That's a fascinating question.
It's really pretty recent, I think, dating from the 1960s. Until the 1960s, what they call modernization theory was the driving force of understandings of change. The idea was that slowly but surely, everyone around the world was going to increasingly look similar and act similarly.
In other words, English was going to take over, everyone would have the golden arches, and we'd all have roughly the same number of children. It was the best way to organize society, and slowly but surely it would spread all over the world. That was how you were really going to progress: by adopting these best practices and having everyone do them. It was the ideal.
Very quickly we've moved into this new paradigm, which says that if you go down that path, it would be the path to destruction, because it would make you extremely vulnerable if it turned out that although you thought this was the best thing, it didn't work out that way.
For example, there's a lot of concern now about endangered languages. The issue is that those languages enrich our understandings of the world. They have ways of imagining and articulating perceptions of the world that really enrich us. We don't want to envision a world in which there's a single language, a single this, a single that, because it's going to make us too fragile and therefore unable to deal with changes when they come. We need to have that kind of diversity. As in my example, the reason we want genetic diversity is the same reason we want economic diversity: we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket.
What's happening now in terms of identity is we've moved from the notion, for example, that we should have the single to the notion of the multiple. In terms of your hockey example, why not enjoy hockey in multiple languages? Isn't that an enrichment of our understanding of this classically Canadian pastime? It's a big enrichment of it. It makes it better. It makes it stronger, and so on.
It's a very different way of looking at it. To look at diversity as a strength and to see it as a protection that will equip us to deal with change in the future is a very different way to look at it.
Obviously there are limits to that idea. We don't want to get everything so fragmented that we can't work together as a society, so we're back to that balance between what I like to call vertical and horizontal connecting. We need that balance. We need the balance in terms of the commonness that was being alluded to there, in terms of what makes this society tick, but at the same time the diversity that enriches it and is dynamic can continue.
It seems to me that the potential, the opportunity, with new media is finding out how to use it to make Canada stronger and stronger as we move onto that global stage of the 21st century.