2
The Mythology of the Victim
THE VICTIMS OF VICTIMS ARE surely confused. What else can it mean when so many of us see ourselves as the party hard done by? How can we live in such a society? How can it function in such a clamour of competing inferiority complexes, particularly when so many of these are disguised as competing self-confidences?
So in spite of ourselves . . .
we spend our time denigrating people.
it is fear
moves me to say these things
It was a country of pointless struggles.1
The professional victim is a professional innocent. As the one to whom things are done, the victim has no responsibility. This is a comfortable position of passivity. And, although it is difficult to give meaning to such a phrase, this is the classic description of a colonial mind-set—that of the passive victim. Not that there is necessarily any catastrophic level of actual victimization. But if this sense of victimization is kept at a level of repressed hysteria, then it becomes impossible to distinguish in any useful way between real cases of injustice and the psychotic state. In both cases it is the mind-set which will determine how each event will be interpreted. And in general it is easier to mobilize a sense of mistreatment over the mythological wrong than over the real.
Finally, it is the élites who find greatest comfort in such a situation. What those in positions of responsibility know is that a victim is an individual programmed to be afraid. Fear is thus the chief tool of colonial-minded leadership. In spreading fear among the citizenry, it could be said that the élites are exporting their own sense of being victims, which is another way of expressing their own fear that they are inferior.
Of course not everyone falls into the category of these attitudes. Much of this book is about the non-colonial élites. But the history of Canada is filled with waves of recurring insecurity among those who lead us. At the worst of times it is as if power is reserved for those who are crippled by their disbelief in their own worth and in that of the country they are responsible for.
The result is twofold. Changes can then easily be presented to the population as inevitable. And those who occupy the positions of power can do so without assuming the responsibility of power.
This state of mind now once again dominates Canadian public life. At the heart of Canadian leadership lies a need to blame. And blame can easily include expressions of craven admiration or acceptance. Toronto blames the United States. The West blames the East. Francophones blame anglophones. Northern Ontario blames Toronto. Newfoundland blames Quebec and, thanks to a separate issue, Quebec blames Newfoundland. The oil industry blames the consumer. Those with money, who want to keep it, blame those without, in need of help.
I could fill pages with this network of fear disguised as finger-pointing. But at the core of it is a refusal to assume responsibility. The victim does not do but is done to.
A recent book by respected Western intellectuals, Western Visions, summed up the past by worrying about “. . . where to begin a discussion of Western Canadian discontent. . . . the sheer number and range of grievances can make the task encyclopedic.”2 Of course, there have been and still are very real grievances. And a Western alienation has existed, difficult for everyone to deal with, from the nineteenth-century Métis wars to today.
The historian W.L. Morton wrote eloquently about that sense of alienation and described Louis Riel as the leader of the first of a line of Western reform movements. These would include important movements destined to change the whole of Canada, as well as charlatan movements feeding off the alienation. Still other groups were a mixture of the two extremes. The serious movements ranged from the famous Siege of Ottawa in 1910, with its Farmers’ Platform, through the CCF, the early William Aberhart, the Progressives and the NDP. The charlatans or mixed bags have ranged from the later Social Credit to today’s Reform party.
But the point here is the tone of this Western vision. It is a tidal wave of grievances which sweeps away the remarkable success of the West. Suddenly, the fact that the social contract in Canada—one of the real symbols of what Canada is—was invented and implemented largely from the prairies is not taken to be a matter of great importance. Yet even René Lévesque’s social democracy began in Saskatchewan, before being carried to Ottawa and from there to Quebec politics. And somehow the remarkable economic success of much of the West is discounted. Only the failures and the errors matter.
Not that this stance of complaint damages daily life or weakens the region’s great energy and creativity. However, it can’t help but limit the region’s possibilities and therefore those of Canada. After all, the substructure, the frame, the point of view, in other words the basic position, is a level of complaint which bears no relationship to reality and therefore reduces even the most successful of talented people to membership in a confederation of victims.
Indeed the meat of Western Visions goes on to undercut its own general assumptions. Having begun by setting in place the hard-done-by tone, these highly competent writers then edge back towards reality. This is what a society of victims expects from its discourse. First we weep, to demonstrate our basic shared assumptions, then we get on with the practicalities of the real world. But you do not escape your basic mythology with a mere rhetorical flip. So long as you accept it and invoke it, your actions will be fed by it. And if your mythology denigrates you, you will be limited by it, whatever your talents.
