Ghost of a flea

Most dangerous nation in history

"Dude, Where's My Car?", perhaps the least understood work of contemporary American comic genius, features a line spoken by one of the film's protagonists to his friend. Jesse and Chester approach a forbidding home. It combines normality and menace in an unsettling combination whose very familiarity is "unheimlich," or "unhomely" to use the psychoanalytic term. Jesse says to Chester:

Oh man, I'm sensing something very Canadian about this place.

I often think Canada must be the strangest place in the world to Americans. Mexico - "So far from God... so close to the United States." - is comfortingly different. There is no mistaking the border for a signpost of difference with all the adventure and misunderstanding and possibility which comes with difference. Canada, by contrast, presents a mysterious sameness marked only by funny-coloured money and the occassional mis-pronounced word. I was told years after the information might have done me some good that it was always worthwhile for Canadians to apply to Harvard for undergraduate study whatever their financial circumstances. Harvard, it turned out, has quotas for foreign students to keep the place alive with the contrast and adventure supplied by borders. Canadians were a popular fit for these quotas: citizens of a foreign country who could blend seemlessly into Harvard student life. This obviated the whole point of a quota system but - if true - makes a potential opportunity for savvy Canadian undergraduates. The very sameness of Canadians to Americans would be a cause for paranoia between many other countries. Do Americans ever worry how many Canadians walk among them? Silent... hidden in plain sight... No. Barring the odd moment of cultural relevance provided by South Park Americans do not spare a thought - let alone an anxious thought - for their neighbours to the north.

This benign indifference has been the hallmark of a relationship hardly strained since Fenian raids of the mid to late-1800s or casual thought of turning the Union army north after the Civil War. 9/11 has changed all that. Americans are paying attention to the world beyond their borders and to the relationships their political leaders have managed for them. They are not happy with much of what they see. Koreans and Europeans demonstrating against their liberators and against the very military strength which has defended their property and freedoms for decades. Devil's bargains with potentates whose despotism has fostered outrages against liberty. Finally, and perhaps worst of all, they have found a mixture of sneering condescension and craven nit-picking amongst people they had considered to be friends. "Why don't they like us?" is a common mockery of American earnestness among the European literati. But it is a good question: why don't free peoples respect and appreciate the people who have made them free?

Blame Canada. Or rather, blame something "Canadian."

I have been re-reading Frank Herbert's "Dune" books as a reminder of aspects of two courses I am teaching. Herbert was a journalist with an ecological bent to his thinking whose fiction does a better job of explaining the anthropology and economics I am teaching than the academics upon whose work his stories are based. You could not get a better introduction to Alfred Korzybski's general semantics or Gregory Bateson's cultural ecology than through reading "Dune." I have been reading and re-reading Herbert's books since I was fifteen and still find new ideas even as am now teaching them to university undergraduates. This week I found another one. Peace, according to Herbert, breeds aggression. I cannot fully make sense of this claim but my gut tells me he is right. Peace breeds aggression. I think of the places I have lived and visited and make comparisons. The friendliest and most out-going place I have ever lived is the city of Manchester in northern England. It is also the home of a midieval violence among drug-dealers enforcing street-law not with guns but machetes. Central London was also a home of the "aggro" for which the English are famous. Trafalgar Square regularly features middle-ages confrontations between mounted cavalry and brick throwing football hooligans. I will never forget the sight of two small, hairy bare-chested Scottish guys - faces painted blue and white Braveheart-fashion - vastly outnumbered and taking all comers making a stand in the fountain below Nelson's column.

The martial tradition and its attendant traditions of virility and personal honour still live in the United Kingdom. I believe these characteristics are expressed in direct proportion to traditions of courtesy and hospitality. There is a logic to this equation: where rudeness might have consequences in the form of physical violence there is an incentive to show courtesy and respect. England and Scotland are not alone in expressing this logic. Think of the elaborate rules of war built up through centuries of negotiating conflict. Think of the famed hospitality of traditional bedouin Arabs. And yes, think of the famed courtesy of the American cowboy. If you want peace, said Roman strategist Vegetius, then prepare for war. But a capacity for violence does not only produce peace as a result of the potential consequences of violence. The capacity for violence breeds peace as a result of culturally managed expresssions of aggression. This is not only a functional relationship but a lived experience. Martial prowess and systems of honour breed dignity and self-respect which do not need to find expression as aggression.

