We can do better, but we’ve done very well

The orgy of self-loathing by which Canadians are marking this 150th anniversary of no one knows what reached its climax this week with the timely arrival of a flotilla of thinkpieces reassuring us that this is all healthy and normal.

It is Perfectly All Right that a country should be entirely unable, on the anniversary of its founding as a state, to think of a single reason to celebrate it. It is Perfectly All Right, likewise, that it should be so devoid of fellow- feeling amongst its citizens that its government does not dare mention the reason for the generic celebrations it has ordered up, for fear of alienating one section of the population or another.

The reasons for this bouncy nihilism vary: either because nationalism is icky, or because Canada’s lack of nationalism is in fact a kind of inverted nationalism, a way of distinguishing ourselves from other nations. Anomie is part of our unique cultural identity. Yadda yadda yadda never had a civil war blah blah blah we’re a shy, diffident country yadda yadda something about the wilderness, and we’re done.

It’s interesting that this anti- nationalism, mostly on the left, should coincide with the rise of nationalism — mostly imported, in one of the many ironies of this debate — on the right. The ur- text among the latter is that interview Justin Trudeau gave the New York Times Magazine, in which he referred to Canada as the world’s “first post- national state,” inasmuch as it has no “core identity, no mainstream,” thus confirming populist suspicions of him as a treasonous stooge of globalist elites.

I find myself, as usual, despising both sides. Some degree of nationalism — a sense of being part of the same political community, an order of belonging that transcends, without erasing, the differences between us — is essential, if the whole is to be governed coherently.

People will not consent to “others,” not part of their tribe, having a say in how they are ruled, nor will they make the kinds of sacrifices for each other — to pay taxes, to fight in wars, and so on — that successful nations depend upon.

Canada has paid a price for its attenuated state of nationhood in the divisions and drift that inhibit it from acting decisively on the international stage or fully realizing the benefits of its own union. There’s a reason, for example, that we are still forced to endure hundreds of internal trade barriers, 150 years after the federation that was supposed to end them.

But nationalism, in a country like Canada, cannot be grounded in identity. The nationalist right is making the same mistake in this regard as the nationalist left of a previous generation. Then, it was a kind of pseudo-ethnic identity centred on the state, in whose beneficence Canadians were alleged to believe innately, almost genetically, in a way quite unlike other nations, or at least unlike the Americans.

Now, it often sounds something more like a genuinely ethnic state, or certainly one that looks upon immigrants from “non-traditional” cultures with suspicion.

But what is common to both is its attempt to define the nation in terms of its identity: a body of characteristics, ethnic or cultural, said to typify its members, almost invariably in distinction to others, outside the group.

Proponents of identity nationalism, like identity politics generally, tend to take this way of dividing humanity as natural and indisputable. When Lucien Bouchard said that Canada was “not a real country,” that’s what he meant: whatever its nationalists may have believed, Canada did not in fact possess a single, homogeneous identity.

This is one of the many pathologies of identity, whose first definition, after all, is sameness. To emphasize the differences between groups that is its idee fixe, it must exaggerate the similarities within them. Not only does this lead to gross stereotypes of both — idealizing our own, and demonizing the other — but it makes those differences, and similarities, not interesting sociological observations that we can take or leave, but ends in themselves, to be enforced if necessary.

But ethnicity or language are no more the “real” basis of nationality than any other. To fixate on them is a choice, nothing more. And as it is, we can make another choice: in place of identity nationalism, we can choose what is often called civic nationalism. Rather than endless existential agonizing over “who are we,” civic nationalism asks simply: what do we want to do together? What are the purposes we want to achieve, what are the ideals we want to stand for? Typically, these are best kept to a short list, the kinds of things nations put in their constitutions.

This has many advantages. It frees us from the fixation on difference for difference’s sake: if we happen to believe in the same things as other nations, what of it? Let us be the best exemplars of those universal ideals. And if we find that we are falling short? Again, we need have no fear of admitting it, as if we would disappear if we did. We need only redouble our efforts to live up to our own ideals.

An element of self- criticism, such as we are now going through, is therefore very much in order. So is a sense of proportion. Like any society, Canada has many sins to its name; foremost among them is the historic treatment and present condition of aboriginal Canadians, which is rightly the source of so much shame at present.

But it is not the whole of the Canadian story.

There is a reason why this country is so widely admired around the world: because of the immense good that it has done, not only for its own citizens but for those of other lands; because it stands, for all its faults, as one of the most successful societies on earth, or that has ever existed.

On this Canada Day, let us quietly remind ourselves of this, even as we resolve to do better.