Traveling and cultural exchange
I'm about to go overseas for a little vacation. Travelling internationally has come to seem fairly routine for me now, as my in-laws live outside the United States. Part of me feels proud of this, like to makes me more cultured or something. I know, though, that it will take far longer than my brief visits to foreign countries to begin to understand the viewpoints of their citizens. Still, even the momentary flashes of comprehension that I've experienced have been edifying, something to take me out of the U.S. cultural bubble in which I live. I can't help believing in that age-old belief of most liberals, that multicultural contact leads, on the average and in the long-term, to more peaceful coexistence between cultures.
I've been wondering more and more if this is true, however. One of my relatives, accompanying me on this trip, is a hardcore Texan, and she's been constantly talking about how much these foreigners hate America. I suspect she will go overseas looking for that and find it. A postmodernist might even argue that that's all tourists ever see, those facts and images that fit what their psyche has prepared them to see. In some way a sinister fact from recent terrorist events supports this theory: many of the terrorists had spent large portions of their lives in the country they attacked, and yet their heart was not softened by this contact.
Is it tenable anymore to believe contact, simple contact between cultures, can reduce hatred? And if not, what more is needed? This seems to me a question of preeminent importance in our globalizing world.
