Communities make Canada strong

Last Sunday, MLA Norm Letnick and I were cooking pancakes together for the Canada Day celebrations in Lake Country organized by the Lake Country Rotary Club.

“What does Canada mean to you,” Norm asked, flipping a pancake.

“That I don’t have to be an American,” I replied flippantly (get it?) “I can’t say that,” he laughed. So I tried again: “I like what former Joe Clark said, years ago. That Canada is a community of communities.”

Norm nodded. Then he used that line in his speech at the opening ceremonies.

Good for him. Because it’s a good description of how Canada differs from the much larger nation south of us.

Community is important. Sociologists now say that people who live in an active community — with lots of face-to-face interaction — can expect to live about five years longer than people who live in a lonely or isolated environment.

Communities learn to get along with each other. They don’t always agree. But like families, they learn to compromise. Partly because of fear; they can’t afford to split up into smaller factions. Also because they want to get along together; they value community itself.

They know intuitively that co-operation and compromise is good for everyone. And that polarization is not.

I say “intuitively,” because they probably haven’t absorbed intellectually that community is the logical extension of the process of evolution. Evolution used to be characterized as “survival of the fittest.” In fact, as biologists are now discovering, it’s “survival of the co-operative.”

The legendary lone wolf is a less efficient predator than the pack; a mixed forest resists disease better than a monoculture. Even our human bodies are the result of co-operation between millions of our own cells and billions of bacteria.

The alternative to community is individualism. Which is what I see, from my viewpoint looking south out of the Great White North, as rampant in the United States.

On a CBC radio Ideas program, Robert Reich attempted to define the difference between left and right in politics. The right, Reich argued, distrusts government. The left distrusts corporations.

I guess that proves I’m middle-of-the-road — I distrust both of them.

But I think Reich missed an important distinction — how left and right act out their distrust.

The right tends to takes a vigilante response. If you don’t like something, you take individual action against it — the lone gunman who shoots up a newspaper, a night club, a concert, a school.

The actual ideology of the shooter is irrelevant. So is his religion or mental health. The key is that he chooses to act individually. Or, possibly, with a small posse of similarly disaffected people, as in the World Trade Center attacks.

By contrast, the so-called left knows that it needs government to control the corporations it doesn’t trust. So it has to take collective action. Because corporations are not entities that can be shot. They are, themselves, collective juggernauts that will keep rolling along doing damage regardless of what happens to a few individuals.

Only a similarly powerful collective entity can counter them. Usually, therefore, a government.

So the characteristic of the left is that it organizes. Whether it’s protests or sit-ins or elections, the left depends on organizing numbers of people around an issue. But almost always, a single issue. Which does not yield to compromise or cooperation. And is therefore just as polarizing as the vigilante mentality of the right.

Both, it seems to me, are symbolic of the dominant religion of America — individualism.

Forty years ago, author Robert Bellah wrote (in a book called Habits of the Heart) that individualism has become so ingrained in the American psyche that even when people think about breaking the pattern, the only solution they can imagine is to be even more individualistic.

In such a climate, it seems to me, the concept of community offers an alternative. Community has room for individual differences. But those individuals recognize that they are all better off together than standing alone.

We build community in churches. Or try to, not always successfully.

We build community in service clubs and volunteer organizations. We build community in working teams and professional associations.

I concede that Canada is not an ideal community. We are increasingly governed by three corporate entities — Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. The principle of polarization has slithered into our political processes.

But community remains a goal worth holding high.

That’s why I like Joe Clark’s notion of Canada as a community of communities.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca