Worth the Fee to Read It

We don’t go out of our way to teach history. Such “history” as is taught today is really social studies: forcing the peoples of other times and places into a convenient matrix that reinforces current social norms. We’re neither interested in truly exploring other times, nor do we encourage the notion that maybe, in difference, there is something to be learned, nor the idea that perhaps to take this step forward, society also took a different step backward.

Know Where You Come From …

Western society today is anything but monolithic when it comes to religious belief — the Protestant revolution, scientism in the nineteenth century and a feeling of guilt surrounding autochthonous and immigrant communities saw to that — but the reality is that if you look back to 1000 CE you find, in the West, a compact, unified, Latin Catholic society. These are our ancestors: projects such as the combined National Geographic/IBM genographic project are demonstrating the concentration of genetic paths in Western society, not just in Europe but in the settler communities of the Americas, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. We — mostly — remain within our compact society to this day.

I bring up religion because of an experience I had in 1991. On the Côte d’Azur for the first time, my family and I made our way to a little Provençal hill village — Mougins — for a late lunch. After a fine meal on the square, we wandered across to the Church on the other side and pulled open the door. A millennium of must, dust, soot (from the candles) and the stink of people over the centuries rolled over us. (This is why I had come!)

The building was in the oldest style of Western architecture, when the West was first starting to set its own style. (This style — Romanesque — spread almost as wildfire across Europe in the space of a few decades.) This church betrayed both the recent occupation of the area by the forces of the Caliphate and the older Levantine Latin Orthodoxy that preceded the long transformation of the Western Church: it remained a “world cave” of the Levant, common to Orthodox, Monophysite and Nestorian Christians, Jews and the residual Samaritans, Muslims, Zoroastrians and Parsees, and the like, where the building is all interior (the outside merely creates the cave but is not really worthy of decoration, and windows are small, merely to allow a little light in, but not to illuminate the space). Yet the West can be seen: the ceiling was not rounded, to close the space in, but peaked and drew upward to the infinite; the interior designs drew the eye up; even in the stonework images of men, angels and the Lord appear, the graven images forbidden in the Levant and replaced by iconostases and geometric designs. This was a poor church, and had been from its creation — but it spoke to the birth of a new people. In only a century more, the foundations of generations-long projects to build soaring cathedrals would be laid.

Look how much is embedded in this simple description: comparative art and architecture, the sense of self of a people, theological history, style, substance and passion, comparisons to others who were not of this society, even though from one generation to the next, in this part of the world, Latin (as it evolved into Provençal, Savoyard and the language of the oc, then was taken over by the langue d’oil of French and the Italian dialect spoken there only 150 years ago was pushed out through centralized education) has never been lost: one generation has always understood the previous and the next. Yet the presumptions of Classical Rome in its Latin, of Levantine Orthodoxy in the Latin of, say, a St. Augustine or a St. Benedict, and of Western Mediaeval Latin are as different as night and day: each is part of a self-contained society.

For those of the Renaissance to throw away the learning of the High Mediaeval — that of our society — in favour of the works of Classical Rome simply because Cicero and his kin never said ego habeo factum and instead used feci was a ridiculous loss and rejection of self, especially since that assertion of the self and the worth of the person is part of what makes the West the West. But from then to now our society remains riven by currents of denying what it is, what makes it unique, valuable and (from time to time) great, and therefore why doing what is needful to preserve it rather than changing just anything and everything on a whim is wrong, and so the rear guard of those who would conserve the West — true Tories, one and all — against the leftward drift of liberalism continues.

… and Where You Are Going

So much political and economic writing — goodness knows, I’ve contributed my own share of it! — leaves the historical in the dust. Liberalism or leftism (at the time of the French Revolution the two would have been synonymous) is resolutely anti-historical: all that matters is the current situation, and there are no restraints other than the practical (not enough tolerance for debt “right now”, or too many other things pressing on us “right now”) placed on change.

Yet what that says is that we — and other peoples from other civilisations — are all fungible and malleable; that someone’s traditions are folklore and easily discarded. It is certainly true that individuals who emigrate and settle in the lands of a civilisation not their own by heritage can and do acculturate, often, after two or three generations, to the point where they have accepted their new home and its traditions not only as their own, but, in a peculiar sense, as their heritage. (It is what the French do with their process of educating future citizens, either in school or to prepare to take the citizenship test: one reaches a point where one can say, without irony, “Our ancestors, the Gauls”.)

