Five Years in Canada

Five years ago yesterday I was accepted into graduate school here in Canada and thus began a five year span that has seen me move gradually westward across the Ontario peninsula. All the while I have gazed keenly across Lake Erie at my native country.

Living outside of the United States has been an instructive experience. When I first came up here I had many misconceptions about Canada which I think are common to many Americans. For one thing, I assumed Canada was “left-of-centre” politically because it has a national healthcare system. I also imagined -because I didn’t know any better- that Canada posed a distinctive alternative model to the American political economy. I definitely know now that Canada is not a proto-socialist country and that its political economy is really not very different from what I grew up with, especially in the post-NAFTA North American world we all inhabit.

I came to Canada seeking the exotic and deliberately seeking an alternative to the American way of life. I know that in 2005 and 2006 I was feeling almost like an alien in my own country. The Bush years were very divisive and because I never supported that regime and was horrified by so much of what was happening around me I was feeling very much in the minority, very much on the margins of American society. In the intervening years I have come to appreciate the margins and find living, thinking and creating in marginal spaces to be very productive and enticing. I sensed this in myself five years ago, but I was not yet in a place where I could begin to imagine the kind of structures I would need to fulfill the responsibilities and moral principles I now know are essential in my life.

Southern Ontario is not a marginal space and I don’t see Canada as marginal to the United States. It is perhaps an irony of the Canadian-American relationship that so few Americans know much of anything about Canadian history, culture and social experience despite the fact that throughout the histories of both societies discussions and disputes over trade, diplomacy, the environment and security have been prominent and recurring.  Before these two countries existed as independent societies the politics of empire linked our two societies closely. In the intervening years much history and different affinities have created a distance between the two countries but think about it: Canada and the United States share the longest undefended border in the world. Surely this suggests there is so much commonality that no one frets about that border, at least not to the degree that Americans worry over the U.S.-Mexican border.

But while Canada is not marginal, I have been able to find the margin up here. I have found this not only in the Canadian Shield but also in the thought of Canada’s historians and in the ideas of two of this country’s most notable intellectuals: Harold Adams Innis and George Parkin Grant. I have found in their thought a deep skepticism of the United States that is thoughtful, intelligent and incisive. In addition to these men, the historians W.L. Morton and Donald Creighton have given me a cognitive map and an imaginative literary framework from which to imagine Canada, imagine North America and think outside of an American’s understanding of both this continent and international relations.

Interestingly three of these men were avowed political conservatives, thus belying the popular misconception in my homeland that Canada is a socialist paradise. All of these men were deeply suspicious of American individualism and consumerism and all of them looked upon American militarism and the rise of the United States in the post-war era with a range of emotions including fear and dread. Reading each one of them is very profitable, not because they were “anti-American” but because their opinions are thoughtful, informed and truly distinct from the body of thought and criticism I have encountered in my studies of American history.

Of course, a distinctive voice is expected but it is easy to forget that one does exist or is even possible, especially in our era in which the conventional wisdom is that liberal capitalism and free markets are the only real path to progress. This abstract understanding of the world is necessarily incomplete. Canada has a history and a social and physical geography that leads observers in different directions from the United States so you won’t find the same issues debated when you read about the fate, purpose, or future of Canadian society. This, for me, has been an exotic encounter.

There was, in Canada’s past, a body of thought that questioned the notion of progress. George Grant is probably the most articulate and fascinating Canadian exponent of doubt about progress and his writings reflect a deep-seated skepticism about a political tradition that praises human ingenuity and in his mind, deifies it. His concern that faith in progress, faith in the belief that humans can remake the world as they see fit and that it is fully proper to do so, drew upon his extensive reading and meditation on the western philosophical tradition. What is perhaps most fascinating about Grant is that his training in philosophy and religion led him to see Canada as an anti-modern society, as a last redoubt of traditionalism, anti-capitalism, anti-militarism. He linked, quite controversially, Canada’s past with the preservation not only of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but with the natural law tradition. Grant seemed like a Victorian in his affinities for public virtue and English institutions and reading him one is reminded, at times, of Matthew Arnold. But Grant really was not a Victorian for he looked at 19th century Britain and saw modernism at work even in the cultural institutions he revered. For Grant, the entire modern “project” of industrial development might just have been a mistake. He dared to wonder this admitting all the while that he could not prove it. What Grant did do was try to begin to piece together a different philosophical engagement with the world, one not driven by a progressive reading of history or of faith in the technological liberation of mankind.

When I discovered Grant I relished his writings because he did something I had never encountered before: he questioned the notion that a nation should have, indeed must have, a progressive history. As an American I can surely say I have never read an American historian or philosopher who has made this point. And Grant did this in a respectable way; he never said that Canada should become authoritarian or become a religious dictatorship; it should not try freezing modern life at some imaginary point or, better yet, roll it back to some past golden age. In other words, Grant was legitimate because he valued and respected human differences and was willing to acknowledge and understand the modern belief in technological progress even if it dismayed him.

Grant made Canada exotic to me by providing a literature that engaged my own doubts about progress and allowed me to begin to do so in historical and cultural terms. Harold Innis also did this by offering a remarkably detailed examination of Canada’s economy and geography. Innis showed me that the pathways of trade, the tools of economic development, and the interplay of geography and climate formed this country in a way that could not be replicated anywhere else. What Innis proved was that imperatives of geography and of locality are formative and this perspective challenges the integrative, highly abstract modern faith that technological progress and economic abundance are mobile, interchangeable and applicable in a common, normative format. This misconception underlies much free market thinking and is and has long been the guiding principle and impulse in the American push for trade liberalization and the exportation of the “American way of life.” 2001-2009 in America taught me to doubt the wisdom or humanity of such policies.

Innis brought my thinking back down to Earth by giving me what he called his “dirt research.” If you can believe that Canada is a country that is a natural system, an organic machine then you have the makings of an alternative frame, a counter narrative to the globalization narrative that dominates modern life. Innis’ argument, which he expanded beyond the continent, is nevertheless Canadian in origin, Canadian by root and branch and, for this American, is another exoticism of this northern land.

Happily, I have been assimilating these ideas. Still, I am an American and have an abiding love for aspects of American political thought and for the optimism of the American spirit. I’ve called myself a Jeffersonian on this blog and while I would qualify that statement by saying I do not share Jefferson’s empire-building affinity, I remain attracted to his vision of yeomanry as it seems like a possible basis for a more decentralized, ecologically conscious, progressive society (quite anti-imperialist). As I say, it is a possible basis and a provocative and enticing vision. And it is American, indeed. Canada is not a land where a clement, rolling landscape dominates and offers long growing seasons and abundant, arable land. Jefferson had a more “edenic” frontier to contemplate (though I dare say it was not edenic to its indigenous victims) while the Canadian lands present different obstacles. This was Innis’ point, an observation Donald Creighton followed in his own work when he argued that Canada’s fur frontier and river system posed a different map to the future than the coastal plains and interior valleys of colonial America.

Canada and the United States are two countries with different pasts and different intellectual traditions but are not irreconcilable and are not enemies. This is something well-worth remembering in an era of increasing hysteria over the foreign and the unfamiliar. I have had the good fortune to have been able to choose to walk along the intellectual and geographic margins of both countries and am finding the experience powerfully enriching.