jsburbidge (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jsburbidge) wrote2007-07-09 08:22 pm
jsburbidge) wrote2007-07-09 08:22 pm
Entry tags:
Diverging cultures
When I was born, Canada had no "universal health care" system. Four years before I was born, my father went to graduate school in the United States and had only a very minimal sense of being in a different culture during that time.
By the time I was twenty-one, Canada not only had a universal health care system but had started to think of it (by contrast with the United States) as a distinguishing mark of the Canadian polity (although this would be ramped up even more in the ensuing couple of decades). When I was twenty-one, I went to graduate school in the United States, and felt myself to be usually in a slightly uncomfortably alien culture. (This wasn't because I hadn't been abroad before: I'd lived in France and visted a number of other countries which are, on their surface, far more different from Canada than the U.S. is.)
At present -- witness Michael Moore's new film on health care -- it looks as though the U.S. is never likely to adopt any form of universal health care, and its political culture seems to have wandered off in a wildly different direction from every other country in the world.
This seems to me to be a story not about Canada (which had changed in terms of its self-definition over the period of time) but about the United States. Up until sometime shortly after I was born there had been a broad common song-sheet, as it were, from which the Western democracies had sung. Some might be a little faster and some slower, but they were all following the same general path. Canada was rather behind the European countries on the health-care front (as on a number of others), but when it implemented health care it was recognizably acting in harmony with most of its peers. Similarly, the adoption of a set of loosely interconnected values -- a broad secularization of the official levels of social expression, the adoption of "gender" equality and later expansions of equality rights (most recently the extension of some form or another of marital rights to homosexuals -- marriage in Canada, civil unions in the U.K., for example), the relative demilitarization of society -- not only has Canada's military muscle declined since the end of WWII, but the way in which e.g. regimental churches, cadets, and other quasi-miltary or miltary-liked institutions used to be integrated with Canadian society has prety well evaporated).
Some of the changes in Canada would seem to move us more in the direction of the U.S. After all, we have much weakened the monarchical affiliations of the public arena -- no crowns on pillarboxes, any more -- and we've adopted a Charter of Rights which moved us heavily in the direction of U.S. Bill of Rights jurisprudence.
But at some point the U.S. dropped out of singing from the shared songsheet. Some of the differences may now look rooted quite a long ways back -- the evisceration of the "left" in America by the New Deal compared to other western democracies goes back to the Depression, and American exceptionalism goes back much farther than that. In the early sixties, there was already the Beyond the Fringe joke that "they have the Republican Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party, and the Democratic Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party" -- although that is almost as much a commentary on the way in which the Liberals (not yet the LibDems) had dropped out of effective contention in the U.K. And there are still plenty of people in the U.S. (mainly in the cities and the "blue" areas on the American electoral map) who share ideals with the governing elites of the rest of the western societies. But the U.S. is now notable as the great holdout on public health care (see, e.g. the comments to this Crooked Timber thread). The Equal Rights Amendment was unable to be ratified. They are markedly more miltarily oriented than any other western country I've been in (the only country which has felt more suffused with a military theme was China, which is hardly Western).
You can find people in Canada who think, roughly, like "mainstream" Americans, but they are relatively few and far between. (They're still probably more common than in any other country.) Mark Steyn, David Warren, and David Frum are, after all, all Canadian in origin, and all stand rather to the right of the American spectrum.
By the time my five-year-old daughter is going to graduate school, the U.S. is likely to be so different that adjustment to its norms will probably be like adjusting to the norms of Germany, or France, rather than the nice, close, almost-cousins feeling that worked in my father's day.
By the time I was twenty-one, Canada not only had a universal health care system but had started to think of it (by contrast with the United States) as a distinguishing mark of the Canadian polity (although this would be ramped up even more in the ensuing couple of decades). When I was twenty-one, I went to graduate school in the United States, and felt myself to be usually in a slightly uncomfortably alien culture. (This wasn't because I hadn't been abroad before: I'd lived in France and visted a number of other countries which are, on their surface, far more different from Canada than the U.S. is.)
At present -- witness Michael Moore's new film on health care -- it looks as though the U.S. is never likely to adopt any form of universal health care, and its political culture seems to have wandered off in a wildly different direction from every other country in the world.
This seems to me to be a story not about Canada (which had changed in terms of its self-definition over the period of time) but about the United States. Up until sometime shortly after I was born there had been a broad common song-sheet, as it were, from which the Western democracies had sung. Some might be a little faster and some slower, but they were all following the same general path. Canada was rather behind the European countries on the health-care front (as on a number of others), but when it implemented health care it was recognizably acting in harmony with most of its peers. Similarly, the adoption of a set of loosely interconnected values -- a broad secularization of the official levels of social expression, the adoption of "gender" equality and later expansions of equality rights (most recently the extension of some form or another of marital rights to homosexuals -- marriage in Canada, civil unions in the U.K., for example), the relative demilitarization of society -- not only has Canada's military muscle declined since the end of WWII, but the way in which e.g. regimental churches, cadets, and other quasi-miltary or miltary-liked institutions used to be integrated with Canadian society has prety well evaporated).
Some of the changes in Canada would seem to move us more in the direction of the U.S. After all, we have much weakened the monarchical affiliations of the public arena -- no crowns on pillarboxes, any more -- and we've adopted a Charter of Rights which moved us heavily in the direction of U.S. Bill of Rights jurisprudence.
But at some point the U.S. dropped out of singing from the shared songsheet. Some of the differences may now look rooted quite a long ways back -- the evisceration of the "left" in America by the New Deal compared to other western democracies goes back to the Depression, and American exceptionalism goes back much farther than that. In the early sixties, there was already the Beyond the Fringe joke that "they have the Republican Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party, and the Democratic Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party" -- although that is almost as much a commentary on the way in which the Liberals (not yet the LibDems) had dropped out of effective contention in the U.K. And there are still plenty of people in the U.S. (mainly in the cities and the "blue" areas on the American electoral map) who share ideals with the governing elites of the rest of the western societies. But the U.S. is now notable as the great holdout on public health care (see, e.g. the comments to this Crooked Timber thread). The Equal Rights Amendment was unable to be ratified. They are markedly more miltarily oriented than any other western country I've been in (the only country which has felt more suffused with a military theme was China, which is hardly Western).
You can find people in Canada who think, roughly, like "mainstream" Americans, but they are relatively few and far between. (They're still probably more common than in any other country.) Mark Steyn, David Warren, and David Frum are, after all, all Canadian in origin, and all stand rather to the right of the American spectrum.
By the time my five-year-old daughter is going to graduate school, the U.S. is likely to be so different that adjustment to its norms will probably be like adjusting to the norms of Germany, or France, rather than the nice, close, almost-cousins feeling that worked in my father's day.