17

An Idea of Balance

THE ABILITY TO ASSUME COMPLEXITY is a great strength. You could call it the ability to deal with reality. All nine of the mythologies I have been discussing turn on the complexity of Canadian society.

No doubt this situation creates a problem—emotional, intellectual, political, practical—for those unable to accept the cards which have been dealt us. I have a certain sympathy for them. After all, the purpose of the standard nation-state mythology throughout the west has almost always been to achieve a sense of both unity and belonging through the illusion of simplicity. Indeed the central drive of these organisms has been to transform complex realities into real simplicities through centralization, the eradication of distracting cultural and linguistic strands and the dominance of a heavily written code, whether legal or social, supported by factual structures which confirm the existence of the nation. The intended effect of all of this is to create a mythology which could be described as a modern lay religion or a national ideology.

It may sound as if I am describing the nation-state at its worst—Nazi Germany, for example. Not at all. If we look coolly at the history of the west, over the last two centuries in particular, we find a number of factors cohabiting as best they can. The mythology of the nation-state has evolved more or less as described. Fortunately other factors, such as the rise of modern democracy, have often softened the unforgiving edges of these single-focus mythologies.

Canada has been by no means excluded from these monolithic dreams. After all, if this approach has been so important in the west, it is in part because it also represents a great strength—that of concentration. The surface is romantic, the underpinnings utilitarian. The psychological drive is fear dressed up as pride.

We have had our fair share of movements which attempt to impose the remedy of simplicity upon us. D’Alton McCarthy and Honoré Mercier firing volleys of self-righteous indignation at each other across communities is a good example. They were intelligent, intellectually sophisticated men and so they wrapped their monolithic visions in legal and philosophical robes. They actively denied they were appealing to race or prejudice or even to the fears which one group might have of the other. Their respective dreams of unity just happened to be built on mono-cultures with one religion, one language and, in nineteenth-century terms, one race. All they were arguing for, they would say, was the historic imperative of a real nation. Since then the inheritors of their views have repeatedly encouraged us—and continue to do so—in the dream of the standard nineteenth-century monolithic nation-state myth.

Complexity demands a very different sort of strength. It is much less comfortable. It demands more of the citizen. It is the more Socratic position, as against that structured Platonist certainty to which most of us have become accustomed. It is a calmer, more discreet form of mythology because it cannot flash simple answers and definitions. It depends more on the relationship between citizens than on the assertion that the citizenry are united on the essential but unstated questions. These are unstated because they are unstatable, except as heart-warming mythologies.

The assumption of complexity is a search for balance between different elements; not eradication or domination of one over the others, but a continuing struggle to develop and maintain some sort of equilibrium. That this myth exists at all in Canada comes in part from the needs of a northern society—a society living on the geographical and political margins. It is also a habit taken from a long, relatively stable coexistence with the Natives. It is important to keep on repeating that for much of that time the Natives’ real standard of living or quality of living was higher than that of the European immigrants. That relationship did not end in a defeat of one by the other and the eradication of the loser’s myths and social values. Rather there was a betrayal of trust; that is, of an agreement which was legal. Even more important, that agreement was the product of centuries of cohabitation. But the effect of these slow and relatively recent acts of bad faith was to allow much of the Native culture to be integrated, almost by sublimation. Our superficial European triumphalism simply ignored the aberrations which Canadian society was calmly accepting.

The construction of this society by two large minorities with two languages and more or less two religions; the sense that everyone was an internal or external refugee; the distrust of the Heroic gesture, which was a natural outcome of living with complexity; the sense of constant movement, somehow inevitable and necessary in a society seeking stability over great distances; the curious middle-class cooperation or socialism, which was invented in the nineteenth century by this small population living in relatively poor conditions, in order to deal with the complexity of their situation—all of these factors and more led to an idea of egalitarianism rather than populism.

The American idea that egalitarianism is opportunity not result, as Seymour Martin Lipset has described it in American Exceptionalism,1 could have little relevance here. In fact, their idea is not so much egalitarianism as populism. This contains some very real positive qualities and strengths. But it comes in a form particularly susceptible to false populism and class differences.

