An audio version of this post is available here.
My mother has a theory as to why Canadians and, by extension, Swedes, Norwegians and Finns, are known for their at-times excessive levels of politeness, hospitality, and “don’t rock the boat” mentality: all these peoples spend their winters in bone-chilling temperatures, and even if you don’t particularly like your neighbours there’s not going to anyone else around to dig you out of your house in the event of a blizzard; so you’d better try your best to get along with them regardless. My mother further argues that Canadians are the most polite of all, owing to our British heritage – she may not be an anthropologist, but I can’t help but feel that she may be on to something.
Whether it’s environmental or ancestral – or both – it cannot be denied that we circumpolar dwellers can, at times, strive to be too kind for our own good. The evidence of this happening in Sweden, Finland and Britain has been done to death, but critical commentary on the Canadian conundrum is comparatively lacking. My hunch is that this is owing to two things: the first is that Canada is, ultimately, somewhat irrelevant on the world stage in terms of day-to-day affairs – like New Zealand, it takes something of a disaster for our happenings to make international headlines; the second is that in Canada it has become somewhat of a taboo to make generalizations as to our own values, behaviours and cultural quirks. Although we know that we do have them – even our politicians have a hard time denying that – Canadian society has become so paralyzed by the manufactured fear of “excluding” someone or another from the broader conversation, we’ve had to resort to shutting the thing down entirely. Canadians are so polite, in fact, we have seemingly lost the will to stand up for ourselves when challenged to, even when the very fundamental principles of our society are under threat.
In person, that is. Under the spotlight we are as tepidly passive as the situation requires, but it is what you do in the dark that speaks the truest to one’s character. Herein lies the other side of Canada, of Canadians, from east coast to west; a phenomenon better known (as usual) by its American incarnation: “Minnesota Nice.”
Minnesota Nice refers to a stereotype of behaviour attributed to, well, Minnesotans. Wikipedia defines its aspects, in short, as follows: “polite friendliness, an aversion to confrontation, passive-aggressive behaviour, a tendency toward understatement, a disinclination to make a fuss or stand out, emotional restraint, and self-deprecation.”
To my Canadian readers: sound like anyone you know?
It should be noted that Minnesota played host to a great deal of immigration from Germany and Scandinavia during the 19th and 20th centuries; anyone who has seen either version of Fargo will likely have noticed the unusually high percentage of characters with Scandinavian surnames. It is thought that this heritage may have contributed to the development of Minnesota Nice mannerisms, as there is arguably a fair deal of overlap between this type of behaviour in a small subset of North Americans and that of the Scandinavian cultures at large. For further evidence to support this we might look to what is called the “Law of Jante” (Janteloven in Danish), something of an unofficial “Nordic code of conduct” that was first put into words by the Danish-Norweigian novelist Aksel Sandemose in 1933, but that has already existed on the basis of unspoken agreement for quite some time before.
As the novel that first featured these “laws” was satirical in nature, the aforementioned tendency toward self-deprecation is, itself, palpable through Sandemose’s choice of phrasing. The Ten Rules of the Law of Jante are these:
1. You’re not to think you are anything special.
2. You’re not to think you are as good as we are.
3. You’re not to think you are smarter than we are.
4. You’re not to imagine yourself better than we are.
5. You’re not to think you know more than we do.
6. You’re not to think you are more important than we are.
7. You’re not to think you are good at anything.
8. You’re not to laugh at us.
9. You’re not to think anyone cares about you.
10. You’re not to think you can teach us anything.
In the novel’s context, “we” refers to the residents of the town of Jante. In the sociological context, “we” refers essentially to society at large — to anyone who’s not “you.”
With the possible exception of #9 (our country’s robust social safety net screams We care about you! Even if the excessive wait times and rampant abuse of the system suggests the opposite), the sentiment behind these laws can be felt throughout numerous aspects of Canadian culture: be humble and don’t stick your neck out; don’t try to speak for anyone but yourself; and, somewhat more recently, check your privileges before you go on highlighting your personal achievements – in other words, don’t highlight them at all.