Acculturation and blending in — the Diefenbakerian “unhyphenated Canadian” motif in our own national life — is one thing at an individual level. But, as George Grant, the Canadian Tory philosopher, noted, our love of the good, the true and the beautiful is rooted in love of self, of immediate family, of friends, of community, of nation … and thus of society. To reject the West and its traditions, then, is to demonstrate a lack of love for who you are. Philosophers have noted that you can have “love for the amorphous” (a “love of all humanity”, for instance), but only at the price of denying love for yourself as you are, love for friends and family, love for your community, etc.

To reach the amorphous, one must deny history. This is best done by removing it from serious study: burying it in scholastic detail where it is taught (universities), turning it into social studies (or removing it from the curriculum altogether) in the schools, treating questions of whether to preserve past buildings and existing inefficiencies in the urban fabric as an economic decision, etc. Thus we have our society as it exists today, with no concern for its past — or its future (witness that we have known since the 1970s [US President Carter was reviled for pointing it out!] that the days we are now coming into were inevitable, yet we continued to build as though tomorrow would not come).

Only through learning history fully will we find our way out and prosper again.

The blogosphere is an interesting space from a political point of view, for it is highly unlikely that anyone would write about matters political who didn’t have some internal drive or passion toward it. What this means is that we are far more likely to find partisans online — both as writers and as readers/commenters — than we are in the broader public.

Writers, of course, write because they want to be read. So they look to join blogrolls and communities. These help bring new readers their way. But they often come with a price: one of converging upon the general view of that community. Add a few overt partisans to that mix, and slowly that community will become almost a reflexive mouthpiece for one party or another.

For those with active or independent minds, such communities can seem a straight-jacket.

Moreover, no community exists in isolation. The community itself will have a site, and feeds, which must be managed. Perhaps this effort is donated as a labour of love, but, more likely, it must be funded, by donations or by advertising. The net effect is that the community has a vested interest in reinforcing itself around its sources of income. How expulsions from the community can then occur isn’t hard to see.

I don’t — and have never — belonged to such a community. The reason for this is that I believe, deeply, that we should decide each issue on its merits. This can lead us into conflict with those who subscribe to the community’s position, “right or wrong”.

As an example of this, take the recent issue of Dan McTeague, MP, and his RESP tax deduction private member’s bill. Perhaps this is a worthy measure (I don’t happen to think so; I prefer simpler tax systems, and this is yet another complexity) but fundamentally my opposition to it stems from the bill’s disregard of Parliamentary tradition. Tradition matters to me: while it does change, it should change by express deliberation and consideration of what is being given up, not backed into in a fit of partisan excitement. I believe the Speaker erred in allowing this bill to proceed: while he might have been able to find no explicit restriction upon which to hang a denial of a bill like this which is all about restriction of revenue planned for in the budget, our tradition is that it is the budget which is voted up or down, and that such a measure should have been an amendment to the budget itself.

Does this then make me a Government supporter (as in last Thursday’s Ways & Means vote, which included an explicit repeal of the previously-passed RESP provision)? Obviously, yes, but as someone who shared an issue, not someone even who is necessarily doing it for the same reasons (the Government’s stated reasoning is that this would threaten the stability of the budget to remain out of deficit, which is also a truth, but only if no move is made to accommodate the new provision as a choice; the Government did not choose to challenge the affront to Parliamentary tradition, as it ought to have done).

Men and women of good will and engaged, active mind can disagree with one another without any sound and fury at all. My fellow writer — and one whom I respect deeply — Werner Patels, the author of Ideas and Issues, supported the RESP provision. Promoting post-secondary education and tax relief are also things I support; we disagree as to the methods to accomplish these (to some extent), and we obviously disagree about the value of hewing to Parliamentary tradition and the Canadian methods of responsible government. But we can share these, even commenting on each other’s writing, and the voice is never raised.

Compare that to the partisan! Both the Liblogs (the self-identified Liberal Party supporters) and the Blogging Tories (the self-identified Conservative Party supporters) wrote reams on this whole tale — opposed to each other, naturally — and both echoing the sound and fury occurring in the House. Here there was no cross-engagement, just a closed world encountering another closed world.

