American in Civilization, Canadian in Culture

Let us begin with that cliché of Americans who view Canada: that Canadians are basically like Americans.... At bedrock, Americans think, the Canadian experience is not all that different from the experience of the United States.–Robin W. Winks, The Relevance of Canadian History: U.S. and Imperial Perspectives

1 Continentalism versus Nationalism

If any country in the 1960s seemed indistinguishable from its neighbors in civilization, that country was Canada. Its apparent status as a miniature replica of the United States was aptly symbolized in the construction of the world's tallest freestanding building, a communications tower by means of which Torontonians were said to be able to broadcast more TV channels–American as well as Canadian–than any other Canadian community. Toronto, along with Boston, Montreal, Detroit, and Chicago, formed the northern arc of the twentieth century's most dynamic civilization.

That civilization was set in a world increasingly brought together not only by improved communications (Canadian Marshall McLuhan's "global village"), but also by the growing power of transnational corporations. It was the "global reach" of such corporations that led one IBM executive to say that national boundaries were of limited significance: "For business purposes the boundaries that separate one nation from another are no more real than the equator. They are merely convenient demarcations of ethnic, linguistic and cultural entities."

Implicit in this assertion was an important assumption: that there was a distinction between civilization and culture. Certainly at any time there tends to be a dominant civilization whose technology is acknowledged to be superior. That civilization requires considerable organizational skills and these help to give its society, government, and economy a distinctive character that has widespread appeal as a model. At various times such civilizations as those of Greece and Rome, France and Britain, have offered such an appeal. More recently it has been the United States (and to a limited extent, the Soviet Union) that has provided the pattern for other peoples.

To many foreigners it has seemed that North America forms a single civilization dominated by the United States, and that Canada is merely part of this civilization. As the opening quotation from Robin Winks indicates, at bedrock Canada has not seemed all that different from the United States (though perhaps the United States of yesterday) and any differences between the two countries have been thought to be of minor significance. Yet countries like Canada, which feel themselves threatened by a hegemonic civilization, are only too conscious that there is a difference between the attributes they share with their powerful neighbor and those that are peculiar to themselves. With noteworthy exceptions, it is the shared attributes, for example the science, technology, and economy, that form the common civilization. It is the distinctive characteristics, for example the literature, history, and world view of a people, that on the whole delineate the separate culture.

The term "civilization" is often used synonymously with "culture," particularly in dominant civilizations where the culture is assumed to be universally acceptable. But in comparing Canada with the United States it makes sense to draw a distinction between what the two countries have in common, namely their North American civilization, and what they do not share. Canada, after all, has its own literary tradition and its own philosophical assumptions, in a word, its own culture. In a dominant civilization like that of which the United States is the center, the political system is taken for granted as an integral part of the civilization. It is partly through its political power that the civilization is able to extend its influence. In a peripheral society such as Canada, where a people is attempting to preserve and promote a distinctive cultural identity, the political system plays a different role. There, the government is expected to defend the culture against the dominant civilization.

To thus differentiate between civilization and culture may seem somewhat arbitrary to someone brought up in the English or French tradition, where the terms are used interchangeably. Thus Fernand Braudel has written, "The mark of a living civilization is that it is capable of exporting itself, of spreading its culture to different places. It is impossible to imagine a true civilization which does not export its people, its ways of thinking and living."

But it is common to find such a distinction drawn by German writers (though not by Freud). Norbert Elias has written, "The French and English concept of civilization can refer to political or economic, religious or technical, moral or social facts. The German concept of kultur refers essentially to intellectual, artistic, and religious facts, and has a tendency to draw a sharp dividing line between facts of this sort, on the one side, and political, economic and social facts, on the other."