If we’re being perfectly honest, this kind of mentality is seen almost exclusively among Anglophone Canadians of European descent. That’s not to say that it can’t be found among Canadians of differing ancestry, only that I, personally, have not seen anywhere near the same level of excessive humility and non-confrontation among them as I have among European, particularly “old-stock” Canadians. If the reader feels that none of this applies to them, they are free to exclude themselves from the generalization – but it cannot be reasonably denied that there are large swaths of the Canadian population who do behave in this manner. My own opinion is that this mentality has played a large role in leading us to this social, political, and cultural mess that we now find ourselves in. We’ve been trying to sweep these problems under the rug for so long, we’ve come to a point now where we can no longer walk across it without tripping.
Take, as an example, the following excerpt from a Maclean’s article on anti-immigration sentiment in Canada, aptly titled “The Rise of an Uncaring Canada”:
“There are a few inconvenient facts that don’t often seem to sink in with the anti-immigrant crowd. To name a few, that Canada needs immigrants in order to maintain economic solvency, that Canada has international obligations, as well as moral ones, to take in refugees, and that our total refugee intake is small compared to other G8 nations.”
Do you see the similarities? Don’t think you know more than we do. Don’t think you are more important than we are or, in this case, than anyone else on the planet is. Stop complaining; things are much worse elsewhere. Underneath it all is something of a smug-suggestion that anyone who disagrees with the presented opinion is, well… an idiot, or heartless, or even a heartless idiot. We must not forget, even if it does not work on us as individuals, how successful this guilt-tactic has been for preserving establishment rule – it’s been so for decades.
Now, Canada at large has seen comparatively less cultural influence from Scandinavian settlers than has Minnesota, to be sure – but perhaps we should be wondering about the conditions that led to such a mentality developing among Nordic societies in the first place. Was it the harsh, cold winters leading to a survival imperative to get along at all costs? Is it something that can perhaps be traced further back into the psyche of our Germanic, tribal ancestors from long ago? Is it something else entirely? We may never know for sure. But to be frank, the why doesn’t quite matter so much as the need for us to acknowledge and understand this aspect of our culture, to become fully aware of our own behavioural tendencies and, in doing so, come to harness them for our benefit – if such a thing can be done.
Where Canada appears to deviate significantly from this Minnesota-Jante paradigm is in terms of active, rather than passive aggression: outside of the ice rink, we are (socially speaking) woefully adverse to “throwing down,” as it were. I myself have often wondered if the reason why any good hockey game sees at least a punch or two thrown from both sides of the rink, if not a full-on dog-pile, has anything to do with some sort of pent-up rage and frustration within us as a people. It may similarly explain the Canadian tendency toward complaining endlessly about a given issue in the company of our close peers, only to turn around and behave as if everything is perfectly fine; or at least fine enough that we can’t really be bothered to go about trying to change things. This may have something to do with our nation’s political history as well: for the most part, over the last 150 years, our opinions (particularly in the west) regarding anything have been seen by the Laurentian elite as largely irrelevant, and have been treated as such accordingly. Canadians are no stranger to the art of complaining without being heard, but what is worse is that we are unable to harness this frustration in the pursuit of actually doing something productive about our sorry state of affairs – we wouldn’t want to impose, you see. What if we’re just overreacting? What would people think!
But perhaps this is beginning to change. As much as we may look to our southern neighbours, wishing that we had the gall to march, protest, and throw things with the same, patriotic passion as the Americans are won’t to do, we have to remember that we are not actually Americans, despite all of our media saturation in their pop culture, politics and various other domestic affairs. Our revolution may not be televised, but the wiser among us no longer trust the Canadian media to cover anything of importance that happens in this country, anyway. We do not have nearly as many soapboxes to stand on as Americans do; all the more reason why it is so important for us “dissidents” to spread the message through whatever avenues we do have at our disposal.