The particular view of nationalism developed by Abbé Groulx was gathered up and reworked in the 1950s and 1960s by a group of intellectuals known as the Montreal School. Their sage was Maurice Séguin. Their principal mouthpiece was Michel Brunet.
Although Groulx is now rightly criticized for his social and racial attitudes, and although his arguments encouraged the idea of the victim, it must be said that his arguments about the Canadian experience in general had some depth. What he had to say was interesting, whatever your own politics. The Montreal School was quite another matter.
All they took from Groulx was the negative. The result was a victim psychosis in the extreme. It is now somehow assumed that the Montreal School is just the past. No longer relevant. But in fact their selective reworking of Groulx became the intellectual foundation of the current separatist/sovereigntist school.
This movement—indeed, the Parti Québécois itself—has within it two very different, often contradictory, parts. One is social democratic and reform oriented. The other comes from the Montreal School, which was conservative, in many ways reactionary, and was tied to the old clerical nationalism. I’ll come back to this in detail, as well as to the terminology—separatist/indépendantist /sovereigntist. The point here is the importance of the victim mythology.
The Montreal School anchored their catastrophic view firmly in a highly selective editing and interpretation of the past. They set out to demonstrate that the shape and pattern of all that would follow had been cast in iron by a single determining event—the changeover of titular colonial powers. This, they insisted, was a conquest or rather the Conquest, always to be capitalized. “The first,” said Brunet, “the great cause of our lack of a national sense, you could even say the only cause . . . was the Conquest. . . .” Séguin: “The moment they installed themselves in the valley of the Saint-Lawrence, English Canada fundamentally ruined the French colony.”3 The rest was inevitable. “Papineau’s former lieutenants learnt with docility the difficult art of governing on the vigilant leash of their English colleagues . . .”, “. . . the pseudo-leaders of French Canadian society.” “Once again they were the victims of history’s evolution.”4 These are almost haphazard citations. There are hundreds more just like them.
Was there a conquest? Certainly Papineau didn’t think so. He called it “the ceding of the country—la cession du pays.” Nor did Philippe Aubert de Gaspé in one of the first and most important French-Canadian novels, Les Anciens Canadiens—“La Cession du Canada.”5
Two sorts of people have always insisted on the idea of conquest. The first was the group Papineau described as “. . . those people who called themselves the conquerors of the country when they were merely the baggage train merchants . . .”6 In other words, those anglophones (American colonials and on-the-make British immigrants) who tried to profit from a difficult situation by pumping themselves up as the new masters, in the hope of profiting from authority. They constituted themselves as the Château Clique. The second group were those in the francophone élite who supplemented their own authority by playing the victimization card. In other words, they argued that the catastrophic situation so limited the populace’s possibilities that only this particular élite’s methods could defend them.
They might be called not so much the nationalists (which is a perfectly responsible position) as the narrow or ideological nationalists. Or the victimization or masochist or isolationist nationalists. Perhaps the most accurate term is the negative nationalists.
The mind-set of both pro-conquest groups, anglophone and francophone, was and remains profoundly colonial. And both groups can be followed through our history down to today. Along the way they have burnt down parliament buildings, opposed the idea of democratic justice, tried to limit the other side’s language, religion, rights. Today they can be found in the neo-conservative and negative-nationalist movements, just as they could in the equivalent groups two centuries ago. They continue to operate in opposition to the reformers and the positive nationalists.
But was there a conquest? Certainly there were some battles won and lost by varying sides. These were mainly skirmishes. There were a few real but small battles. There were a few casualties. And in the fallout over the next few years there were a few more deaths. By any standards of warfare, none of this amounted to much. There was then a European conference at which those British who made money out of fur in Canada came to an agreement with those French who made money out of sugar in the Caribbean islands. Had the French beaver lobby and the English sugar lobby been stronger, the treaty might have inverted the exchange of colonies. The colonial merchants in New York and Boston would have been annoyed, but they were always annoyed with London. The French colonial slave owners in the Caribbean would have been upset, but Versailles would have seen this as the inevitable tantrums of moneyed people. What was clear was that neither metropolitan power cared in the least for those who lived in the colonies.