For our purposes it is useful to distinguish between the two terms and to give them more precise, if perhaps arbitrary, definitions. In doing so, we may on occasion take for granted the conventional contrast drawn by many social scientists between "modern" (often meaning "superior") civilization and "traditional" (often meaning "backward") culture. Nevertheless, this convention can be very misleading. A modern civilization is usually superior only to an older civilization that it has replaced: technology is, after all, obsolescent. But a traditional culture may be a superb culture that no modern civilization can replace, let alone surpass. Civilizations rise and fall. It is cultures that, unless destroyed by a powerful alien civilization, persist indefinitely. What is traditional, i.e., a culture, may prove to be long lasting: what seems new and modern, for example, the technology of a contemporary civilization, may turn out to be obsolescent and even transient. Consequently, the humanist scholar who is concerned with a great culture may be taking a longer view of the future as well as of the past than the social scientist whose primary interest is the analysis of a contemporary civilization. For example, in India the civilizations of the Mughal Empire and the British Empire have come and gone. The Hindu culture, which in their heyday both the Muslim rulers and the British denigrated, remains.

It is worth bearing this in mind when viewing Canada's complex relationship with the United States. To view Canada solely as part of North American civilization, as most Americans do, is to emphasize those characteristics that Canada shares with the United States. On the other hand, to note Canada's culture is to become aware of the differences between Canadians and Americans.

Canada has been in the front line in the conflict between civilization and culture. Each of its three successive civilizations has left a different residue. France left its language and literature, its customs and civil law, and, above all, its religion. It did not leave much in the way of political institutions, advanced technology, a scientific spirit, or economic organization. Thus France's legacy for Quebec was largely its culture, not its civilization; and it was the culture that survived. Britain brought not only its culture, particularly its literature, but its civilization as well. This included commerce, industry, and modern agricultural techniques; it also included the Westminster parliamentary system and the concept of the Crown. It is possible for some Quebecois to view Canada's political system, at least in its parliamentary aspects, as a leftover from the once dominant British civilization. But it is also possible to regard the British political tradition as a permanent element of Canada's culture and part of the British cultural legacy that will continue to be treasured long after other features of British civilization have disappeared.

It is too early to say what the legacy of the United States will be. Its science, technology, and multinational corporations have brought many of the benefits of American civilization to Canada. However, Canada's parliamentary system of government remains British in its inspiration, despite the injection of the federal principle first adopted in the United States. At the popular level, American culture as purveyed on television and in popular magazines sometimes seems all-pervasive, much to the chagrin of Canada's intellectuals.

These intellectuals have long differed in their attitudes toward the three civilizations (particularly the American) that have successively dominated Canada; and this, combined with their concern for Canada's own identity, helps to explain the intensity of the conflict between the "continentalists" who see Canada primarily as a participant in North American civilization, and the "nationalists" whose main concern is the preservation of Canada's cultural identity and who believe that the main threat to Canada as a culture emanates from the United States. The humanists among the nationalists have been particularly concerned about the threat they perceived from the social sciences in the United States with their emphasis on "modern civilization" rather than "traditional culture."

Such concern could only be heightened by the writings of someone like Daniel Boorstin, a noted historian and, since 1975, Librarian of Congress. An American scholar, inspired by the Bicentennial celebrations in the United States, Boorstin argued that the old select Republic of Letters had given way to the more democratic Republic of Technology, "largely a creation of American civilization in the last century." According to Boorstin ours is a world of obsolescence ("the great library is apt to seem not so much a treasurehouse as a cemetery") and convergence ("the tendency for everything to become more like everything else"). Moreover, "the Republic of Technology, ruthlessly egalitarian, will accomplish what the prophets, political philosophers and revolutionaries could not." Boorstin was contrasting the New World with the Old. He did not refer to Canada. We may presume that he took it for granted that Canada was too new and too American to have been part of the old Republic of Letters and was therefore destined to become part of the Republic of Technology.

From the perspective of contemporary civilization Canada would seem destined to be not only part of the "Republic of Technology" but part of the universal "Republic of Science" on which that technology depends. Together with what was once called the "military-industrial complex," science and technology formed the basis of the American civilization that became dominant after the Second World War. With the development of survey research and a new computer technology that made the sampling of public opinion possible on a large scale, many of the social scientists in the United States became enthusiastic participants in the Republic of Technology as well as the Republic of Science. They took for granted the American civilization to which they themselves were making important contributions. It was customary in the age of science for social scientists to examine the characteristics of a dominant civilization, whether the France of Comte; the England of Marx, Mill, and Herbert Spencer; or the United States of John Dewey and Talcott Parsons, and to assume that its characteristics were of universal significance. It was a cliche, that the world was moving toward a common civilization, one that would be based on the advanced technology of tomorrow.

