Out of Order

Let be be finale of seem,
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

– Wallace Stevens

“Canadians think of their country as an empty vessel, and are always searching outside Canada for people and things to put in it” – so said an article published on our defunct website ten years ago. That seems perfectly appropriate for a country which, in an article published there five years ago, I compared to a cargo cult As the latter article has it, “We have provided [Canada] with what seem to us to be all the characteristics of a nation, but on closer examination these characteristics turn out to be in large part primitive imitations of the real thing.”

My intention now is to enliven your intellectual life with a series of articles about the cargo cult institutions provided for us Canadians. Today we’ll be looking at the Order of Canada.

The Order of Canada, according to the Governor General’s website, is “the centrepiece of Canada’s Honours System and recognizes a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation.” The Order was a brainchild of Lester Pearson’s, who already had a Nobel and so can’t be accused of creating an honour for himself to get. It was established in 1967, and its Chancellor is the Governor General. Members of the Order of Canada are selected by a shadowy group called the Advisory Council of the Order of Canada, which is currently chaired by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Any Canadian may nominate someone for membership, but nominations are not publicized, deliberations about the selection of new members are secret, and decisions not to select someone are not explained.

I must admit that I have never been impartial about the Order of Canada, which I have always considered to be profoundly elitist and consequently un-Canadian. What sociological and anthropological evidence there is suggests that Canadian culture – or, at least, the culture of the great majority of Canadians – is egalitarian. For decades before the establishment of the Order of Canada, Canadians had been forbidden to accept honours in the higher ranks of the Commonwealth orders of merit, such as the Order of the British Empire, and few had complained about being denied the opportunity to lord it over other Canadians (of course, Conrad Black was young then).

But then separatism put in an appearance. All of a sudden people started thinking that perhaps Canada was a bit too decentralized and sectionalist for its own good. Furthermore, the separatists were arguing that Canada was not a real country. National institutions like those of real countries were needed, and Centennial year offered a golden opportunity to create some.

And so we got the Order of Canada. Unfortunately, in importing the idea of the order of merit, Canada didn’t look closely enough at foreign models. As a result, like cargo cult reproductions of airport control towers which omit important components of real airport control towers, such as radar systems, Canada’s order of merit ended up a feeble imitation of real orders of merit.

Our two mother countries provided models that we could have followed. France has four orders of merit and the United Kingdom sixteen, each intended to honour achievement in different fields. In France and the United Kingdom honours are also widely distributed; for example the Légion d’Honneur alone has over 110,000 members, or one for every 550 French citizens of all ages. Consequently, French citizens have a reasonable chance of being acquainted with a member of an order of merit, and a reasonable chance of success if they aspire to become members of one themselves.

But Canada decided to do the exact opposite. The Order of Canada is an omnibus order, intended to honour people in all fields. Consequently the goals which members are supposed to have achieved are only stated vaguely. The Order's motto is Desiderantes meliorem patriam (those desiring a better fatherland), which the Governor General's website makes even vaguer by translating it sloppily, as They desire a better country. That translation could as easily describe people who hate Canada and leave it. Even a good translation doesn't exclude many people. We all desire a better Canada, don't we? Those young fellows who supposedly wanted to behead Stephen Harper probably thought that would make Canada better.

The Order of Canada is also highly exclusive. Currently there are about 5,600 members of the Order of Canada, or one for every 6,000 Canadians of all ages. Consequently, its members tend to be important people. In fact, they consist largely of:

1. people of the type that politicians hang around with, and
   
2. people of the type politicians would like to hang around with.

So the members include a lot of rich people, retired politicians, journalists, sporting figures, and TV stars.

The members do appear to be highly worthy. When you exclude 5,999 of every 6,000 Canadians from the Order, you're going to end up with a highly worthy membership. However, you are going to exclude a large number of worthy people, and your membership will not be drawn from the great mass of the people. The members of the order of Canada are largely:

• distinguished people in the professions, sciences, culture, education, social service, sport, and journalism,
  
• philanthropists (a category which includes a large proportion of the entertainers), and
  
• big shots (including a fair number of provincial cabinet ministers of varying degrees of distinction).

