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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 1, 2007
Sea to sea
Canada today is “deux nations.” There are the people who speak and think in French; and the people who speak and think in English. Together they make up one nation, with a continuous history, of more than five centuries. And then there are the people who speak, effectively, no language; who are deracinated, who have no history. That is the other nation. There is very little communication between these two nations -- the “old” Canada, and the “new” Canada -- because little communication is possible between two such groups. The one is aging and shrinking, the other expanding while growing ever younger. (Yet all trends are reversible.)Demographically, but also spiritually. Those who have no language, no culture, no religion, no sense of past, and therefore of destiny, remain ever young. Outwardly they may become old and wrinkly, but inwardly they retain the mind of the pre-school child, unformed and cloudless. Yet they fulfil the requirements for citizenship set out in John Lennon’s famous hymn to emptiness, “Imagine”: “Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries: it isn't hard to do.rnNothing to kill or die for; and no religion, too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace.” This is the postmodern dream, of perfect vacuity -- of the serenity we imagine will sweep over us like sleep. All we need do is abandon everything of value in our heritage, everything for which so many of our ancestors actually fought and died. In this great zero, everyone will be equal, and no person will be better than another. The heroine and the harlot will be one and the same, great saints and great monsters indistinguishable. “Judgementalism” -- the aversion that one individual has behaved better than another -- is, among the vacuous today, the only crime remaining to be punished. And likewise, under the doctrine of “multiculturalism,” there is nothing to choose between one culture and another. They are all just fine, and so far as any particularity can still be distinguished, “everything is beautiful in its own way.” In a sad, sad way, this is a parody of Christianity: “Judge not, lest thee be judged.” Leave out every other particle of Christianity, and any possibility of context. Retain only this, and one might well call the postmodern void, “Christian.” It is a post-Christian Christianity, and I have heard it preached in several denominations. It is also a ridiculous lie, but who are we to choose between truth and falsehood? (“What is truth?”) Reason itself makes people unequal, for some can reason better than others. The Canada of the government-funded paper flag-waving and painted faces -- the “new” Canada that is celebrated each year on what is now called “Canada Day” -- has nothing controversially Canadian about it. You could wave a different flag, and choose another face paint, and nothing would be lost. It is a kind of recess from kindergarten, after which we return to “sleepy time” again. That is the Canada that is taught in our schools, yet wasn’t always. I can remember a Canadian classroom, whenas I was a child, with a portrait of Vanier, as well as of our Queen. That was Major-General Georges-Philéas Vanier, P.C., D.S.O., M.C., and Bar, born April 23, 1888, died March 5, 1967, the Canadian soldier and diplomat who was Governor-General from 1959 until his death. A great, good, and illustrious man, the last to fill Canada’s highest office with real distinction (though Roland Michener filled it with dignity). A lot of young people write to me in email, to say that I am dead right about what they are taught in school, and ask me what they can read to educate themselves, especially about Canada. How many times I have recommended, for a one-volume history, The Kingdom of Canada, by the late William Lewis Morton, as a good place to start. (One needs a place to start.) He was a westerner, a progressive, a “red Tory” -- so many things I am not -- and yet that book, published originally in 1963, veritably sings about the nature of Canada, and tells a history that is true, not evacuated and “imagined.” Alternatively, spend the day researching the life and career of this Georges P. Vanier. Or, by contemplating this verse from the Psalms, that every true Canadian will be able, immediately, to recognize and translate: Et dominabitur a mari usque ad mare, et a flumine usque ad terminos terrae! David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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