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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 8, 2004
Laughingstock
"A weak gutless spineless Canada the laughingstock of the world was the comment attached to some item of news, forwarded to me in e-mail. Several days later, I can no longer remember what the item was about, but the comment still rattles. The commentator is not famous and not likely to become so. He is a conservative Protestant believer, who keeps an e-list, and forwards choice titbits from Internet and media and personal reports, to undisclosed recipients" several times a day. Not for the most part the big news but the little news from around Canada: the stuff that really tells you what's going on in this country; the signs of the times as it were. An eccentric daily documentation of the country's descent into the septic tank of "political correction". "A weak gutless spineless Canada the laughingstock of the world." I agree to the adjectives. But no not to "laughingstock of the world" that is a false cosmopolitanism. Canada is a light on the hill compared with Somalia. Ship-shape and Bristol-fashion compared with Paraguay. A hive of industry compared with Bhutan. Warmer on average than Greenland and cooler on average than Surinam. The whole world is a laughingstock let us get that much clear though I doubt that the angels are laughing. And the truth is outside of Canada only Canadians think much about this place. We say "laughingstock" because we wish someone cared enough to laugh at us. They don't. Canada is for the Canadians to laugh at. Reading about the final decline of Roman civilization in Britain one wonders how many thought -- in Latin and in Britain at the time -- that Britain had become the laughingstock of the Roman Empire. But it hadn't: the lights still on in Britain were like the lights still on in Gaul or in distant Illyria. They were going out everywhere especially in Rome. Each province of the Empire each municipality each villa and finally each person made his own accommodation with the encroaching barbarism. The comparison of the West to the Roman Empire is a clich? the "decline and fall" was an old saw long before Gibbon. It was an old saw even to Petrarch. The West was never an Empire like Rome: it has been something greater and subtler. And in two thousand more years perhaps we shall have something greater and subtler still. We have only to wait. But meanwhile for all I'll say against my own country in its post-modern post-historical condition I won't have it that Canada is much worse than other countries. We are a little ahead or a little behind the more comparable states of Europe. The Dutch and the Swedes for instance are a little ahead of us ideologically the Swiss perhaps a little behind. But the sort of things happening in Canada are happening all over Europe and in most of the United States for that matter: a strange collective willed act of amnesia of self-deconstruction in which everything that made Western Civilization all ethical moral legal and liturgical norms are being dipped successively into the acid bath of "multiculturalism" -- as Rome was dipped in the bath by Vandals Huns etc. They had it done to them having hardly invited Alaric to sack Rome. Yet the Rome he sacked was begging for Alaric: had lost its zest for remaining alive. We are having it done to us mostly by ourselves or by invitation: having ceased to care much whether we have raised another generation in our own likeness; or raised another generation at all. The Roman birth-rate had collapsed: the future lay then as the future lies now with the people who are having babies. Yet there is so much to be dissolved and it takes so long to happen. A civilization does not die all at once or mostly at once as a human body. It dies in one person at a time. Most of the head may be dissolved and yet the arms and legs go on moving from habits established over many centuries. And many of those habits will be incorporated unconsciously into successor civilizations. But that will be then and this is now. People like me and many of my readers still belong to the West as to the old Canada so long as we breathe. Our task is to continue the rearguard fight to preserve and restore what we can when we are able and thinking ahead: to resume the work of Christianizing the barbarians. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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