There are Cracks in Everything
Let's not paper them over.
As Leonard Cohen put it, “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” I’m going to riff on that, to urge facing the incompleteness and uncertainty in what we think we know. That kind of honesty helps us see the world more clearly.
It’s powerfully tempting to paper over the cracks in our knowledge. Broad simple statements are so much easier to deal with. But what we want to ignore — the complications — can be usefully unsettling.
Case in point: Canada
We ignore Canada, although our two countries share so much history and culture. We could learn from it, as Canadians do from us. But we don’t. Is that because we idealize and then dismiss the country?
Last October I drove with a friend to Stratford, Ontario, for its Shakespeare Festival. The play we saw, “Salesman in China,” was written by Canadians Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy. Not surprisingly, neither they nor their play is well known in the US.
The production was splendid, and the drama thought-provoking; I’ll get to that in a minute. But none of my friends, even those who attend the festival faithfully, had heard of it. Its obscurity here reminded me of the year I lived in Toronto, in 2003-2004. The headline story that year in Canada involved the CIA’s “rendition” of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen. He was seized while transferring planes in New York City, then flown to an overseas site for “enhanced interrogation.” That is, he was beaten and tortured for a year. No information relevant to US security was found.
His story, and others like it, reached American audiences only a year later. Apparently even journalists don’t read Toronto’s Globe and Mail.
Why do we ignore Canada, in spite of all we have in common? We condescend to it: “Such a good little country.” (Well, not exactly little, but still.) And then we dismiss it.
We idealize Canada, patronize it, and then ignore it.
Canada does many things better than we do. In particular, its health care system is enviable. But it has real problems. My year there cracked the idealism with which I had arrived. I was surprised, for instance, to learn that our environmental policies were sometimes better than theirs. Coming from East Lansing, so green and clean, I found Toronto’s foliage dusty and struggling. The newspapers were covering polluted water in a suburb. I finished the year with a more complicated view of the country.
That was decades ago. Since then the Flint water crisis has cracked my faith in America’s record. But my point remains: Idealizing anything is a soporific. It puts us to sleep rather than making us think. Canada is our sibling. It struggles with issues like our own. Recognizing that fact might help us pay more attention, might convince us that we could learn from both its successes and its failures.
Another case in point: China
The play we saw last fall highlighted another set of blind spots, these due to a sweeping negative view. “Salesman in China” depicts a moment in history, the 1983 Beijing production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” The chaotic violence of China’s Cultural Revolution was just over, and the play’s production a significant opening to the West. The country’s newspapers headlined the event. Miller and his wife traveled to Beijing to consult; the play we saw depicted the couple as fascinated by the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese characters privately complain that Westerners pay attention only to their country’s anguish, ignoring what communism had accomplished — lifting many millions out of poverty.
Maoist China was murderously cruel. But that’s not the whole story.
At this point, dear reader, you may be bursting to say that those advantages don’t outweigh the horrors of Mao. Of course they don’t. But before evaluating systems (or countries, or individuals) as a whole we need just to see them as they are. We (Americans? human beings?) want so badly to leap to the bottom line, to add up pluses and minuses and arrive at a sum: Good! Bad! Practicality often requires us to do that; we must decide where to live, who to vote for, what groceries to buy. Much of the time, though, we’re free to wait, to look more closely, to withhold final judgment.
The light that shines through cracks
Those summations – good, bad – reduce complexity. They eliminate the parts of the picture that don’t quite fit. They paper over cracks that, if exposed, would let in light and provoke us to think more carefully. It’s easier to work with simple truths: Canada is good. Communism is bad. But a more complicated view is more honest, and therefore more useful.
Seeing the cracks in evil leads to questions. How did Chinese communism improve life for its people? Is there anything we can learn from that?
Cracks in the good also raise important questions. Overall, Canada’s health care system is more efficient, just, and effective than ours. But it has real problems. What can we learn from both?
Case in point: The US
From refrigerator magnets to political rhetoric, American life is filled with simplistic slogans. They put our minds to sleep.
We can do better. I’ll have more to say about that soon.
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Thanks for starting a conversation on this. You are correct Judith, Canada is not perfect. Not even remotely. Much needs fixing.
But our healthcare system means I'll never face bankruptcy from medical bills or have to start a go fund me, and our social programs provide real support when people need it. I feel safer here – no school shooting drills for our kids, and practical policies like 12-18-month parental leave make a real difference in people's lives. While we're not perfect, we don't have a death penalty, women's reproductive choices are not up for debate, we're a country that chose to sell insulin patents for $1 to help everyone, and we can disagree yet still coexist peacefully. Our challenges with housing and affordability need work to name two that concern me, but our foundation of caring for each other makes me proud to call Canada home. I appreciate that we don't need one rigid national identity – our strength comes from bringing different perspectives together while maintaining our commitment to collective well-being.
The US is far from exceptional, and the sooner you recognize this, the sooner you can look around the world. The situation in your country is sad beyond belief as far as most of the world is concerned. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is MUCH that is good and decent and exceptional too.
Salesman in China was my favourite play at Stratford this year. Brilliant. I was lucky to see a total of nine.
You have touched on a major area of cognitive psychology. Humans have the ability to think quickly, using heuristics and biases to maintain cognitive efficiency. Speed is metabolically efficient and may save a person's life in times of crisis, but it comes at the cost of accuracy. We need both types of thinking, and we need to become better at realizing which we are using, and when we need to slow down. Nobel Prize-winner, Daniel Kahneman, wrote a book for the general reader based on his decades of research on this topic with his friend, Amos Tversky. Tversky had died before the Nobel Prize was awarded. The book, "Thinking Fast and Slow," became a NYT bestseller. It is fascinating and readable, if complex. I recommend it highly. An interesting side note is that the Nobel Prize was awarded in the field of Economics. There is no Nobel Prize for Psychology. Kahneman never took a course in economics. His research with Tversky became the basis of a new field, Behavioral Economics. Oddly, up until that time, a major tenet of Economics was that people make rational decisions! Their research exposed the many ways in which this assumption was cracked. People are clearly not entirely rational.