My oldest friend in the world is T.W., whom I have known from my early teens. He came by my house yesterday, saying that he heard our old high school was being torn down and he wanted to have a look. So we went out together, driving along the back road to Fergus. (We saw a wolf, half way there, running across the road, but that’s another story.)
When we got to the site of the old school, we saw that all but the original stone building was completely torn down. What remains is the original three-story limestone block which is perhaps 150 years old or so; the rest of the site is now a great flat mess of rocks, bricks, and holes. Tom and I were a little aghast. So many of the places where important things from our teenage years happened–were now totally erased from the face of the earth. Even the place where I discovered Paganism – the hall where I had a locker once, and where a friend told me she knew a Druid and would introduce me to him – is now a hole in the ground.
It got me thinking. Canadian society is a highly mobile society. We’re born of European immigration, after all. Today we think little of driving an hour or more to go to work every day. We think little of moving hundreds of kilometers to start a new job. We are the first country in the world, perhaps still the only one, to have mobility rights enshrined in our constitution and our charter of rights and freedoms. These are wonderful things: but it also has the consequence that people do not put down roots the way people in other countries do. I’m thinking of my experiences meeting people in Ireland and Germany, where the culture is thousands of years old, and there are continuities of land occupation, architecture, customs, folklore, mythology, etc. stretching back at least equally as far.
Here in Canada, which has been settled by Europeans for 500 years, we think very differently about heritage and homeland. The loss of a building, like a high school, that was once important to a whole community, isn’t lamented. The loss of a pristine untouched forest or landscape isn’t lamented. The transformation of farmer’s fields and little woodlots and things, into big-boxer shopping districts, friendly to cars but not to pedestrians, isn’t lamented. Why is that? Last night Tom and I were thinking it might be because Canadians don’t have the same attitude toward heritage, the past, to belonging to a landscape or a community, or to a home. We think of homes, communities, and places as almost infinitly interchangeable: never putting roots down deep, it is not hard to pick them up and plant them again elsewhere.
Among Aboriginal people in this country, as also obtained among the Heroic Pagan cultures of Europe’s ancient history, the highest forms of punishment were exile, banishment, and shunning. A person’s whole psychological sense of himself was closely bound to his belonging to a homeland and a community, and so to be banished from that homeland and community was worse than to die. Today, banishment as a punishment wouldn’t have the same force: we simply don’t tie ourselves to our landscapes or to each other anymore.
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (who, by the way, recently recieved a $1.5 million award for contribution to religious thought) talks abot this too. He says that our values are characterised by a kind of narcissistic individualism. And that this individualism is ultimately unsatisfying, precisely because it is logically unable to recognise sources of value and meaning that transcend the self.
Well, the destruction of most of my old high school seemed to me like a perfect case in point. The values of landscapes, heritage, homelands, communities, and so on, are precisely values that transcend the self, which modern-day narcissistic individualism is structurally unable to recognise.
Here’s a photo of the old part of the building, which is still standing. I nicked this off the web years ago, so it shows a part down to the lower-left which is now gone.
I’m told that the remaining building, which is being gutted and renovated, will be turned into municipal government offices. How banal!
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