This last sentence should not be misunderstood. I am not blaming either colonial power. Among those who live in colonies or ex-colonies, only those with a colonial mind-set have any expectation from the power at the centre of the empire. After all, our colonial empires, like all colonial empires before and after, existed solely for the purposes of the metropole. Why else should they exist? These purposes were primarily geopolitical and economic. Why should there be any other purposes? This narrow-based self-interest was both their great strength and, in the long run, their fatal flaw. They were therefore run and disposed of from those points of view.
That colonials living on those properties imagined themselves as humans with desires as important as those in the metropolitan centre was perfectly normal. That they expected the metropolitan centre to take this into account was perfectly romantic. That is the colonial mind-set—to imagine that the colony is a part of the living body of the metropole. It never is. It cannot be. It is not even an offspring of that body. At best it is an excrescence—because the essential relationship is commercial or military and strictly one way. The attempt to graft a human relationship on top results in a profound deformation. There is an appropriate Napoleonic political description: de la merde dans un bas de soie.
That ex-colonials should maintain illusions about their past relationship with London or Paris, or that those ex-colonials should reinvent themselves as colonials with dusted-off illusions about their current relationship with Washington, is a perversion of normalcy—a persistent colonial mentality. That this merely increases the indifference and even contempt in those centres is hardly surprising. The insistence on the maintenance of an illusory family relationship, where one limited only to political and financial interest existed and exists, is humiliating for those in the former/current colonies and embarrassing for the metropolitan centres.
This painfully romantic view of our relationships with France and England didn’t really emerge until the second half of the nineteenth century. And interestingly enough the idea of the ‘Conquest’ appeared at the same time. French Canadians hadn’t seriously entertained the thought that they were a conquered people until the romantic, nationalist historians began to insist on that idea seventy-five years after the event.7 It rose in parallel with the Imperial nationalism of the British Empire. Both delusions reflected the growing pains of tiny colonies into an enormous complex country. But both were essentially irrelevant to what was happening in that society. They were the evocations of mythology detaching itself from reality. Jacques Godbout examined much of this confusion in his film Le Sort de l’Amérique—America’s Fate.
I am not engaging here in an arcane discussion over a technical point. What we think about our origins determines what we believe about our current situation. And the Montreal School’s approach to victim mythology is by no means out of our system.
In 1993, one of Quebec City’s leading intellectuals published The Genesis of Quebec Society. Fernand Dumont, who died in 1997, was an intelligent, talented intellectual. And yet he regurgitated the entire victim scenario, almost as if Séguin and Brunet had dictated it to him from their graves. In the genesis of Quebec society there is “only a long resistance.” Francophone federalists (throughout history) are inevitably described as traitors. “. . . the political yoke—le joug politique—could be felt until a short time ago. From the Conquest to the middle of the nineteenth century, England threatened the French Canadians with assimilation.”8
Well actually, simple mathematics suggests that the “yoke” lasted 82 years. Since then we have built, not without crises, not without tensions, not unflawed, but increasingly firm levels of democracy. And that latter period has now lasted 155 years, which is not “a short time ago.” In fact it has lasted twice as long as the period of the “yoke” which itself bears some examination. After all, this is a strong, unforgiving term. And yet the period in question was made up of both good days and bad days. It saw the growth of a French-Canadian middle class and 1791 brought the first elected legislature.
Besides, the period 1760 to 1842 was difficult everywhere in the west. The first reform bill didn’t pass in England until 1832. And it gave the vote only to a well-to-do middle class. Not until 1867 did workers get the vote; farmers in 1884. Universal male suffrage came only in 1918. The principle of responsible government remained unclear in Britain until the second half of the nineteenth century. The Luddites were executed or deported in 1813. The Peterloo Massacre took place in 1819 in Manchester. There was constant violence over the nature of government. As for France, there was a brief violent fling with democracy in the 1790s; followed by violent dictatorship until 1830, when 504 were killed in the revolution; followed by a non-violent dictatorship until 1848, when 1,500 were killed in the change of regime and 6,000 deported. At that point the whole of Europe went into a short period of hope which ended almost everywhere with repression. These same decades in the United States turned on low levels of franchise, a growing use of slavery and unimaginable levels of public corruption. William Lyon Mackenzie began by idealizing American democracy. His years of exile there, after the failure of 1837, left him horrified by it. Louis-Joseph Papineau spent most of his exile in Europe and so never had to measure his American ideal against reality. Those years were for Americans the lead-up to a massive civil war over the nature of power in the union. It was the first of those twentieth-century wars fought with a massacre strategy. Between 1861 and 1865, 620,000 American soldiers were killed by other American soldiers and much of the country laid waste.