I’m not saying that the Order of Canada is a private club for politicians and their friends, but that to a large extent it represents the limited perspective and experience of the ruling classes of this country. It includes chiefly people from their exalted and exclusive circles, and the chances of an ordinary Canadian being inducted are less than his or her chances of winning the lottery. In other words, the vast majority of Canadians have no reason either to be interested in the Order or to aspire to belong to it, and overwhelmingly they are not interested in it and do not aspire to join it.

If we must have orders of merit, they should have as their goals the provision of good examples, the encouragement of achievement, and the provision of outward and visible signs of important national ideals. A small, elitist Order of Canada cannot accomplish these goals. Canada could easily accomplish these goals, however, by following the Légion d’Honneur and having more grades of membership. The Order of Canada has three grades, while the Légion d’Honneur has five. The lowest two grades of the Légion d’Honneur contain over 95% of the members of the order. The Governor General would have to rub shoulders with people who wear ready-made clothes, but at least he would have contact for once with people who attended public schools and do their own housework.

We could also at least have subdivisions within the Order of Canada designating fields in which accomplishment is rewarded, with clear standards for membership in each division. That would also help eliminate the impression that many members got in because they know a politician.

Well, we could have a post office that delivered the mail, too, as well as armed forces that actually could exert armed force, and a health care system that actually cared for people. We could. Really. To do that, though, we would have to realize that institutions do not make a country, but rather that a real country creates institutions which arise from its culture.

I don’t know that Canadian culture needs an order of merit at all. There are other ways to honour distinguished Canadians without establishing an exalted caste. If we must have orders of merit, let’s carefully adapt the best foreign models to the requirements of Canadian culture instead of cobbling together a slapdash impersonation whose underlying assumption is that only one Canadian in 6,000 is really accomplishing anything for the country.

Out of Order © John FitzGerald, 2006, 2011

The meaning of lives

"Very much of a novelist's work must appertain to...intercourse between young men and young women" (Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography)

These days, if you've appeared in the public eye for longer than a day or two, you've probably written an autobiography. You've also probably written it long before your life is likely to be over. Drew Carey has written one.

Anyway, contemplation of the huge number of celebrity autobiographies at every bookstore persuaded NEW IMPROVED HEAD to investigate the genre. Its investigation consisted of comparing a contemporary celebrity autobiography to two of the great autobiographies.

The contemporary autobiography selected was Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry . Mr. Fry is an intelligent, amusing, and elegant writer, and the department figured there was a very high probability that he had written his book himself rather than through spectral agency (the title of Mr. Fry's book is taken from Psalm 108:9, of which "Moab is my washpot" are the first four words and The last five are "over Philistia will I triumph"). The two great works with which it was compared were An Autobiography by Anthony Trollope and I, Claud (1967 edition) by Claud Cockburn.

While Mr. Fry is best known as an actor he is a literary figure as well, a novelist and a newspaper columnist. A comparison of his autobiography with those of two other British literary figures who also came from the upper reaches of British society therefore seemed highly appropriate.

In fact, although Mr. Fry's book concerns only the first twenty years of his life, it has elements in common with the older works. In particular, all include an account of British prep school and public school life. The importance of school life is an enduring component of British upper-class myth, and Mr. Fry and Mr. Trollope seem determined to attach great importance to their school lives. Trollope's account of his misery at Harrow is of course renowned, while part of Mr. Fry's account of his misery at Stouts Hill has been published in Reader's Digest as an illustration of the wholesome and helpful influence of teachers.

The difference between the two men is that while in his account Trollope is concerned to restrain his admirable and obviously considerable resentment at the people he considered responsible for his unjust persecution at school, Fry is concerned in his account chiefly to explain how his misbehaviour at school does not demonstrate an unforgiveable or incorrigible defect of character (a possible ulterior motive will be discussed later).

Fry was a thief. He stole money from his fellow students. The culmination of his adolescence was a spree of fraud using a credit card stolen from a family friend. He constructs an elaborate theory whereby his thieving is explained as the result of an unrequited longing for love and of a feeling of inability to join in with other people. He also notes a professional opinion from his boyhood that his problems were due to emotional immaturity. While Mr. Fry protests ad nauseam his shame at and repentance of the crimes of his youth, he ignores the obvious explanation of them.

