His new book is adroitly skewered by Chris Scott in the April 4’s Globe and Mail books section, with a focus primarily on how Gairdner tries to take down post-modernism. When Ken Wilber published the revised Sex, Ecology, Spirituality in 2000, he had to admit that the PoMo crowd’s star had already begun noticeably to have dimmed, but Gairdner feels called on to go after it anyway. Reading Scott’s review, including a delicious dissection of a grammatical howler (Gairdner is a former professor of English), I found myself wondering: How much do such ism-fads truly affect us, anyway? Obviously, movements from the grass roots do so. Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. is an obvious example, as are various fascisms in pre-WW2 Europe and left-wing political movements in Latin America. But post-modernism strikes me as something that has mostly gathered around flickering metaphorical candles in universities, and has only emerged elsewhere in the cynical professions, such as politics and its co-dependant, political journalism.
Gairdner is quoted by Scott as saying, “under the sway of relativism, there is no longer any expectation that an individual ought to hold consistent, connected beliefs.” The italics in this didactic plaint, Scott notes, are Gairdner’s. To request common decency of society at large, and to punish the most egregious violations of it by force of law, is necessary for an orderly world. To require belief – and worse, to require it not to vary as people’s views alter in the face of experience – is ugly.
Glancing over the other books in yesterday’s G&M, I was struck by the geography of their stories, which conveys a quite confident relativism. In new novels by Anne Michaels and Barry Callagahan – 1960s Egypt figures in hers, an African leper colony in his – it’s assumed readers will know stuff. The comparative quality of national discourse in my adopted city and country isn’t at all bad. Even our current crop of third-rate suits-in-office don’t often make the sort of bloopers Hillary Clinton, surprisingly, has come out with in her recent global travels.
Last year, I had a brief exchange with someone in the U.S. who wouldn’t believe that health care in Canada was notably less expensive under our state-run systems than under private enterprise. I don’t know if he has since been able to verify this is true, even disregarding the exchange rate between our two dollars, but I had assumed the disinformation the U.S. medical insurance industry disseminates was widely understood to be self-serving nonsense, and I began to feel my correspondent’s pain as I tried, briefly, to point him to non-relativistic facts that backed my case. Deluded, socialistic (hah! as if) and relativistic Canadians aren’t supposed to have the cold facts on our side – or weren’t, until the economic mess hit and some proud pseudo-conservative positions went up in smoke and ash.
Yet, the odd effect of this on me has not been that I take unending pride in a society which, in practical terms, still confounds the “multiculturalism does not and cannot work” meme. Rather, I can tire of it easily, and be all the more impressed by places where people are much more set in their attitudes. I was profoundly affected by the graciousness of people in Iran, just as the sweetness of Mexicans won me over. These things come up from deep roots in a feeling of place and culture. But central Canada has a functional politeness, like a set of mechanisms, that can feel equivalent to being at one of those receptions where they serve endless canapes when you really want dinner. We don’t really have a national soul, and Toronto in particular often feels rootless. I suspect one reason why we all travel as much as we can, apart from trying to avoid the miserable northern winters, is to feel that sense of confrontation with something more definite.
I’m reminded of someone who was into traditional Chinese philosophies, who said he felt no chi here. I explained to him it flows horizontally, not vertically out of the ground, which he found intriguing but baffling.
In this sort of context, I can find myself perilously close to Gairdner, but without his righteous anger. After all, Canada offers a place to come back to when the confrontation with another collective soul becomes too much. If Gairdner had his way, it might become unlivably like its rigid Victorian self.
Is there a middle ground here? Is there ever going to be a Canada that has more than that functional courtesy? A generation or two ago, there was something like one that never wholly formed itself, and which was subsumed in the hunt for something more all-embracing. But that broad embrace always seems to be sliding away again in this horizontal blurring that I feel to be good and healingly encompassing, but which forever feels insubstantial.