolerance prescribed by a bunch of people (or perhaps by fashion or mental lockstep or what have you) that you would be run out of town on a rail? How can the two words vigilant and tolerant coexist, side by side? The one implies the Ku Klux Klan (vigilantes) and the other implies Mother Teresa. The one implies coercion (we vigilantly insist you must be tolerant) while the other implies openness. These words are somehow incompatible. The one is from the strident lexicon of the True Believer and Big Brother, while the other is from a totally different and much gentler tradition - from the traditions of goodness and non-intervention. Open-mindedness cannot be imposed upon others. The one rules the other out. "Be tolerant, or I'll employ sanctions". Something seems to be not quite right in that mindset.
I can make up other combinations of that kind: "coercive consent", "forced voluntarism", etc. etc. People adopt open-mindedness because they learn or they are shown (as in showing by example) that it is good to do so. "Tolerance" arrived at by brainwashing or twisting of arms does not leave the impression that the convincer believes much in democracy and consensus, nor even in actual tolerance.
Junk the phrase, it is just as silly as Congressional action and military intelligence.

Change of topic 2

You live in Estonia, but maybe some important things may have gone unnoticed. You sound like a learned fellow. Have you had time to delve into Estonian demographics?
We Estonians are a dying tribe, a dying culture. We're going out of business. We're a little tiny people that lots of folks starting from the Germans and ending with Russians has tried to violently eradicate and culturally erase for the past 800 years. Miraculously, we are still here. Half (OK, I exaggerate, but there's a lot of them) our youth (our future) is now in Chicago and Ireland and London studying or partying or plucking turkeys in slaughterhouses, while large contingents of visitors and immigrants from Europe and America are on our doorstep on Town Hall Square in Tallinn.
All of this openness is killing us. It is turning us Estonians into the Mohicans as I write.
You can suggest to us - rather stridently, I might add - your scheme of multicultural ways, which is a philosophy that Americans adopted after arriving on the shores of what is now called the US, to justify both their genesis and assertively expansionist behavior. The Brits are into more or less the same thing, as a knock-on effect that has resulted from their somewhat unkind colonialist adventures (the actual list is long, it is not just the Americans and the Englishmen).
You can of course have mercantile justifications for propagating even greater immigration into Estonia, but we Estonians don't live by bread alone. No amount of turnover can ever compensate me for the loss of my environment – something that crystallized here through the lives and actions and beliefs of untold generations upon generations – as in my parents and their parents before them.
Estonians have not immigrated into Estonia; we've been here all along. Nor have we oppressed anyone. We just sat here and tended to our business over the centuries.
Methinks most Native Americans do not share your perspective, e.g. in respect to the goodness of immigration. Indian reservations in America have more rights to try to keep their reservations Navajo or Shoshone that the Estonians have in the modern-day EU. First peoples would like to continue to exist unadulterated and more or less in their same guise, all the while evolving at some sort of a sustainable pace. They do not want to go out of business, they don't want to lose their traditions or have their language go extinct. We have a right to self-preservation, but will the Estonians be here a hundred or two hundred years from now? The Livonians and a number of other related peoples in this region are extinct or close to extinction.
Demographic and cultural pressures are mounting on Estonia - I'd even say in a desperate way.
I’ve lived in different countries for much of my long life. It has never occurred to me that I should be able to live anywhere that I want on this globe (e.g. in the middle of a community of Amazonian Indians, whether they want me there or not), or that I should dictate to a German how Germany should be, or how America should turn out for the Americans.
There is no given moral right for us to disrupt first people cultures, and cultures of first peoples are not obligated to embrace multiculturalism. Certainly not simply because settler cultures would like global adoption of this credo. Multiculturalism is not the Holy Grail or Eldorado for all the corners of the world. It is not even a gift that we are anxiously awaiting. It is simply perhaps appropriate for places that have been turned very multicultural already.
For small cultures that are trying to remain more or less intact, multiculturalism and immigration that goes beyond certain percentages and rates of change (tempos, if you will) are onslaughts - very possibly terminal ones. If my culture were someone’s body, turbocharged demographic change would be something akin to the HIV virus. The Estonian land may be here a thousands years from now, and some of our genes may be still in circulation, but what will happen to the variegated beauties of my culture? Who will understand our poems and songs, who will live according to our ways and habits, who will sit back and derive enjoyment from the beauty of spoken Estonian? Our many dialects, spoken just a few decades ago, have already almost ceased to exist.
Multiculturalism and continuing to persevere as a small first nation - these things are almost (although not totally) incompatible. Multiculturalism is not an appropriate world view for a small people that need to continue to fight to exist on the territory that it has lived on for thousands of years. Why should I agree to being snuffed out? Added immigration holds this threat. We cannot even pull off the task of graciously absorbing or accommodating the 30+ percent of the Soviets (Russians) who came with tanks and guns and considerable cruelty a half century ago.
Might it perhaps not be more appropriate for you to try socially engineer your own country of origin, instead of a country and society we are desperately trying to save for an ever-diminishing nucleus of Estonians? The Russians wiped out and displaced hundreds of thousands of us when they arrived. We cannot handle the inflow and the outflow that we are currently experiencing. There are only 900,000 of us Estonians, if that. We are an aging population. We drink a lot and we have the highest rate of heart disease in all of Europe.
Nowhere on Moses' tablets is it inscribed that multiculturalism is somehow ethically superior to local (native) culture. Perhaps it would be appropriate to impose it elsewhere! Multiculturalism is conceptually a modern invention. It need not be applied relentlessly to the entire world. I'm sure most of the Maoris and the members of many other first nations will agree with me - a native Estonian son.
It is my moral duty and imperative to fight for the survival of my people. I think tolerance should exist on as broad of a scale as possible everywhere, just as long as it is done with critical reasoning and not blindly. On the other hand, it would be foolish for the Estonian people to allow themselves to be swamped, simply because some members of melting pot cultures who have been raised to see the world in their own way have an opinion on the matter, and because there is a belief among some people that they ought to be able to plunk themselves down in pretty much any old place that pleases them.
When I visit Hawaii, it is always with a sense of guilt and shame. I sense while there that I am "contributing" in some ways through my presence to the final eradication of the local native Polynesian culture. It doesn't matter that I happen to be acutely aware of the way my presence unintentionally disrupts and - yes - even "pollutes" what remains of their cultural ecotope. It only helps a little that I am on their side and empathize with their struggle.
It appears to me you are prescribing a recipe for Estonia that is ruinous for those who are from this place that we love. It may be too much to expect that this "editorial" of mine would bring about a sea change in your attitude, but at least you will know that this is a serious matter for many of us Estonians - deadly serious. I hope it will show you why I can’t agree with you. There is a limit to the foreign influences that we can absorb and still remain ourselves, and that limit - that rate of ability to absorb and cope and still remain ourselves - has been taxed very sorely. We have not recovered from the ethnocide wreaked upon us by the Russians and the Germans during World War II, and now we face new pressures that this little culture is incapable of bearing, if it is to survive. Sorry to rain on your parade, but my worry is a deep and substantiated one.
I for one do not jump for joy on Friday night, when several new planeloads of partying British bachelors and large shiploads of often boozy Finnish kinsmen are deposited in Tallinn. It is entirely possible that I would enjoy a conversation with some of these folks, but maybe in another time and place. They do not harbor evil intentions to wards my small nation and me. They don’t harbor much in the way of intentions towards us at all. But the outcome for us is the same, all the same. My piece is about life and death and of absorptive capacities and their limits. Since you mentioned racism, these guests may be white folks and the Finns are even ethnic relatives, but the teeny Estonian culture is just not capable of absorbing this onslaught! We are ahving enough trouble maintaining our Estonianness as it is! That's what it's about!
Whether the Estonians are racist or not particularly racist is undoubtedly important, but for me it pales in comparison to the question of whether we Estonians will be around at all in a while. We Estonians are in the same boat with the natural environment. Much as the Amazon jungle cannot handle deforestation at the current pace, much as the gorillas and orangutans are being driven out of existence.
Is it racist to want to continue to exist? It would be foolish to relegate it to a matter of just that. I certainly have no intention of getting out of the way, changing, or ceasing to be in my own ancestral homeland. I have an obligation to those who were here before me, and those who ought to continue to be here after me.
To speak of more immigration in Estonia is as to speak of the rope in the home of the hanged man.
It would be easy to say that the writer of this piece is blindly xenophobic, but is the issue perhaps not more complex than that? Think about it.