The obvious explanation is that he stole because it was profitable. Stealing is immediately reinforced by the procurement of the stolen item and, often, by relief of boredom, something which appears to be in no small supply in the educational establishments of the British upper classes. People steal because it gets them stuff and because it's exciting, not because they long for love. Mr. Fry's spree of fraud ended in arrest and conviction, and he was arrested because he failed to take adequate precautions against being arrested. However, his failure to take precautions seems to have been simply the result of incompetence rather than of any possible unconscious recognition of his guilt and a consequent desire to be punished for it.

Trollope's account of his suffering at school is presented as an explanation of the difficulties of his young manhood. However, these difficulties, according to Trollope, disappeared on the day he moved to Ireland to take up a new assignment for the Post Office, and they never returned ("from the day on which I set my foot in Ireland all these evils went away from me"). It is therefore difficult to attribute any real influence over the course of his adult life to his persecution at school. The persecution seems to be recounted chiefly so Trollope can get his own back.

P. D. Edwards has noted the robust strain of resentment in Trollope's autobiography. Trollope clearly believed that others had been unwilling to acknowledge his abilities, and a large part of the book is given over to the admirable undertaking of getting even, as a large part of his life seems to have been. Among other things, he notes that he may have run for Parliament on the off chance that his dead uncle, who had mocked his parliamentary ambitions, might learn of his nephew's victory through whatever channels exist to the afterlife (Trollope lost, although the results were eventually overturned and the borough disfranchised).

The resentment is part of a larger goal of self-justification. For example, Trollope obviously was driven to write, and he seems to have felt a need to justify his writing as something more than the result of an obsession. Much of one chapter is taken up with his arguments for the nobility of novel-writing, and his famous accounting of the income from his books is clearly intended as an argument for the respectability of his craft. Trollope also devotes considerable space to the superiority of his ideas about running the Post Office, where he worked for many years, to Rowland Hill's.

Anyway, Trollope's school days seem to have been recounted just so an important score could be settled. And what of Cockburn's school days? This least conventional of the three men recounts a childhood full of able people who recognized his ability.

Cockburn's account is also strikingly devoid of feeling compared to Fry's and Trollope's – of course, Cockburn had the most aristocratic lineage of the three and may simply have been much more the proper British gentleman (you read it here first – this is probably the first time Cockburn's ever been accused of this). Nevertheless, Cockburn clearly was not using I, Claud as a means of dealing with self-doubt, as Trollope and Fry seem to have been using their autobiographies.

Cockburn is also much more entertaining and informative than the other two men. I, Claud is full of colourful, amusing, and informative anecdotes of colourful, amusing, and important people. Al Capone tells Cockburn that his rackets are run along strictly American lines, while Charles De Gaulle plays an amusing and dangerous practical joke on him (a joke which gives Canadian readers a new perspective on that Québec libre remark). Cockburn also retails anecdotes told him by others. Some (or many) of the anecdotes may have been embroidered a bit (or a lot), but none is probably any less true than it needs to be.

Finally, Cockburn is the least self-obsessed of the three men. Rather than settling scores with old opponents, he recounts how he became a fast friend of one of them (Malcolm Muggeridge). As a result of these differences in approach, Cockburn's book is easily the most intelligent. While Trollope and Fry are certainly no dunces, Cockburn just gave himself more scope to demonstrate his intelligence.

These differences between the three books probably reflect differences in the purposes for which they were written. Trollope's book was written for posthumous publication. The self-justification and settling of scores were probably an attempt to fix his posthumous reputation. Cockburn's book, on the other hand, was probably published with the simple goal of making money, a commodity of which he seems to have been in urgent need at several points in his life. Cockburn, furthermore, had other ways of settling scores and no need to use his autobiography to settle them. He therefore was entertaining, informative, and intelligent.

In additon, though, Cockburn's approach just seems more adult. Cockburn had achieved that state of maturity in which we realize that one of the conditions of life is that we make mistakes, and that these mistakes are sometimes quite serious. Cockburn realized that it is not necessary to deny one's fallibility (Trollope, for example, baldly asserts that whenever, over the course of his long career at the Post Office, he disagreed with Rowland Hill, he was right and Rowland Hill was wrong) or to explain it as the result of some unverifiable psychological hardship. You simply acknowledge your fallibility and get on with your life in the light of that knowledge. Trollope and Fry, though, want to persuade us that they did not make mistakes but instead lost battles with the superior forces of society.