Meanwhile, to the north, English and French Canadians were arguing verbally over the best structure for legislative government. In other words, what was happening in Lower Canada was not by any western standards a “yoke.” Nor was it primarily racial or linguistic or religious. Those factors were not irrelevant. Of course there were racial and religious tensions and I’ll come back to those events in more detail. But the struggle in question was fundamentally the same as was going on in Upper Canada—where the democratic forces were faced by the Family Compact—and in Nova Scotia under the divided leadership of Herbert Huntington and Joseph Howe.
In some ways the most original of the reform leaders was not Mackenzie or Papineau or Howe, but William Cooper, who led a pacific revolt in Prince Edward Island based on the withholding of rents. The landowners were the Island equivalent of the Château Clique or the Family Compact and land reform was the key to responsible government. Interestingly enough, it was precisely this issue which would eventually turn Papineau—a great landowner—into an enemy of reform and a pillar of what would become negative nationalism. During 1837 and 1838, Cooper’s clever sedition caused him to be committed to the custody of the sergeant-at-arms of the P.E.I. assembly. In the 1838 election his party won control of the assembly, but London, on behalf of the absentee British landlords, went out of its way to destroy him by refusing to cooperate over land reform.
These small battles in small colonies were, in fact, identical to those going on in the rest of the western world. It was a battle for responsible government which gradually evolved towards an ever-wider democratic form.
It could be said that in the Maritimes and in Lower and Upper Canada the battle was won relatively fast and with relative ease compared with the disordered situations in Europe and south of the border. “We have made a conquest greater and more glorious,” Wilfrid Laurier said in 1887, “than that of any territory. We have conquered our liberties . . .”9 At that point France, Germany, Italy and Spain still had another seventy-five years ahead of coups d’état, civil wars and citizens slaughtering citizens before the essential democratic questions would be settled. As late as the early 1960s there were repeated coup attempts in France. And in the 1950s a whole sector of the American population was still excluded from any participation in their democracy by laws which, thanks to their Supreme Court, had installed an administrative form of slavery.
I am not making one of those inane arguments about which is the best country in the world. People live where they live and cheap xenophobia is just that. Nor am I suggesting some Canadian superiority which allowed us to avoid the disasters into which others fell. I am merely talking about context—a context which permitted us to produce a more complex social structure. You could call it a conscious use of geopolitics.
But the victim mythology, being a centripetal force, cannot register wider norms. In any case, the victim has an automatic mechanism for discounting all that is positive.
In Western Canada, for example, the mythology would have it that it doesn’t matter how rich the society has become. What matters is “. . . the wealth the region might have enjoyed had it not been for the intervention of the federal government.”10 And although LaFontaine, Cartier, Laurier and those who supported them might have thought they were doing something, it was an illusion. Séguin saw 1791 as just a British ruse. Nothing more than “. . . clever concessions to prepare the resignation and assimilation of French Canadians.” A psychiatrist would probably say that Mr. Séguin had a persecution complex. “The capitulation of Vaudreuil (1760) led infallibly to the unconscious capitulation of LaFontaine.”11
There is no escape from the arguments of victimology. No matter how well you do, you are betrayed by destiny, your unconscious or some other invisible force. No matter how rich you become, you could have been richer if only . . . if only. . . . No matter how much power you win, your victories were traps set to ruin you and force you to your knees. No matter how much good you do, some greater cause has been betrayed. Democracy, prosperity, the rule of law, social justice; these are mere shadows which cannot efface the mythological truth of the wrong being done to you. As always, when victimization and destiny are combined, the underlying theme is a contempt by the mythologizers for the intelligence of the citizen.