Years ago I made a decision which lead me to become an anthropologist. The winter Olympics of 1988 were held in Calgary, Alberta and an exhibition of Canadian native culture was planned to celebrate this aspect of Canadian history. "The Spirit Sings" brought together hundreds of artifacts from a variety of First Nation's contexts in an exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Alberta and a stand-alone exhibition in Ottawa, Canada's capital city. The exhibition became contentious as one of its main sponsors - Shell Oil - was engaged in a land claims dispute with the Lubicon Lake Cree of northern Alberta. The Cree felt it was absurd that the very company which was trying to take their oil was paying for an exhibtion which talked about Canadian native peoples entirely in the past-tense. A boycott of the exhibition was organized and my department split between anthropologists wanting to support the Cree position and those who believed "The Spirit Sings" was an educational opportunity not to be missed (I do not recall a pro-Shell position... these were academics...). My undergraduate opinion did not count for much but I took the question very seriously. I wanted to learn about First Nations history and culture but was not certain about the rightness of taking a course based on an exhibition the political representatives of First Nations peoples wanted shut down.

The story of my decision is a complicated one and falls beyond the scope of my claim that Canada is the most dangerous nation in history. Suffice to say I took the course and subsequently dropped out of art history. One reason I am glad I made the decision I did, however, was something said to me by the curator of the "Plains" section of the exhibition. He talked about the history of warfare and what would now be called ethnic cleansing on the American prairie of the nineteenth-century and contrasted it with a modern "renaissance" of pride amongst First Nations peoples. He claimed a cultural renaissance had started first and had more effects in the United States than in Canada and further that this difference was a reflection of the difference in those nineteenth-century conflicts. There was warfare in the United States as prospectors ignored treaties in search of gold and settlers ignored the same treaties in search of land and in followed war and the United States cavalry. In Canada, by contrast, there was relative peace. Centuries of trade organized by the Hudson's Bay Company - the oldest corporation in the world - and the subsequent introduction of the Northwest Mounted Police - later the RCMP - preceded Canadian settlers and prospectors. There was little opportunity to fight in the Canadian west because the corporations and the cops went in first. That "Spirit Sings" curator described brutal conflict in the American west and compared it with a tide of peace, order and good government which crossed the Canadian prairie like a grey-sludge burying everything before it. American native peoples had something to fight against and so held onto their dignity, self-respect and identity. I believe this example demonstrates something fundamental about Canada. Something dangerous.

I am not worried about Wahhabism and other forms of militant Islam. This may be another hundred-years war and we may lose a city to a nuclear-armed Islamic version of the nihilistic Puritanism of my ancestors. There may be more of the appalling brutality we witnessed on 9/11 and we need to fight this fight so that all people regardless of race or religious belief can be safe and free. But let there be no mistake: fundamentalism is going to lose and liberty and McWorld are going to win. I believe that most free people - when they become free - will choose fast-food, pop-music and fashion-choices over National Socialism, emperor cults or martyrdom. What I fear is the fight we need to prepare for once the battle against the fundamentalists is won. What kind of peace are we going to make for ourselves? Is it going to be a peace which challenges us, fosters exploration and adventure and provides us opportunities to fight for justice? Or is it going to be a Canadian kind of peace? A snivelling, ungrateful and emasculated European kind of peace? Will we make a cold peace where etiquette and slavish devotion to manners replaces a chivalrous courtesy? Is our future the grey-sludge of Canadian peace, order and good government rolling on from the prairie to cover the whole world in an enervating blanket of darkness and comformity?

It is the Canadian way of peace which makes Canada the most dangerous nation in the history of the world.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at March 2, 2003 01:49 PM

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