Continentalism and Canadian Higher Education

Continentalism and Canadian Higher Education H. T. WILSON The historical argument does not enjoin a return to the beginning of things, but rather an intelligent appreciation of what things are coming to. THORSTEIN VEBLEN I Inthe short space of two years., my initial interest in the professionalization of academic life, particularly as it has taken place in the social sciences, has made me increasingly aware of a homogenizing process at work in Canada tending to make of North America a single society on the United States model. This phenomenon has elsewhere been termed continentalism 1 because it expresses the essential reality of a liberalism which, if ubeyond" doctrinal ideology ,2 nevertheless provides a pragmatic justification for those values implicit in the worship of technique andin the kind of empiricism which defines freedom as the pursuit of happiness and elevates it to the status of a transcendent, if morally empty, goal. 3 Itis more than merely a coincidence that the author of the Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding also wrote the Second Treatise of Civil Government. English philosophy manifests significant parallels between empiricism as an epistemological doctrine and liberalism as a view of man in society and politics. If, as Bacon argued, knowledge is power, then the purpose of knowledge must be to suborn nature to the designs of men, to mold and reconstitute it as an expression and an extension of the self. Thus nature becomes an object-world, a smiling field in which man expresses his potency through externalization. Notice that this formulation requires man to extract himself from nature in order to know it for his own purposes, whatever they may be. Such an instrumental orientation to nature was bound to express itself in relations with human beings who themselves came to be perceived as "other." Technique as a means to improvement in the human species was especially critical in the historical circumstances in which those THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. 1 1 NO. 2 1 FALL 1970 transplanted Calvinists who chose to leave Europe behind them confronted that state of nature which Locke once called America. To conquer nature required a discipline on the part of the Calvinists most conducive to that escape from the body which is manifested in the obsession with technique as externalization and externality. They were virtually required to turn their bodies into machines in order to realize the triumph over nature which contemplation unrelated to mastery would deny them. 4 There is more than a sight and sound facsimile between empiricism and imperialism. The very idea of nature as "other" to men, expressed in the subject-object dichotomy, could not help but divorce humankind from the process and the product of its own externalization. Such a state of affairs makes it possible, however absurd it may be, to view both process and product as distinct from and alien to us, unnatural if you will. It is a major contention of this essay that such a view is not only incorrect, but dangerous to the extent that it provides us with an escape hatch which saves us from having to confront our capacity for evil as human beings. 5 The belief that technology will "liberate" us presupposes that a homogeneous world civilization without chance or choice, an anticulture in its pretensions to perfection or perfectibility, is morally desirable and defensible. I do not believe that it is. It is the ambiguous reality of Canada and Canadians as part of North America yet different from the society which would continentalize itself as "America" which sets the keynote for the difficulties which the nonFrench experience in asserting separateness while acknowledging common ground as inhabitants of this continent. The very willingness of British Canadians to admire the technological imperative unfolding below the border has made it impossible for them to recognize that their separateness depends upon the vitality of New France as a nation within a nation. 6 A common heritage with those who first successfully resisted the imperial power of Great Britain has effectively overshadowed an initial revulsion with the means employed by their brothers to assert their independence from London. This has made it possible for the rest of Canada to perceive the French...