By John von Heyking, March 24, 2009 in Pedagogy and Teaching
After considering the "big picture" questions about politics, my first-year students turn to the study of Canadian politics (in the U. S., this subfield would get covered by an Introduction to U. S. Government and Politics, though, for reasons I’ve discussed previously, American university students frequently receive Introduction to U. S. Government and Politics as their formal introduction to the overall discipline of Political Science).
After hearing about the tension between politics (treated generically, in the form of the laws of Athens) and philosophy—both as reflecting distinct ways of life—we lower our gaze to within the political horizon to consider the nature of the regime in which my students live. This lowering of our gaze comes as a bit of relief for many of my students, who can now get a chance to study politics in a form with which they are more familiar. It also comes as a bit of a disappointment for those who may have caught the Socratic bug. But teaching is not a risk-free enterprise, so we must carry on.
One of the disadvantages of considering the Socratic dialogues at the outset of the semester is that it tends to obscure the differences among political regimes. From the Socratic perspective, Athenian democracy looks a lot like any other political regime—including tyranny—because the difference among political regimes is smaller than that between the way of life of politics and the way of life of philosophy.
Still, there is a difference between Athenian democracy and tyranny or oligarchy. And there is a difference between both of those and modern liberal democracy, as presented in the form of the idea of responsible government in Canada.
The best introduction to Canadian politics I can think of is the ratification debates that took place after the constitutional document had been drafted. These debates are abridged in a wonderful volume, Canada’s Founding Debates, edited by Janet Ajzenstat, Ian Gentles, Paul Romney, and William Gairdner. Here we read why Canada's Founders chose the form of responsible government they did, over and against alternatives. Canadians, who have inherited this system, are oblivious to its foundations, and the reasons for those foundations. This ignorance is not restricted to Canadians; it is the general condition of citizens everywhere who are accustomed to the benefits of their regime without being fully aware of why they are benefits.
Even so, one of the reasons they published this volume is the utter, and appalling, ignorance about the Founding among not just the Canadian public, but Canadian political scientists. Unlike the United States, where the Founding debates are easy to obtain, and where studies of the Founding are an academic industry, the Canadian debates, before Ajzenstat and her colleagues published them in abridged form, were rarely published and rarely examined by scholars.
The ignorance of Canadians is not simply a matter of the limited horizon of the citizen, but part of it is willful and imposed because Canadian political scientists and historians determined, without bothering to study the sources, that Canada’s history is progressive; what’s important is to come, and not what has occurred. It’s as if to confirm Aldous Huxley’s warning that modern tyranny requires ignorance of history. With Huxley's Brave New World still in their memories, the students feel cheated at having their history taken away from them. I am not above turning the resentment undergraduates have against their rulers and elders into a healthy skepticism toward the ideology of progressivism that reigns strongly in Canada, perhaps even more strongly than in the United States. There is something satisfying with turning youthful attitudes against the unseemly youthful attitudes of the old.
