American in Civilization, Canadian in Culture

Let us begin with that cliché of Americans who view Canada: that Canadians are basically like Americans.... At bedrock, Americans think, the Canadian experience is not all that different from the experience of the United States.–Robin W. Winks, The Relevance of Canadian History: U.S. and Imperial Perspectives

1 Continentalism versus Nationalism

If any country in the 1960s seemed indistinguishable from its neighbors in civilization, that country was Canada. Its apparent status as a miniature replica of the United States was aptly symbolized in the construction of the world's tallest freestanding building, a communications tower by means of which Torontonians were said to be able to broadcast more TV channels–American as well as Canadian–than any other Canadian community. Toronto, along with Boston, Montreal, Detroit, and Chicago, formed the northern arc of the twentieth century's most dynamic civilization.

That civilization was set in a world increasingly brought together not only by improved communications (Canadian Marshall McLuhan's "global village"), but also by the growing power of transnational corporations. It was the "global reach" of such corporations that led one IBM executive to say that national boundaries were of limited significance: "For business purposes the boundaries that separate one nation from another are no more real than the equator. They are merely convenient demarcations of ethnic, linguistic and cultural entities."

Implicit in this assertion was an important assumption: that there was a distinction between civilization and culture. Certainly at any time there tends to be a dominant civilization whose technology is acknowledged to be superior. That civilization requires considerable organizational skills and these help to give its society, government, and economy a distinctive character that has widespread appeal as a model. At various times such civilizations as those of Greece and Rome, France and Britain, have offered such an appeal. More recently it has been the United States (and to a limited extent, the Soviet Union) that has provided the pattern for other peoples.

To many foreigners it has seemed that North America forms a single civilization dominated by the United States, and that Canada is merely part of this civilization. As the opening quotation from Robin Winks indicates, at bedrock Canada has not seemed all that different from the United States (though perhaps the United States of yesterday) and any differences between the two countries have been thought to be of minor significance. Yet countries like Canada, which feel themselves threatened by a hegemonic civilization, are only too conscious that there is a difference between the attributes they share with their powerful neighbor and those that are peculiar to themselves. With noteworthy exceptions, it is the shared attributes, for example the science, technology, and economy, that form the common civilization. It is the distinctive characteristics, for example the literature, history, and world view of a people, that on the whole delineate the separate culture.

The term "civilization" is often used synonymously with "culture," particularly in dominant civilizations where the culture is assumed to be universally acceptable. But in comparing Canada with the United States it makes sense to draw a distinction between what the two countries have in common, namely their North American civilization, and what they do not share. Canada, after all, has its own literary tradition and its own philosophical assumptions, in a word, its own culture. In a dominant civilization like that of which the United States is the center, the political system is taken for granted as an integral part of the civilization. It is partly through its political power that the civilization is able to extend its influence. In a peripheral society such as Canada, where a people is attempting to preserve and promote a distinctive cultural identity, the political system plays a different role. There, the government is expected to defend the culture against the dominant civilization.

To thus differentiate between civilization and culture may seem somewhat arbitrary to someone brought up in the English or French tradition, where the terms are used interchangeably. Thus Fernand Braudel has written, "The mark of a living civilization is that it is capable of exporting itself, of spreading its culture to different places. It is impossible to imagine a true civilization which does not export its people, its ways of thinking and living."

But it is common to find such a distinction drawn by German writers (though not by Freud). Norbert Elias has written, "The French and English concept of civilization can refer to political or economic, religious or technical, moral or social facts. The German concept of kultur refers essentially to intellectual, artistic, and religious facts, and has a tendency to draw a sharp dividing line between facts of this sort, on the one side, and political, economic and social facts, on the other."

For our purposes it is useful to distinguish between the two terms and to give them more precise, if perhaps arbitrary, definitions. In doing so, we may on occasion take for granted the conventional contrast drawn by many social scientists between "modern" (often meaning "superior") civilization and "traditional" (often meaning "backward") culture. Nevertheless, this convention can be very misleading. A modern civilization is usually superior only to an older civilization that it has replaced: technology is, after all, obsolescent. But a traditional culture may be a superb culture that no modern civilization can replace, let alone surpass. Civilizations rise and fall. It is cultures that, unless destroyed by a powerful alien civilization, persist indefinitely. What is traditional, i.e., a culture, may prove to be long lasting: what seems new and modern, for example, the technology of a contemporary civilization, may turn out to be obsolescent and even transient. Consequently, the humanist scholar who is concerned with a great culture may be taking a longer view of the future as well as of the past than the social scientist whose primary interest is the analysis of a contemporary civilization. For example, in India the civilizations of the Mughal Empire and the British Empire have come and gone. The Hindu culture, which in their heyday both the Muslim rulers and the British...