Trollope's attempt to fix his reputation was subverted by his great obsession, writing. Reading between the lines, we can infer that Trollope, raised by a literary mother, simply loved to write. He persevered in writing even though his early books were not successful and although writing required great sacrifice - for example, he also had a full-time job to perform and so got up at four every morning to write.

Trollope thought everything about writing was important, and that belief, and a desire to demonstrate the rewards of writing as a career (and, as we have noted, its respectability), led him to include an account of the money he had made from every book he had written. That one page is what readers seized on. Trollope acquired the reputation of a mercenary philistine.

Fry's book seems to have a similar purpose but may have been in part intended to deal with a more immediate problem. In 1995, Fry abandoned the West End production of Simon Gray's play, Cell Mates, after bad reviews. He simply disappeared without warning, finally reappearing in Belgium. Moab is My Washpot seems to be an attempt to explain that disappearance as something other than simply an irresponsible act. It culminates in another flight, the one undertaken with someone else's credit card, and tries to explain it as the result of psychological difficulties which are clearly intended to make Fry's acts seem less criminal. These psychological difficulties, moreover, are to be considered as persisting into Mr. Fry's adulthood. So we probably are intended to conclude that when he ran away from the West End he was just coping with the thwarting of his longing for love by the critics.

While that purpose may seem ignoble, NEW IMPROVED HEAD believes that Mr. Fry did rise above it. We believe his goal was not simply to rehabilitate his reputation, but to rehabilitate it by peddling as big a load of old codswallop as he could put together. That is, Mr. Fry is probably well aware that his explanation is silly (for one thing, it's not hard to imagine his scorn at someone else's attempt to offer the same explanation), and his goal was to get people to believe it anyway. If the blurbs are anything to go by, he was successful in achieving that goal, and for that NEW IMPROVED HEAD commends him.

So once again NEW IMPROVED HEAD ends up with some anticlimactic conclusions. For example, we conclude that celebrities write autobiographies as marketing exercises. Who knew?, one might ask, except that clearly many reviewers of Mr. Fry's autobiography have not made it clear that they know it.

We also conclude that autobiographies should be judged by their ability to entertain and inform and not by the insight they supposedly provide into the life of a renowned person. For one thing, you're not likely to get insight. Cockburn remarks in his book his surprise that readers of an earlier edition had failed to see how the events recounted in it explained his decision to leave the Communist Party in the late 1940s. The chapter in the 1967 edition about this decision provides no more insight. The simple fact is that anyone's life is a complicated thing. The person living it is unlikely to understand it, and if he does he still may be unable to explain it adequately to someone who is acquainted with him only through his writing. Cockburn does us the favour of providing us with a straightforward account of his life rather than with a simplistic interpretation of it in the manner of Trollope or Fry. We reach the last page of I, Claud with no great insight into the reasons that his life turned out the way it did, but also without the sensation of having been bludgeoned by propaganda that we have on reaching the last pages of Trollope's or Fry's books. That may be a demonstration of Cockburn's greater skill as a propagandist, a skill of which he was proud, but it more likely is simply the result of a realization that a mistake, even a serious one, does not make one worthless. We also end up with as much insight into Cockburn's life as we have into Trollope's or Fry's.

Anyway, who wants insight into a renowned person's life? For example, NEW IMPROVED HEAD will continue to admire Mr. Fry's work regardless of whatever rationalizations he wants to provide for whatever acts he may feel guilty about or vulnerable over. We don't really want or need to know why he thinks he does things, or the way he would like us to think he thinks he does things.

By NEW IMPROVED HEAD's standards, Trollope's and Cockburn's autobiographies are clearly superior to Fry's. Trollope and Cockburn were important people who did important things and knew other important people. Their accounts of their lives are intrinsically interesting, and in addition they pass on valuable lessons taken from their experience. Fry's book deals mainly with his childhood and hobbledehoyhood, and is intrinsically about as interesting as anyone else's account of their upper-middle-class childhood and hobbledehoyhood would be. We are sure that Mr. Fry's further autobiographical work will be more rewarding simply because it will be more adult and about a considerable record of achievement.

The Meaning of Lives © Actual Analysis, 1999