QotD: The Canadian Soul

I almost never pull multiple quotations from the same article or blog post, but in this case I had to make an exception (after yesterday's QotD from This Blog Sits at the):

One concept of Canadians is that they are products of contraction and complexity. They come from a world of two founding cultures (the famous "two solitudes") for which integration is always sought. Two cultures and languages have given way to many cultures and languages as the multicultural experiment continues. Canada licenses newcomers with the right to keep and cultivate their differences. This means that for every cultural characteristic that might serve as a national identifier, there is another that contradicts it. Take as one case in point, Toronto as a city animated by the "tension" between Methodist Scots who made it Canada's second city (after Montreal), and the Italians who arrived after World War II to save them from culinary, fashion, social and emotional inadequacies.

Canadians must also endure the fact that they practice a communitarian capitalism, that they insist on a tall poppy individualism, that they are both aggressively egalitarian and aggressively hierarchical. There are really lots of contradictions swimming about here, and I think the people who rise in a world like this are people who are good at surviving and managing complexity. The fact that Canadians generally are uncomfortable with the "imperial self" that is sometimes popular south of their border gives them a certain perspectival flexibility, let's call it. The ones who flourish are precisely the ones who use these complexities as a staircase with which to climb to acts of integration and creativity.

[. . .] Canadians suffer here from the devotion to consensus. Much more than Americans, Canadians think they have to agree. Much more than Americans, Canadians think they have to approve. One of the things I love about Americans is their pragmatism. You will be hammering away at a problem in a boardroom and it becomes clear that we are not looking for a consensus, we are looking for something that is "good enough for television. Let's get on it."

As I recall from my museum days in Toronto, it was customary to watch people withdraw their compliance and it was customary for people to sniff their disapproval. Again, in the American case, people pursue the thing much less personally, and are inclined to go with things that are responsive to the opportunity . . . even if they are not especially consistent with one's own preferences. Finally, Canadians believe [there is] a null space to which a committee, an institution (and their nation?) can retreat, a place of no decision and no momentum. For most Americans, this is intolerable. In American committee meetings there is a unspoken but deeply shared understanding. We are going to decide on something, and we are going to act on it, it's just a matter of what.

In Canadian groups, contradictions live and they have the power to derail things. [. . .] These Canadians cannot escape their contradictions. They cannot integrate. They can ascend to higher plane of generality, a richer synthetic moment of creativity. Canadians in groups become the victim of their differences while as individuals they are the beneficiaries of these differences. Or, to put this another way, the integration that Canadians do so well as individuals is denied them in collectivities.

Grant McCracken, "Canada, the Martin Paradox, and The Opposable Mind", This Blog Sits at the, 2008-01-10