The experience of Canadians over the last four centuries has developed the idea of individualism as a balance between opportunity and result. If we are now losing track of that difficult idea it is because the relative success of our balanced egalitarianism has created enough widely spread wealth to fool us into believing that we are a naturally rich country, like our neighbour. The immediate effect of imitating their model—as we have increasingly done—has been the rapid return of the sorts of endemic poverty we worked so long and hard to lessen.

The irony at this moment, when our élites in particular have grown tired of the Canadian condition, is that the élites of many other nations in the west have found their old mythological tools to be no longer very effective. These seem to have slipped inexplicably out of their hands into those of a new, strong mythological simplicity—the economy.

Suddenly people with responsibilities are saying globalization, the way they used to say homeland and once said heaven. The market-place is evoked with the tones of racial purity. They sing the praises of competition—of their forceful ability to compete—the way they once sang those of their national language. And the salesmen of trade have taken up the old nationalist military vocabulary. Glory and courage are their stock-in-trade. Each of them is tougher and smarter than the other. Heads of government now cheer on traders the way they once cheered on generals. The practical impact is just as mixed. At least this is a less bloody form of self-indulgence. But it is still built on mythological simplicity, not on the complexities of reality, that is, of society.

The Canadian élites—anglophone and francophone, centralist, federalist, decentralist, sovereigntist, separatist—have taken up the new chorus. For the first time since the world wars they have been allowed to chant and believe in childlike mythological dreams along with their colleagues in other countries. They have been able to talk and act as if the complexity of the place, of which they are an élite, does not exist. And that to all intents and purposes the place itself does not exist as a society with the particularities of a long experience. In tune with this global chorus they have also taken up the new relatively harmless nationalism, which could better be described as a communications strategy. The citizen is treated as something between a sports fan and a consumer who is subjected to repeated barrages of public-relations campaigns. This is the nationalism of warm and fuzzy feelings and it accompanies the new globally minded élite.

But the irony, I repeat, is that the élites of the other nations are finding that their own simplicity myths no longer function. The reassuring vapour these once emitted has been dispersed by the force of economic rhetoric. The result is not so much clarity as an inadvertent mythological void.

It could be argued that a more realistic view of the nation-state has begun to settle into the citizenry of many western states. This is a citizenry which is annoyed, confused, insulted and uncertain of how to protect the structures of the public good they struggled so long to put in place. Abruptly the national élites seem to prefer playing another game in which the public good is subjected to what they say are larger truths. All of these turn out to be either pedantically utilitarian or highly romantic. The utilitarian involves the reduction of society to self-interest. The romantic involves the selling of economic mythology as a new universal religion.

In other words, the citizen in the west is struggling for the first time in a long while with a view of reality which is pervasively complex.

Canadians have the good fortune always to have existed on that plateau of complexity. We built our country on the acceptance of it. It is a sign of just how out of sync and essentially colonial our élites are that, at precisely the moment when those in other countries are beginning to see reality in our way, we are abandoning our own intellectual terrain in order to grab onto the sort of myths which they are discarding. But then the provincial and colonial state of mind always leaps to pick up what the empires discard.

Mythologies—not mystifications—are essential to the existence of any society. The great truths of ideology, filled as they are with inevitabilities and unrelated as they are to the realities of any place, can only hold sway for short, intense periods before their own failures cause them to peter out.

In the meantime the outlines of our mythologies are still in place.

This remains a society centred on complexity. It is so much part of our history that it colours every aspect of our lives and all of our attitudes. The difficulty is not whether our myths remain true or applicable, but whether we can find ways to apply them.

And so, while our élites increasingly give themselves over to their myths of globalization—or are these mystifications?—the citizenry seem to be withdrawing into a state of sullen non-cooperation. Why? Because they are repeatedly told that the mythologies, and indeed the realities, by which they built the country can no longer function.

Sullen non-cooperation is a curious tool often used by frustrated populations. It can take the form of growing cynicism or of scepticism, of disengagement, of loss of interest in public affairs. None of this is necessarily a sign of passivity. These are also expressions of active doubting.

The question now is of what this doubt consists. Are people questioning their own realities and the mythologies which express those realities? Or are they doubting their élites’ protestations of global inevitabilities and of all being for the best? Are they wondering what they can do about these people on whom they have conferred power in so many domains, but who use that power to dismiss the relevance of the society’s experience and memory? After all, the dismissal of honest mythologies is an indication that those who hold power do not wish to assume the responsibility which comes with it.