Most Canadians, as well, although they might vote for the same party again and again, do not identify themselves with one enough to actually sign up and become a member of a riding association, or be a regular financial supporter. (I have done the second, but for three different parties at various times Federally, and for three different parties Provincially, sometimes for years at a time.) One can share a great deal with a party and its policies — motivations might differ, but the direction is roughly aligned — and thus feel that supplying them with either the mother’s milk of labour or of cash makes sense. Parties, too, do not operate for free: in the words of the old Spanish proverb, “take what you want, and pay for it”.

Still, those of you who have followed my writings here and elsewhere know well that I prize the independent candidate, the person who will stand against both their riding and their party when needed. In other words, I value independent thinking and a willingness to trust that I, the citizen, will engage when we differ rather than simply shout you down unthinkingly, and try to encourage it. This is the legacy of Chuck Cadman’s last term as an Independent MP representing Surrey North; the thought of electing more such is why I support STV as a voting mechanism (there are times to consider changing traditional practice, and this is one of them, as I have argued earlier this month.

In the recent past it has been necessary to support the new Conservative Party. Canada needs more than one party of government. Much of my writing in the past month has criticized the Liberal Party, but not with the intent to say “Conservatives right; Liberals wrong”: it is because it is clear to me that the tearing apart of the old Progressive Conservative coalition during the second Mulroney Government has also deeply crippled and hollowed-out the Liberal Party, to the point where it is adrift. (In other words, the Chrétien years represented a period in which they didn’t need to be competitive and the inter-necine warfare that replaced external competition broke that party, too.) I have chosen to write about the Liberals rather than promote a new alternative in large measure because Canadians are deeply small-c conservative when it comes to parties: refreshing a known name gives that party a leg up, at least for a few decades.

But I have also — via the comments on my piece yesterday about how Toryism (which is not at all the core of the Conservative Party) and Greenism (if I can be permitted this abysmal neologism) are a natural pairing with many congruences over issues — been made to realise (thanks to my readers) that it is time for me to look more closely at whether I ought to be stepping forward more clearly for new alternatives in the Canadian political landscape, and broadening my public support where helpful. This may lead me to eschew the money side of politics for a while — the NDP’s insistence that one is simultaneously a member of both the Federal and Provincial parties simultaneously simply by being a donor drove me from continued support, for instance (although we needed and continue to need an ability to alternate parties in BC — and here the NDP is the Opposition — I ultimately could not stand with Layton’s Federal NDP), and I simply will not, any longer, give blanket support to any party that ties me down in this way. But the pen (or the pixels) still await.

I had said, earlier, that I might not vote in tomorrow’s by-election here in Vancouver-Quadra. On that score I have changed my mind. I shall vote. I believe that at this juncture I have managed to find enough commonality on issues to feel I am voting “for” rather than “against”. To that end, I shall, tomorrow, cast my ballot for Dan Grice, and hope that it is enough to push him past the other candidates to take his place on March 31 in the House, as the Green Party’s Deborah Grey.

Periodically, there comes a point where the Augean Stables of Canadian politics need a good cleaning. We have been there for a long time now. The Bloc and Reform were false starts. May this one turn out to be better.

You might think it doesn’t really matter, much, what we call a place. After all, in recorded history, there have always been autochthonous people in place when newcomers came a-calling. Change the civilisation of those callers, and the place names change. We don’t, for instance, call the Mediterranean Sea Mare Nostrum (”Our Sea”) any longer, and not just because we don’t speak Latin: the name itself has changed to “between the lands”. So, too, the place where I was born: from Toronto, to Fort Rouseille, to York, and back to Toronto. Names, in other words, change.

So why, then, be so vociferous — “stupidity” isn’t exactly a kind way to put things — about the latest bit of nomenclature adjustment that’s being proposed, that of changing the Strait of Georgia to the Salish Sea? Especially since, given the Premier’s enthusiastic taking up of this little bit of British Columbian change, it is likely to come to be, whether the public thinks much of it (in media web site instant polls and on phone-in shows) or not? (As Premier Campbell noted, “you don’t hear too many people referring to the Queen Charlotte Islands any more” — the renaming to Haida Gw’aii has taken over.)

