And that experience is that Canadians are woefully informed about their own country and the world at large. There was constant confusion about the political system and Canada's role in international affairs.
Some of what you perceive as being ill-informed may be actually be due to the fact that Canadian political systems and and our ideas about our role in international affairs are currently in a state of some flux, and the West is where a lot of the changes are happening. We have been struggling for some time to find political frameworks that can encompass both Quebec and Western nationalism, and that struggle continues. We are also beginning the process of looking for ways to make our parliament more representative. The political right in Canada is very divided, another source of turmoil that is strongest in the West.
We are at the moment even more obsessed with the U.S. than usual - for obvious reasons, at least in my opinion - and are torn between the need to find effective ways of dealing with our very large and militarily powerful neighbour and largest trading power, while at the same time feeling more and more that we want to be quite distinct from the U.S.
Internationally, we want to believe in the image of Canada as a peacekeeping and humanitarian nation that is the legacy of Lester Pearson, while not wanting to spend a dime on providing the military and international service infrastructures to carry out the work that has to underlie that image.
Just to mention a few of the things that are making Canada rather confused about itself right now.
I think we are in general just as informed as Americans, if not moreso, about events in the world outside of North America, but receive little information from our media about the context and possible meaning of those events. We suffer at times from a blend of both the British and the American forms of insularity, and the chance workings of history that made us the uncomfortable bedmate of a powerful imperialist power mean that when we do look beyond our borders, we most often look south, and not much further.
I may have misunderstood "nurturative" but if it means using government intervention on a broad and grand scale to encourage certain social outcomes, then the Bush administration is indeed nurturative.
Based on my own reading of Lakoff, I think you may be missing some of what he seems to be including in his "nurturant pparent" construct. The government as nurturant parent does indeed appear to imply government intervention to encourage social outcomes, but so do some forms of the government as strict father construct. It is the nature of the social outcomes, and the goals of the interventions, that determine whether the government is acting as a strict father or a nurturant parent. Lakoff says in this article (http://www.alternet.org/story/16947) that:
Nurturing has two aspects: empathy (feeling and caring how others feel) and responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. These two aspects of nurturance imply family values that we can recognize as progressive political values: From empathy, we want for others: protection from harm, fulfillment in life, fairness, freedom (consistent with responsibility), open two-way communication. From responsibility there follows: competence, trust, commitment, community building, and so on.
I don't see much of what the Bush administration has done fitting into any of these categories. There really isn't even a commitment to protect citizens from harm - if there were, the U.S. would be taking port security much more seriously. But that would slow down the import of goods, and that's not something that corporate America really wants (unless, of course, it's goods that would be too competitive in the U.S. market, in which case the government is only too glad to impose tariffs and stifle competition).
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2004-10-20 12:19 am (UTC)Some of what you perceive as being ill-informed may be actually be due to the fact that Canadian political systems and and our ideas about our role in international affairs are currently in a state of some flux, and the West is where a lot of the changes are happening. We have been struggling for some time to find political frameworks that can encompass both Quebec and Western nationalism, and that struggle continues. We are also beginning the process of looking for ways to make our parliament more representative. The political right in Canada is very divided, another source of turmoil that is strongest in the West.
We are at the moment even more obsessed with the U.S. than usual - for obvious reasons, at least in my opinion - and are torn between the need to find effective ways of dealing with our very large and militarily powerful neighbour and largest trading power, while at the same time feeling more and more that we want to be quite distinct from the U.S.
Internationally, we want to believe in the image of Canada as a peacekeeping and humanitarian nation that is the legacy of Lester Pearson, while not wanting to spend a dime on providing the military and international service infrastructures to carry out the work that has to underlie that image.
Just to mention a few of the things that are making Canada rather confused about itself right now.
I think we are in general just as informed as Americans, if not moreso, about events in the world outside of North America, but receive little information from our media about the context and possible meaning of those events. We suffer at times from a blend of both the British and the American forms of insularity, and the chance workings of history that made us the uncomfortable bedmate of a powerful imperialist power mean that when we do look beyond our borders, we most often look south, and not much further.
I may have misunderstood "nurturative" but if it means using government intervention on a broad and grand scale to encourage certain social outcomes, then the Bush administration is indeed nurturative.
Based on my own reading of Lakoff, I think you may be missing some of what he seems to be including in his "nurturant pparent" construct. The government as nurturant parent does indeed appear to imply government intervention to encourage social outcomes, but so do some forms of the government as strict father construct. It is the nature of the social outcomes, and the goals of the interventions, that determine whether the government is acting as a strict father or a nurturant parent. Lakoff says in this article (http://www.alternet.org/story/16947) that:
Nurturing has two aspects: empathy (feeling and caring how others feel) and responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. These two aspects of nurturance imply family values that we can recognize as progressive political values: From empathy, we want for others: protection from harm, fulfillment in life, fairness, freedom (consistent with responsibility), open two-way communication. From responsibility there follows: competence, trust, commitment, community building, and so on.
I don't see much of what the Bush administration has done fitting into any of these categories. There really isn't even a commitment to protect citizens from harm - if there were, the U.S. would be taking port security much more seriously. But that would slow down the import of goods, and that's not something that corporate America really wants (unless, of course, it's goods that would be too competitive in the U.S. market, in which case the government is only too glad to impose tariffs and stifle competition).