All of us, it can’t be denied, are victimized from time to time. But this is quite different from believing ourselves to be victims all the time. That is a state of mind, more often than not in large part unconscious. It is buried in our mythology. Or rather, this is deformed mythology—mythology become mystification. And the solutions proposed to this negative state almost invariably institutionalize precisely that same state of mind. This is the result of basing the solution on an assumption that the mythology is true. The solution to the problem instead formalizes the problem by theoretically defending against it. Listen carefully to the rhetoric of Western and Quebec alienation. It is filled with an assumption of the need to formalize that mythology, often precisely by asserting that it needs to be turned inside out.
Nonsense, many would reply. By getting at the root of the problem we eliminate it.
Not at all. By identifying the very origins of our civilization as being the problem, we can only root it out by eliminating the value of everything we have since done; in other words by effacing our experience, our past; in other words by eliminating ourselves. It isn’t surprising that our existence is so often reduced by both sides to a few meaningless feel-good slogans. This is part of the explanation for the referenda discourse which floated about us in 1995 in an atmosphere devoid of a real past or present.
If all our problems lie in our origins, then the solution to everything can be reduced to a new pivotal moment in which we begin again. The mythological indignities of the past will not simply be eliminated. They will be washed away. Like babies, we will be reborn, fresh, new, clean, freed of all negative memories. It is not that reality will actually begin again. Rather this mythological rebirth is to resemble a re-found virginity. And from that it can be hoped that reality will somehow be affected.
In reality nothing is eliminated, neither on the level of the concrete nor the mythological. Instead, by entering into the pretence of rebirth we actually weaken ourselves.
Over the last decades we have seen wave after wave of high-quality, talented politicians and public servants severely handicapped in their ability to propose interesting policies by the ever-thickening walls of a mythological prison. The very illusion of possible rebirth itself becomes the completed prison. That is precisely why the ideologues of victimization insist so strongly that the root of all problems lies in the origins of the civilization. If you accept that premise you are in their hands forever.
Our most basic myth of victimization unites all regions, languages and classes. It is, in short, that Canada exists only because it did not wish to be American. In other words, that our existence is an artificial construct based entirely on a negative. That therefore there is no real purpose, content or agreement on a project. Our endless droning on about what it might be to be a Canadian was born with this fundamental assumption.
It is a negative idea of existence and can be found explicitly or implicitly in almost every historical description of our past. The threat from the south. The desire to be British. The desire to be French-speaking Catholics. Donald Creighton: “The ominous change which seemed to come over the United States during the civil war strengthened every force in British North America which was making for national union.” “If they wished to survive . . .,” well, they would have to come together.12
The ‘not to be American’ creation mythology contains a subsidiary myth: that the country is an artificial east–west construction which tries to deny the ‘natural’ north–south flow. The Montreal School couldn’t have agreed more. “Canada was built against the United States.” “In order to save its artificial separatism vis-à-vis the United States, English Canada had to erase the natural separatism of French Canada.”13
This francophone role as the safeguard for English-Canadian survival created contradictory myths. One, that the creation of Canada also saved French Canadians from annexation and assimilation. But the ideological nationalists’ interpretation was that Canada limited the development of Quebec’s natural friendship with the United States. A whole sub-current of the negative-nationalist school saw and sees this north–south flow as natural and to be wished. From Papineau’s calls for annexation to Bernard Landry’s insistence that Quebec’s real friends lie to the south, this has become the natural anti-myth of the other—that is, of the myth that Canada was built to avoid becoming American.
That by most accounts some half of the francophone population went to New England around the turn of the century and was promptly assimilated into the single language, single culture, allor-nothing American mythology, and in this case reality, makes no dent on the logic of those who preach ‘Quebec’s natural friendship with the United States.’ It isn’t surprising. The two ‘not to be American’ creation myths feed off each other, not off any sense of reality. In both cases they eviscerate any belief that the civilization north of the border has a real reason to exist. What’s more, the argument that Canada stands in the way of a natural virile north–south relationship can be heard as easily in Halifax or Vancouver or Calgary as it can in Quebec City, Montreal and Toronto. It is evoked with a petulant tone the way a child threatens to run away from home. ‘I don’t belong here. I’m too good for you. I could do better with the richer, better-looking, smarter people just down the way, who are, in any case, my spiritual if not natural parents.’ The doctor could make more money, the director direct bigger films, the businessman do big business down there in the real world.