Here’s the reason why I think this is an exercise in change for the sake of change, which is always a sign of a dangerous lack of thought: “how do we know that this is a historical name at all?” For it seems to me that there is a world of difference between reverting to a name that was in common use where the population at large remains in the majority (Haida Nation), and picking a name that might be appropriate simply for the sake of politically correct nomenclature (and whatever advantage in negotiations for treaties and in the next election it might bring). The first settles something in a way most can accept; the second merely opens the door to competing renamings.

(We will say nothing about the fact that this body of water is a strait and not a sea: it is not an open body of salt water of sufficient size to warrant that term, geographically. Pedantry isn’t needful or desirable here.)

It doesn’t take long to realise, here in BC, just how diverse the linguistic groups and First Nations communities are. The Coast Salish are just one of the many groups that are tied to the ebbs and flows of life in and around the Strait of Georgia. True, these predominate right on the shores of this body of water, but they are not exclusive, nor were the pre-colonisation “First Nations” geographically territorial in the sense that Western nations are. So, by renaming, we choose sides. We declare, in public, that we support one set of claims. Now what do we do for competing claims? Live with the years of animosity this brings forth? Or keep on with the renaming? When two claims conflict over the same territory — as many do in this province — which name “wins”?

In other words, this apparently simple step of “honouring” the First Nations opens a can of worms even worse than the treaty process has opened.

Why should we be surprised? Ever since Trudeau made multiculturalism the official policy of this land, we have tripped over this issue of recognition ever since. Recognise one group — for the whole idea of multiple cultures living independently in a single territory is all about groups — and you offend another. Picking the larger group alienates the smaller. (Why is it that the majority group of basic unhypenated Canadians never seems to be chosen? Ah, because to choose them is to expose the flaw of group-thinking and group-manipulation at the heart of multiculturalism, and indeed at the heart of Canadian progressivism and liberalism.)

This is why, for instance, Montréal accepted the change from Dorchester Boulevard to Boulevard René Lévesque — it was in accord with the majority’s will — and why Iqaluit could replace “Frobisher Bay” (majority population and language). But “Salish Sea” doesn’t fit this mould. First, it’s not in the autochthonic language needed, the way Haida Gw’aii was, and, second, the majority of the population around these shores — unlike the inhabitants of the Queen Charlottes — isn’t of that tradition. So this will be a bit of social engineering imposed on the region, not something springing authentically out of it.

Not that that will matter. The armies of the politically correct will be all over this one, as will those First Nations band members and supporters who see an issue with which to demand more. So, too, those amongst us (and they are many) who don’t believe in the value of tradition (and names are symbols that embody traditions and history), don’t think history is relevant, and are browbeaten and will not defend their own heritage. The cries of bigotry will be raised — is it an attempt at apartheid or ghetto-construction to simply say “my traditions count, too”? — and the earthworms will undermine the ground Canada stands on, once again. The group will once again override the sovereignty of the individual Canadian.

Worse, we will live through this change simply because an advantage is perceived, not because of any great moral principle at work (despite all the claims to the contrary that will emerge as the debate is joined). The labelling of this body of water as the “Salish Sea” is akin to selling the rights to a well-loved landmark and having its name changed to suit some corporate sponsor. Ask Torontonians, who saw the Pantages turn into the Canon Theatre, or the SkyDome into the Rogers Centre. Only a fool would have renamed the Montréal Forum or Maple Leaf Gardens; new buildings have sponsored monikers, but the historical sites do not.

This overriding of tradition in the name of advantage — pecuniary or otherwise — tears away at the fabric of society. It makes people care less about their communities (yet another source of escalating crime and violence, as people draw their curtains and live privately, ignoring the public realm). It destroys the well-springs of commitment. We are left with far less of ourselves each time this is done.

For once, the Left has understood this: the BC NDP is questioning the rush to rename. Good! This should be questioned — and in the end, rejected. For here’s the reality: colonial immigrants built this place. The First Nations culture of the rainforest and coast was one of the highest ones in North America — but still, not enough to make the jump into modernity without what the colonisers brought to this place.

It is our tradition that should for once be stood up for, not denigrated and cast aside to pander yet again. “Strait of Georgia” is but one of many symbols that say exactly that, and that is what I will call it, going forward, regardless of what my province might choose to ram down my throat.

For I am a free Canadian, and they can’t take my right to disagree publicly away.