Civilizations encourage our... «Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London»

Civilizations encourage our hypocrisies to flourish. And by so doing, they undermine globalization’s only plausible promise: that we are free to invent ourselves. Why, exactly, can’t a Muslim be European? Why can’t an unreligious person be Pakistani? Why can’t a man be a woman? Why can’t someone who is gay be married?
Mongrel. Miscegenator. Half-breed. Outcast. Deviant. Heretic. Our words for hybridity are so often epithets. They shouldn’t be. Hybridity need not be the problem. It could be the solution. Hybrids do more than embody mixtures between groups. Hybrids reveal the boundaries between groups to be false. And this is vital, for creativity comes from intermingling, from rejecting the lifelessness of purity. If there were only one human left, our species would die.