Loosening the Mind
Substack: Excuse Me?
In a recent interview in the Paris Review, Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson says that when people ask her about the difference between Americans and Canadians, she replies, “Canadians have one characteristic: they’re polite, but wrong. All the time, polite but wrong.”
My first thought, upon reading this, was: “Isn’t that two characteristics?” But Anne Carson is a brilliant poet and a scrupulous translator (from the Ancient Greek), and she chooses her words carefully. Polite but wrong is one characteristic. We can’t be polite but right, or impolite but wrong.
The usual oddity attributed to Canadians is that we apologize too much. We are apologetic to a fault. There is the cartoon of a Canadian making his way to the centre of a row of seats in a theatre, saying ‘Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me” to each person he passes. I suppose that is being polite but wrong. I once apologized to an ATM. I had inadvertently entered the wrong PIN, and when the machine declined my operation I said, “Oh, sorry.” Aloud. To a machine. That was definitely being polite but wrong.
However, I don’t think that’s what Anne Carson had in mind. She went on to talk about Simone Weil’s concept of contradiction. A contradiction is something that pulls us out of our usual pattern of thinking. Some people (presumably not Canadians) react badly to being contradicted. In Plato’s Euthydemus, the young philosopher Dionysodorus maintains that a contradiction is a falsehood, and therefore doesn’t deserve to be considered as a serious proposition. Socrates replies that that is a specious argument, since by contradicting Dionysodorus he would by that definition be uttering a falsehood. People who equate contradiction with “fake news” tend to become politicians.
Anne Carson, being Canadian, regards contradiction as “a useful mental event.” Having your assumptions challenged, she said, “loosens the mind,” and once your mind is loosened, “you can go on to think other things, or wider things, or the things underneath where you were.” And then she brings her thoughts back to being Canadian: “And that loosening, I think, is what wrongness does.” So sometimes it’s right to be wrong, as long as we’re polite about it.
There is a passage in Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton (another Canadian writer), that has to do with this idea of politeness and wrongness. Mira, the leader of a co-op, is talking to her friend Shelley. “Do you think,” Mira says, “that the kind of person who can never say sorry is also the kind of person who can never say thank you…?” She goes on to talk about a woman who decided she said sorry too much, and so “every time she would have said it, she found a way of saying thank you instead.” When formerly she would have said, “Sorry I’m late,” for example, she said, “Thank you for waiting.” Her change in focus, from apologizing for her own behaviour to thanking the other person for theirs, “transformed her life and all her relationships,” Mira says, “like all of a sudden her friendships got so much healthier and more mature and more honest.” The woman was still being polite, but she was now being polite but right.
Or was she? It seems to depend on why you’re apologizing. In the novel, Mira speculates that before her change, the woman was actually apologizing for being privileged, “and the guilt of that, and how there’s a need to apologize for it all the time now, if you’re in a position of privilege.” Are Canadians polite but wrong because we believe we are in a position of privilege? Was I apologizing to the ATM because I felt guilty that I was able to walk around freely all day while all the ATM could do was wait in the bank’s foyer until I came along and asked it (politely) to give me money? Because actually I’d be wrong; I’m not in a position of privilege vis-à-vis an ATM, because by giving me money the ATM, unlike me, is sublimely fulfilling the purpose for which it was created, and the money it is giving me is not, after all, its money but my own. It’s the ATM that is privileged. Perhaps that’s why every time I take money from an ATM I feel I have fooled it again, that I’ve gotten away with something. Because I have: I’ve gotten away with my own money.
But does this imply that Canadians are polite because we believe ourselves to be privileged, and that therefore we are always in the wrong? These days, we do feel ourselves to be in a privileged position vis-à-vis Americans. Even if just geographically, given the onslaught of global warming. Are we wrong?
“Everything Matters” was the inaugural Robertson Davies Lecture delivered at the Kingston WritersFest in 2013 by Alberto Manguel (another Canadian writer). Alberto took the the title from Rebel Angels, a novel by Robertson Davies (ditto): when zoologist Roberta Burns accidentally steps on Professor Lamotte’s toe (I imagine her making her way to the centre of a row of seats in Kingston’s Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts), she of course apologizes profusely. “With Canadian politeness,” writes Alberto, the professor replies: “It doesn’t matter.” Roberta Burns gently contradicts him: “Everything matters,” she says. “The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality.”
Like Anne Carson, Alberto argues that Roberta Burns, though polite, was also wrong. Some things, he said, don’t matter all that much – he mentions the art, ethics and language of commercial advertising, and statements by politicians at election time – while other things, like the day his granddaughter was born, matter a great deal. Also for Alberto, certain books appeared at certain times in his life, and these matter to him. And since great books contain entire worlds, it is possible to maintain that, because these books matter, everything in them matters.
John Kenneth Galbraith warned us a long time ago that commercial advertising matters a lot more than we think it does: as we have since seen, advertising can determine which politicians are elected. It is possible that Canadians apologize so often not because we feel guilty, or because we secretly think we’re superior, but because we are genuinely sorry that we live in a world in which some things matter too much, and other things are deemed too unimportant, or too contradictory, to be thought about.
Alberto understands this, too. He ends his lecture with a line from Samuel Johnson: “There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not.”