[nicolas]

Sir,

There are principles, and there is reality. To allow oneself to mistake the two is a decision in itself, that I think you do but you can not force other to do.

When one says "all man are equal" you have to think about what does it mean. it does not mean that Einstein is equal to a lost crackhead.

It means that an institutionnal system should not rely on a premade distinction between people, who have all the potentiality of being Einstein alike, or better.

In potentiality, the next Nobel prize, the nest greatest endeavour in the world can come from a lost village in a mosque in ouzbekistan.

In reality, it'll come from a occidental, or japanese, clever guy educated at the finest universities.

That is reality, whether you like it or not, and it obviously can not be mistaken for generous principles coined by yet another guilt-suffering occidental.

The danger of your mistake, is that, being against reality, it ends up in making a lot of suffer, and of course when condition gets hard, it is the weakest who suffer the most.

May be it is a bit unreal for you, so here is a concrete illustration taken randomly from my country's today news :

29/10/2005 - 09h10
<< Scuffles took place in the evening, leading the firemen to intervene with nearly 40 recoveries, in particular for set fire to cars, one learned near the staff from the firemen from Paris. Taken for target the day before by bands of young people, they intervened Friday under the protection of the police force.>>

[nicolas]

"Change of topic: what is vigilant tolerance? "

You are perfectly right in underlying the contradiction, in the very title.

The degree to which one adheres to a political theory can precisely be measured by the ability to absorb contradicting point, and raise them as a sort of pinacle.

There is a one to one corespondance between this acceptance and the degree of political twist.

Like a "mystery of faith" of the modern times.

I would add one point to what you say about the multiculturalism.

This expression is too a political statement, as, by definition, there can no be one multiculturalism, but many.

This is often not underlined by its advocate, who prefers not to say if one type of multiculturalism is preferable to another.

So as you said this "multiculturalism" concept is recent, and I would add nothing guarantees that the condition which generated it, that is mostly a stable rich occidental society, is, because of it likey to perpetuate.

In that sense, it is a very interesting concept.