Just as important for Canada as the notion of an American Republic of Technology and a universal Republic of Science, was the widespread assumption that North America formed a single market economy into which Canada was fully integrated. This economy extended the common civilization into the field of culture through the mass communications of radio and television, of magazines and paperback books. By the late 1960s many Canadians feared that their country was slipping inexorably and totally into the American orbit, in its culture as well as its civilization. But it was at this point, when there appeared to be a real threat to Canada's distinctive culture, that the willingness of Canadian social scientists to espouse American ideas was severely tested. Having so recently emancipated themselves from British influence, they had little desire to become part of an American cultural empire.

Instead there was a search for an alternative analysis of socioeconomic trends that examined Canada's integration into the American market economy from a different perspective. The choice between continentalism, with its acceptance of close Canada-United States relations, and nationalism, with its ties to conservative humanism, seemed too limited for those social scientists whose natural preference was for a universal scientific interpretation of phenomena. A third option was more attractive than conservative nationalism. This consisted of the neo-Marxist ideas of thinkers who owed more to the European tradition of political economy than to the sociological analysis of Talcott Parsons and his American colleagues with their notion of an evolving social system. Marxism, with its universal application, with its European origins, and with its broad interpretation of history and philosophy, proved more attractive than conservative nationalism to many intellectuals. In addition, the Marxists' concern for the problems of the poor and their traditional rejection of colonialism and imperialism made a great appeal to political activists. Instead of being studied sui generis, Canada could be compared with other dependent states in the Americas, and Latin American dependency theory could be incorporated into the Canadian tradition of political economy that had flourished since Innis. The neo-Marxists also attempted to incorporate the modern state into their economic analysis.

Marx himself had stressed what we have called "civilization" with its broad influence on societies. He was fascinated by the big industry of the nineteenth century that had "universalized competition," by the new industrial civilization that had "produced world history for the first time," and by the achievements that had made "natural science subservient to capital." Indeed, to Marx the United States was "the most perfect example of the modern State," though he concluded that the bourgeoisie "transcends the State and the nation."

American social science was able to offer Canadians only associate membership, as it were, in the Republics of Science and Technology and in the American market economy. Marxism, on the other hand, in principle offered full membership for all in a socialist society. This society Marx identified with a universal civilization transcending particular states and cultures. This was the civilization that all advanced industrial societies were asumed to have in common.

Marxism has less to say about particular cultures such as that which distinguished Canada from the United States. Like the bourgeoisie itself, Marx was primarily interested in promoting a dynamic civilization. Though he was not unconcerned about the importance of promoting culture in general terms, he tended to be averse to particular cultures, since these tended to be backward. Marx referred disparagingly to the Germany described by Hegel, and was critical of its metaphysical speculation, its religious obscurantism, and its entailed landed estates. He was particularly critical of the Orient, especially the "undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life of India" with its "brutalizing worship of nature." As Shlomo Avineri has observed, "Marx unequivocally prefers industrial, liberal, and bourgeois Britain to underdeveloped autocratic Russia, as Britain's level of economic development guarantees the integration of India within the world market and the universalization of European culture."

Clearly Marx was more interested in universal (or Western) civilization (which he identifies here with a universal European culture) than in any particular culture. Indeed, he opposed Hegel's State because of its defense of what he thought were outmoded social formations. Doubtless, had he examined the relatively backward colonial Canada–and still more the Quebec–of his day, he would have welcomed the industrialization of its developing economy, and wouldn't have been too concerned about the preservation of Canada's national identity.

Yet to Canadians, the State (in Quebec, the Province) has been seen as an instrument to nurture Canadian culture. Only through something identifiably Canadian, not British or American, could Canada's national identity be assured. Canada's independence, in the most fundamental sense of the term, depended on the assumption that despite the influence of successive external civilizations, its own culture would persist and would develop gradually over time.