The following is a digitized version of an article from Canadian Dimension’s print archive, which is available through the University of Manitoba Digital Collections. It was first published in the March-April 1967 edition of CD (Volume 4, Number 3). To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, we do not alter, edit, or update them.

To use the language of fate is to assert that all human beings come into a world they did not choose and live their lives within a universe they did not make. If one speaks in this way, one is often accused either of being pessimistic or of holding a tragic view of life. Neither of these accusations is correct. The words, tragic and comic, are about forms of art and should only be used very loosely to describe events or attitudes to events. The words, optimistic and pessimistic, are surely most accurately used, following Leibniz, to describe what one thinks about the nature of things, whether the world is good or not. I use the word “fate” and believe that nature is good, and do not think that to speak thus is contradictory. It is, in my opinion, a sensible way to talk about the events, though obviously it is far from the liberal dogmas within which most people are taught to think these days.

The fate of most of us here is to be Canadians. I wish to speak about one aspect of that fate—namely that the existence of this country has always been bound up with the interplay of various world empires. One can better understand what it is to be Canadian if one understands that interplay. As no serious person is interested in history simply as antiquarianism but only as it illumines one’s search for the good in the here and now, let me set the problem in its most contemporary form—Viet Nam. What our fate is today becomes most evident in the light of Viet Nam. It is clear that in that country the American empire is demolishing a people, rather than allow them to live outside the American orbit. The Americans are forced to that ferocious demolition because they have chosen to draw the line against the Chinese empire, in a country where nationalism and communism have been in large measure identified. How does this affect Canadians? On the one hand, many Canadians, whether their moral traditions come from Judaism, Christianity, the liberal enlightenment, or a mixture, are not yet so empty that they can take lightly the violent demolition of a people—even in the case of Asians. On the other hand, the vast majority of Canadians are a product of western civilization and live entirely within the forms and assumptions of that enterprise. Today the enterprise of western civilization finds its core and its spearhead in the American empire. In that sense our very lives are inevitably bound up in the meeting of that empire with the rest of the world, and the movements of war which draw the limits in that meeting. The depth of that common destiny with the Americans is shown in the fact that many Canadians who are forced to admit the sheer evil of what is being done in Viet Nam say at the same time that we have no choice but to stand with the Americans as the pillar of strength of western civilization. Beyond this kind of talk is of course the fact that this society is above all a machine for greed, and that our branch plant industry is making a packet out of the demolition of Viet Nam (let me say in parenthesis that there is something immensely funny about poor old Paul Martin waggling off to Moscow as the independent broker of peace, as if the Russians could take our noninvolvement seriously).

Our involvement is, of course, much deeper than the immediate profits of particular wars. Our very form of life depends on our membership in the western industrial empire which is centred in the U.S.A., which stretches out in its hegemony into parts of western Europe and which controls South America and much of Africa and Asia. Somewhere in the minds of nearly all Canadians is the recognition that our present form of life depends on our place as second class members of that system. When I say “second class” I do not imply a low status, because there are a large number of classes within it. It is much nicer to be a Canadian than a Brazilian or a Venezuelan.

Indeed our involvement in the American empire goes deeper than a simply economic and political basis; it depends on the very faith that gives meaning and purpose to the lives of western men. To most Canadians, the central cause of motion in their souls is the belief in progress through technique, and that faith is identified with the power and leadership of the English-speaking empire in the world. The culmination of the age of progress is identified with its apotheosis in the United States.

This then is why for thinking Canadians our present fate can be seen with such clarity in the glaring light of Viet Nam. It is the knowledge that the very substance of our lives is bound up with the western empire and its destiny just at a time when that empire uses increasingly ferocious means to maintain its hegemony. Our fate is seen in the fact that the earlier catastrophes and mass crimes of the age of progress could be understood as originating with other peoples, the Germans, the Russians or the Chinese. They could be seen as the perverse products of western civilization, national socialism or communism. This can no longer be said. What is being done in Viet Nam is being done by the English-speaking empire.

Not only in our present but in our origins, Canada was made by western empires. We were a product of two northwestern empires as they moved out as part of that strange expansion of Europe around the world. It is essential to emphasize that they were northwestern. Hegel’s language is here the clearest. He speaks of the germanische Geist, and in using those words he does not mean the German (deutsche) spirit. He means by it geographically those European lands whose rivers flow into the North Atlantic. He means the particular western Christianity which characterized those lands. He understands that the dominant spirit of the modern age no longer is in the Mediterranean peoples but has passed northwards and westward to the Abendland.

If one is to understand Canada one must understand the history of those empires, not simply in terms of what they did—but in terms of the spirit which they had and which drove them to such enormous motion. To speak very shortly and elliptically about this, if one is to pick the society where modernity first makes its appearance in a more than individual way, one must pick England. Also to understand why that is so, one must understand above all that unique meeting of Calvinist Protestantism and the new secular spirit of the Renaissance. That secular spirit can, of course, be seen in the new physical science we identify with Galileo and the new moral science of Machiavelli. It was a superficial interpretation of what we call the Renaissance by the liberals who saw such thinkers as a return to the Greeks, when they represented a profound turning away from the ancients. The role of Calvinism in making possible the capitalism which has shaped the western world........

© Canadian Dimension