I will come back to this, but my own sense is that the American card is a denial of self which is filled with self-loathing. As such, it is not merely a suicidal act (like most victim myths), it is also profoundly untrue.
Not that there aren’t concrete arguments which can be made for the north–south view of the continent. For a start, there is the role in the creation of Canada of the American threat during the 1860s. And there is the natural north–south economic flow. But are these circumstantial arguments or are they essential realities? Do they accurately reflect our experience?
I would say that they are circumstantial and that the natural flow is in fact east–west. What’s more, it always was, long before the idea of confederation had been imagined, long before even the ceding of the country in 1762.
The difficulty which myths present is always the same. How are we to remember the past? In 1882, the French writer Ernest Renan spoke at the Sorbonne on “What is a nation?” One of Renan’s points was that the terrible internal massacres which built the European nations made selective forgetfulness a key to their remaining nations. “To forget, and I would even say historical error, are an essential factor in the creation of a nation.”14 In other words, it was up to historians and written history to ensure that particularly unpalatable events were more or less left out or watered down or made palatable. Ask in France how many citizens were killed by other citizens in 1830, 1848, 1871, and you will find the numbers strangely absent. In 1944–45? Perhaps twenty thousand. Perhaps two hundred thousand. Who knows?
In 1996 the philosopher Charles Taylor commented at length on Renan’s arguments. “It is necessary that many things be forgotten: the conflicts, even the crimes which divided our ancestors.”15
But I wonder to what extent we choose that which is remembered versus that which is forgotten. Perhaps our duty is to remember everything, so long as our intelligence is devoted to giving balance and context to those memories. After all, the only real protection against the repetition of a barbaric or stupid act is a conscious recollection of the implications.
What often does happen would suggest that Renan was right, if only in a curious way. Often it seems that the worse the crime the less likely it is to leave traces of bitterness. It is the smaller acts of wrongdoing which take on a mythical life imbued with bitterness.
Renan talks of the prolonged brutality, extermination and terror used to unify France—few of those traces remain. One could say the same about many of the great crimes of the twentieth century—for example, the Holocaust and the legal murder which they called World War One. We try to remember. Constant intelligent efforts are made to ensure that we do remember. But strangely enough, even in these horribly extreme cases, the mythology is not one of victimology. The clarity of the wrong done seems to give the victim a sense of their just position. Perhaps it is this which in turn draws much of the poison from the wound.
Nothing which the outside world would consider a major crime has ever been committed in Canada. And yet we have had our tragic and clearly unacceptable moments. These are our real tragedies. The aboriginal community has suffered from endless acts of injustice, violence and dishonesty, including the trashing of treaties signed in good faith; the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755 was one of the most disturbing; and it was followed by a second internal expulsion in the 1780s; the persecution of the Métis was another; there was the legalized anti-Asian racism which culminated in the internment of the Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. “We are going down to the middle of the earth with pick-axe eyes,” Joy Kogawa writes, “carried along by the momentum of the expulsion into the waiting wilderness.” “We are the despised rendered voiceless. . . .”16 Here, as elsewhere in the world, it is interesting to note the low level of bitterness which these dreadful events have left behind.
Of course there have been hundreds of other unacceptable actions. As in the rest of the western world endemic anti-Semitism and a panoply of specific racisms plagued us from coast to coast in the first half of the century. The anti-Chinese head tax in British Columbia, Regulation 17 limiting French schooling in Ontario and the exclusion of the old Halifax black community are just three examples. Most of these and other prejudices have been beaten back into the shadows, where inevitably they still lurk. Again the levels of bitterness among the very real victims are surprisingly low.
But what about the palpable mistreatment of French Canadians inside Quebec? Surely that belongs on the list. The wrongs done were very real. But the context was also far more complicated. As the political scientist Jean-Pierre Derriennic puts it, “if you explain to an immigrant that French Canadians have also been second-class citizens, he goes off to look in the books. He discovers that the Saint-Lawrence valley has been governed since 1791, almost without interruption, by a State of Law which included an elected assembly.”17 In other words, you cannot compare the fate of those who once dominated in Canada—the aboriginals—with the state of the francophone community. Whatever its problems, the inheritance and the status of the latter is not a tragedy.
