Dominion Day 2008

Has Canada become Hooperized?  Evelyn Waugh, who understood conservatism as an emotion, more than simply as an economic or political proposition, observed in Brideshead Revisited:

Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry's speech on St Crispin's day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae.  The history they taught him had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial changes.  Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon - these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.

Years ago, in my feckless youth, I collected signatures with dear Brutus - who is still alive, gentle readers, despite his low frequency posting - for Canada to support the war in Iraq.  I did it, I suspect, simply because I wanted to tell some yet unconceived progeny that their father had campaigned for war, rather than against it.  I recall a collection of young girls - perhaps sophomores, but they seemed younger - asking in disbelief if we were doing what, very clearly, we were doing.  We had posters with Karsh's Churchill glaring down at us and them, a caption reading: "Where have all the Churchill's gone?"  That was long ago, cried one girl, ancient history.  The past has no relevance here, the implication.  I was appalled more by her naivete than her ignorance. I knew only too well what a precarious thing civilization is, not from personal experience, my father had lived in what had once seemed a civilized country, which slide back into barbarism overnight.  Gibbon's famous remark about history being "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind" applies just as well to geography. 

Beyond this thin line, which wise statesmen have argued over and drawn, here is us and the beyond is them.  This blessed plot.  Did they not understand how the world does work, how it - not capitalism - is red in tooth and claw.  That the warrior would become obsolete only when that thin line was brought forward, and became all encompassing.  Till then he and his code were needed.  I was wrong to object to her naivete, she knew no better having been taught nothing of the world beyond the line, nothing but cliches that were shopworn long before her time or mine.  There was something in those girls manner which has remained with me, not girlish ignorance, but a certain smugness of the bourgeoisie.  The romantic element eluded them.  The romantic sees the manichean aspects of life, the Sturm und Drang.  In describing those who sought to overthrow the British monarchy, C.S. Lewis noted:

Monarchy can easily be debunked, but watch the faces, mark well the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

Few lines have better described the real tragedy of the modern world, a loss of feeling and beauty, the death of magic.  Hooper would have been too conventional to have been a republican, yet he would have not have objected to the rhetoric of those to "whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach."  The cry here is not for literal superstition, which is absurd, but for emotion, for what emotion is when properly understood.  To feel is to understand, but not in the sense often implied.  A feeling is not a primary, it is a product of beliefs, experiences and values.  To feel strongly is not necessarily to have lost sight of reason, but to have understood its lessons so well that thought is not necessary.  Just as habit is not necessarily a product of unthinking rote behaviour, it too can be the end result of years of hard thought. 

There is a middle case too, of something partially grasped, something half submerged in the subconscious or soul or whatever a particular generation decides to call it.  This is often an excuse for much sloppy thought and sentimentality, but its importance should not be denied.  There are many thing that we cannot explain readily but are no less real or important.  The ill-treatment of a child can be objected to on grounds of future psychological well being, but this is a cold thought.  There is something about harming the defenseless and innocent that we cannot quite articulate, yet is still important.  It is not that it cannot be explained, but that it is hard to explain because so much is touched upon at once.  A feeling can have many thoughts behind it. 

The loss of feeling, which is the plight of Hooper, is a loss of knowledge and understanding.  Being unable to weep at the "epitaph at Thermopylae" is the symptom of a shrunken soul and view.  As we battle against the Trudeaupian state we must put aside, for a moment, the equations and tax proposals.  We lament that Canadian history is untaught in our schools.  A recent survey of 18 to 24 year olds finds that half cannot identify our first Prime Minister.  Perhaps you have, at last, died John A.  Lack of general knowledge can be disorienting, it can even be gauche in some circles - ever shrinking ones - yet what is also lost in the not teaching of history is romance.   Amidst its bloodshed, "the register of crimes," history suggests what perhaps only literature and art can fully accomplish, a sense of man as something other than an animal.  The same survey, above, which noted that half of our youth cannot recall - or perhaps were never taught - the basic facts of our national history, noted that genealogy is now tremendously popular.  Because of this one bore of a historian proclaims that history is not dead, it's just changing forms, the past is still cool.  Personal history, however, is not history.  That your great-grand mother was the first woman in some obscure county or township to get a driver's license is not history, it might be interesting but it's a form of navel gazing. 

History, literature and art teach you what you can't discover by yourself, or can't understand as well.  Not one example in one narrow context, which is all we ever personally know, but millions of examples in millions of contexts over many years.  The humanities, at their finest, carry us out of ourselves.  To lose that is to become the parochial and balkanized nation that we are now, obsessed with grandma's gossip but not Sir John A's feats and follies.  We lose understanding in all this, but we also lose romance.  The grim facts of history should not be explained away or glossed over, yet in reading a national history we see a grand stage.  To have built a country, especially so preposterous a one like ours, is to have been a giant, warts and all.  History isn't just great men doing great things, but that must be part of it.  If we could do it all ourselves, there never would have been the great men in the first place.  Grandeur implies romance, romance implies emotion and emotion the end point of what, ideally, is much understanding.  To feel because you know.  For the polyphony to play.  Hooper feels too, and weeps too, but over the trivia of the day.  He would not weep over this: 

    When old age shall this generation waste,
        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
    Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The Hoopers, and their spiritual god fathers in the public schools, may "know" but they do not feel.  In not feeling they remain in the worst form of ignorance, the smugness of those who cannot imagine an alternative to what they and the world around them is, both dream and nightmare.  Once more again, then, with feeling.