Hope for the future may come in the form of the “Blue Wave” that is now sweeping across provincial politics. As of yesterday, six of our ten provinces have now openly rebelled against the progressive hegemony – Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Alberta, and Prince Edward Island – thus taking a seat at the table with Saskatchewan, which has been under conservative management for some twelve years already. True to form, Quebec has decided to do the whole “conservative politics” thing differently, which ought to surprise no one; nevertheless, the rest of the converts stand together in opposition to the present status quo. No one trapped within the ever-shrinking progressive bubble seems to have seen it coming, but to the residents of these provinces it makes perfect sense: no, Canadians will not protest outside of CBC headquarters or organize weekly rallies and marches with the same intensity as Americans might, even if they are endlessly slandered by various pundits and op-eds calling us all sorts of terrible things, but again – we are not Americans. We are Canadians; we are polite; we will do things our own way. We will smile and nod and apologize in person, no matter how much it pains us to do so, but as soon as the opportunity arises we will complain about the encounter as much as is required to make us feel a bit better about ourselves.
And there’s no better place to complain than from behind the privacy of a voting booth.
This is why I tell people not to trust polls in general, but particularly those of Canadians: we have no problem lying in someone’s face to preserve the necessary illusion of collective agreement, and polls seem to be no exception. For better or for worse, there is a duplicity about us that cannot be ignored; you simply cannot trust a Canadian to be perfectly honest about anything that isn’t about their own shortcomings. This, too, is similar to the infamous Swedish phenomenon of “consensus culture”: we are loathe to rock the boat, to say or do anything too much against the current consensus, but once someone or something gets it started, once the masses begin to see that they are not alone in their thoughts – that theirs has become the new consensus – they are all too eager to get onboard.
The glaring downside to this tendency of ours is that we are easily manipulated through it: all it took for progressive insanity to capture us in droves was the complete domination of our media by its promoters, executed purposefully over several decades. We have been led to believe, falsely, that the progressive consensus is in the majority – thus we had no choice but to go along with it. This time around however, there is another world of opinion to be found. On social media, just as it would among trusted friends and family, the real consensus began to form: people are angry, tired, and frustrated; and it is far easier on our cultural psyche for us to tweet, blog, or vlog about it than it is for us to march, scream, and throw things in the streets. It is clear from all of the mainstream media’s hullabaloo over “fake news” and “election interference” that the establishment elite have since realized the danger that social media poses to their continued grip on power: in a country as thinly-spread and regionally isolated as Canada, any means that we have of talking to one another outside of the progressive filter serves to undermine their carefully-constructed illusion of widespread agreement with their agenda. Once enough voters realize that it is socially “safe” to dissent, the dominoes begin to fall.
The battle is far from over, and even the current crumbling of the Liberal base may not lead us anywhere worthwhile at the end of the day: our political system remains deeply corrupted, and our federal conservative party’s positions amount to no more than the adage of “progressives doing the speed limit.” It is not clear that the wider, more existential concerns that we have for the fate of this country will, or even can be addressed. It may be hard, at times, to feel hopeful for a country whose politicians seem to be seriously entertaining the idea of “putting a price on plastic” – but pessimism, too, is something of a Canadian cliche.
Now more than ever is the time to spread the word; to find our allies and raise hell alongside them. We have to take the conversation out of our living rooms and further into the public space. Even those less technologically-inclined Canadians, those who still watch the news regularly (imagine!) will, at some point, have no choice but to notice the massive blow that has been dealt to the Liberal brand at the provincial level; no choice but to acknowledge that the times are indeed changing. Some will welcome it, others may not – but my feeling is that there are more out there who will be receptive to change than we may have previously thought possible.
Now is the time to find out if I’m right.
Uppity Peasants 