Its history is filled with positives and negatives and all of the interested parties have well-entrenched positions. Each has their list of wrongs. I would rather attempt to avoid the canonical approach, tipping my hat at appropriate moments as the stations of victimization are passed. That is, I would rather approach a complex problem with the dignity it deserves, and deal with it step by step throughout the book.
If simplifications are required, why not begin with what could be called the two great tragedies of Canada’s first century? They began as political struggles and ended by infusing much of the mythological and real poison and bitterness into our society.
The first was the victory of the Ultramontane movement in Quebec and the second the victory of the Orange movement in Ontario. Each in its own way was a spearhead of intolerance and a manipulator of fear. The Ultramontanes took French Canada off a relatively normal track of political and social evolution. In many ways, the result was the loss of a century. The infection of healthy nationalism with a sectarianism that can still be felt in the negative nationalists was one of their accomplishments. The Orange movement provoked the Métis persecution, attacked francophone rights and caused Ontario also to lose close to a century of balanced evolution. Its infection of society can still be felt when unilingual movements or other reflections of prejudice break out.
It could be argued that these two racist, anti-democratic movements are the most important contributions made to Canadian political life by the mother countries. They invented and sent us organized philosophies which summarized their own internal battles and prejudices. These quickly took on lives of their own here and became the clear expression of the forces eager to destroy the moderate reformers. It follows that they were determined to destroy the positive, reforming anglophone–francophone alliance.
The Ultramontane movement came out of the French Revolution and represented the response of the reactionary part of the Catholic church to modernization. The Ultramontanes refused modernization and fought for church control over education and politics. The movement began to grow in Canada in the 1820s and its attitudes survived until the Quiet Revolution in 1960.
The Orange Order brought the prejudices and divisions of Ireland to Canada in an organized manner in 1830. It can be argued that it became a more moderate force as the century wore on and other more extreme groups appeared. But these new extremists were very much the children of Orange attitudes.
I am not talking here of an obscure past. These are the mechanisms of imported prejudices and they continue to function. If you examine the arguments, the vocabulary, the attitudes of the Reform party and the Parti Québécois, you quickly find yourself tripping over the arguments, vocabulary and attitudes of the Orange Order and the Ultramontane movement.
It could be said that D’Alton McCarthy and Monsignor Bourget, the ultimate key leaders of the two movements, are the dark figures of Canadian history. In C.G. Jung’s terminology, they are the shadow side. They activated myths of the victim at precisely the moment when there was no justifiable reason to do so on either side. Although history is made neither by great men nor villains, for working purposes it could be said that they are the evil alter egos of the Siamese twins. It is they and their allies who have worked the obscure, abstract realms of mythology, defying reasonable comparisons and norms.
“I had no understanding,” Arthur Buies wrote in 1867 in Quebec City, “how true it is that all the vices flow from ignorance.” Ignorance, of course, is only marginally a matter of education or the lack of it. “When he could not understand a thing he straightway condemned it,” was how L.M. Montgomery described that mind-set in a town in northern Ontario. How curious that we should so suffer from the mind-set of a prisoner in this country “forever untouched,” Bruce Hutchinson wrote, “unknown, beyond our grasp, breathing deep in the darkness and we hear its breath and are afraid.” That is the force of mythology gone wrong. “To live in prison is to live without mirrors,” Margaret Atwood puts it. “To live without mirrors is to live without the self.” The conclusion is Milton Acorn’s:
I’ve tasted my blood too much
to love what I was born to . . .
I’ve tasted my blood too much
to abide what I was born to.18
That is precisely the effect of mythological walls. And somehow, at least so far, modern communications have not helped. So far, as Harold Innis, the great philosopher of communications, saw it, they “have made understanding more difficult.”19 Communication without understanding is the new form of the negative nationalism promulgated by McCarthy and Bourget. The very mass of information and sounds flying around us creates unease, drives us into stubborn, ill-tempered passivity and makes it easier for the ideologues to work us with fear. To every attempt at balanced memory, we tend to reply with the bitter, often cynical assurance of the victim.