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book review

Belonging is easy in Adrienne Clarkson’s imagined community.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail

The distance between Periclean Athens and Ford Nation is not as huge as some would have you think.

The ancient Greek ideals about citizen-centred democracy that Adrienne Clarkson repeatedly cites in Belonging, the book version of this year's CBC Massey Lectures, sound so much more uplifting than the contentious, coarsened values we have grown used to in 2014.

But democracy has always been messy, as the Greek historian Thucydides made clear when he wasn't putting phrases in Pericles's mouth that can still be deployed to soothe CBC audiences. Demagogues go with the turf, rhetoric trumps rationality, bullies abound, and when everyone has a voice, consensus is a strained and temporary illusion. The diversity that we, like Pericles, claim to prize necessarily includes people we can't stand and ideas we don't want to hear.

Where we get off lucky, some 2,400 years later, is in our almost complete separation of public and private life – citizenship has an entirely different meaning when you can assign the job of fighting wars or making life-and-death political decisions to other people. You don't always have to pay attention. To a modern mind, if not to Socrates, this is liberating. But the pleasant detachment that is so crucial to our (slave-free) market economy and our more engaged understanding of family life creates a crucial problem Clarkson fails to resolve with her broad sense of national belonging: How do you establish and justify a group identity, particularly in a starting-from-scratch country of immigrants, when people are so free to go their separate ways?

Clarkson, not surprisingly for a former governor-general used to chatting with aboriginal leaders and decorating national heroes, much prefers a community-based understanding of society to what she derides as "the cult of individualism" – the discreet code-words she uses for Thatcherite politicians whose popularity contradicts her progressive world-view.

"We are most fully human," she writes, acknowledging the paradox at the heart of Belonging, "most truly ourselves, most authentically individual, when we commit to the community."

This is the kind of fine generalization a Massey Lecturer is expected to produce. But it's offered more as a statement of faith – the tone of Belonging is surprisingly religiose, even mystical – than a fully formed argument. Clarkson, though you'd scarcely know it from these wide-ranging talks that source the meaning of happiness in Bhutan and the spirit of connectedness in South Africa, inhabits the same city as Rob and Doug Ford. Political theory of the exotic lecture-hall variety willfully transcends such awkward, compromising reality.

Forget the useful and necessary reminder that all politics are local. She'd rather chase down comforting lessons about getting along with others in her perfect Provençal home-away-from-home than try to figure out the contradictory appeal of the Fords and their kind.

A busy four-way stop in Toronto's Rosedale neighbourhood is adduced, it's true, to demonstrate "quintessentially Canadian" qualities – unlike the French, she alleges, we proceed patiently and in order, meeting our responsibility toward our fellow citizens "with equal measures of restraint and permission."

It's this kind of parochial smugness that gives Central Canadian elitists a bad name. And I don't say that just because I navigated the same sequential intersection this week with Clarksonian grace, only to be honked at by someone who thought I'd miscounted my turn. Both of us quintessential Canadians drove away wondering what was wrong with other people. But fortunately neither of us had to generalize our experience into an overly ambitious CBC insight that referenced both Jurgen Habermas's analysis of freedom and the Bantu ethic of Ubuntu. The chaotic nature of movement in a modern city isn't the worst place to look for the idea of citizenship. It's just that when you find yourself travelling alongside Clarkson, the reassuring conclusions about generous interdependence seem to have been reached before the experience ever happens.

Does a remote, religious and somewhat xenophobic place like Bhutan really have all that much to teach us in a multicultural nation that traces its lineage back to the wide-open Athens of Pericles? Bhutan is a country that prizes the concept of gross national happiness, which is why it's bound to inspire a collectivist like Clarkson. But even benign abstractions like generosity and tolerance mean different things once we appropriate them from an expensive Himalayan vacation getaway and try to transplant them to our complicated Canadian lives.

The great Athenians owned slaves, hid away their women, got rich on an empire ruled by force and intimidation, lost a disastrous war to the militaristic Spartans and executed Socrates – a reminder that we shouldn't valourize other people's values completely out of context. The Massey Lectures are a kind of intellectual cruise where we expect to be comforted and reassured, but Clarkson still manages to come across as a widely read woman of immense experience whose mind remains fixed on Rideau Hall orthodoxies.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the contradiction that lies at the heart of Belonging and undermines its optimism – in a book about equality of citizenship, the great Canadian achievement where religion and blood and history don't control who you are or who you can be, Clarkson happily and uncritically cedes priority to native people.

Using her best Royal We, she tries to speak for a country that labours to overcome the shameful behavior of the past. But going beyond reparations, she elevates Canada's natives to a special status that is mythic and patronizing, as well as being glaringly inconsistent with cruel modern reality. If the greatness of Canada depends on the ease with which immigrants get to discard their Old World baggage, why should this New World nation cling so fiercely to its past?

John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.

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