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[felis_ultharus]

So I finished John Ralston Saul A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada last night. It's a brilliant book, although with a lot of tangents that don't seem to quite fit -- Saul is a little like that brilliant professor who tends to ramble off down brilliant side roads and forget what he's lecturing on.

But still, all Canadian progressives need to read this book. His basic argument:

• Canadians keep talking about us being a young country but -- dating from the foundations of Newfoundland, Quebec, Halifax, and Acadia -- we actually have 400 years of history under our belt.
  
• For the first 250 of these years, the First Nations or Aboriginals were the dominant group. One-third to one-half of colonists lived among them most of the year -- adapted to their culture and modes of dress, learnt their ways of living and hunting, intermarried with them, and adopted their values. Even in the cities, the economy and colonial defence was dependent upon them.
  
• For the first 250 years, this created a hybrid culture, and many of the very early progressive acts -- the end of slavery in Upper Canada, the religious and language tolerance of the Quebec Act, the egalitarianism of Lafontaine and Baldwin, the rarity in our use of the death penalty -- was completely out of step with Europe, but highly reflective of Aboriginal cultural assumptions.
  
• 150 years ago, a wave of British ultra-imperialist and anti-Catholic immigrants rewrote Canada's history from a British perspective, and erased the French and Native contribution. French Canada replied to this challenge by re-writing English Canada and the Natives out of its history.
  
• These views came to dominate our elites, who returned to the colonial-mindedness of the colonial days. They became obsessed with Paris, London, and Washington, and forgot where they were.
  
• Meanwhile, disease and brutal government policies removed the best reminder of the way we were -- the Aboriginals themselves -- from view.
  
• Yet, basic Aboriginal principles of tolerance and fairness remained, and so we've lurched haphazardly -- two steps forward and one step back -- toward policies like Medicare and avoidance of war and a strong social safety net.
  
• But because we can't remember the source of these instincts, our progress is stumbling, and we're frequently sidetracked by arguments from Washington, London, and Paris that are alien to one half of our collective unconscious. If we remembered, our progress would be more consistent and faster.

Saul said in an interview that Canadians who read this book say he put into words something they'd always felt but could never put into words. I concur.

The most interesting criticism is that people have accused him of romanticizing or misrepresenting First Nations people, or of oversimplifying the relationship between them and Europeans. Interestingly, none of these responses seem to be coming from First Nations people, and he's leaned heavily on their own words over four centuries for his arguments.

There are problems here, though. Saul is a little too much a booster of capitalism for this socialist to handle. I thought he'd given up on that after The Collapse of Globalism. Interestingly the book was finished just a little before the credit collapse, and I notice he's downplaying these elements in his interviews.

I also wonder what's up with him and gay people. He only seems to mention us dismissively in passing, whereas he has no problem championing other marginalized groups. This in spite of the fact that the relatively easy time we've had in Canada compared to other European countries (no recorded use of capital punishment for the 270 years when it was punishable by death) would seem to support his arguments.

Still, it's a great book, and highly recommended. Saul writes about history and philosophy in plain, easy-to-understand English, so it shouldn't be intimidating for anyone.

Comments

[lux-apollo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recommend. This seems very interesting - also, a book my mother may be interested in, as a former history and geography major, it's her favourite part of her week when she gets to teach about Canadian history. Yes! A Christmas gift idea solved!

;-)

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'm always happy to help ^_^