Fearful Symmetry, by Brian Lee Crowley

One of the great, perhaps fatal, failings of modern journalism is its persistent inability to view the world in a context that extends beyond the increasingly brief length of its own news cycles.

Blessedly, Brian Lee Crowley—author of Fearful Symmetry (the fall and rise of Canada’s founding values)—is not a journalist. A graduate of McGill University and the London School of Economics, Crowley is founding president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies and a recent Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at Finance Canada.

His book, which goes well beyond the scope one anticipates from a man who has evangelized the economic salvation available through free markets, does for Canada what its journalism institutions frequently fail to do. Fearful Symmetry tells us where we came from, who we are, what we are doing, where we are going, and why.

Not everyone will agree, of course, with Crowley’s detailed theory of how two powerful forces—demographics and the collectivist dogma of Quebec’s Quiet (yet occasionally very noisy) Revolution—caused many Canadians to lose touch with their founding values. The virtue of work as a cornerstone of both the Canadian and Quebecois character has, Crowley argues, been diminished by policies born in an era in which our conventional wisdom and its leaders doubted (in all probability wrongly) the ability of the economy to absorb the demographic boom spawned by the Baby Boom.

Easy access to (Un)Employment Insurance, the establishment of seasonal work as a full time occupation, heavy subsidies to unsustainable industries and other initiatives of dubious economic value, Crowley points out, all made work not only less necessary but diminished its social value and the strength of the nation’s character.

“If we hark back to the set of ideas that characterized Canada for the first eighty-odd years of its existence, for example, we might notice something quite interesting,” Crowley writes. “The founders of our society weren’t trying to make themselves and their fellows miserable through unrelieved Calvinist gloom, including a mean-spirited insistence that everyone capable of working should do so. On the contrary, they had a theory about what made people happy; work was part of that theory in the sense that they believed that work fulfilled one of the deepest needs of human beings. We are not made for sloth but for productive work. Real work, work that confers benefits on us, our families, and the broader society, is one of the two key ways in which fully mature adults realize their highest purpose and greatest satisfaction. The other is by forming and nurturing a family. . .”

As if that isn’t enough to get cool Calvinist hearts all a-twitter, Crowley later adds, “For Canada’s founders, then, one of happiness’ deepest sources sprang from a learned ability to discipline untutored emotions and desires. Nature pulled us in a destructive direction; culture, supportive social institutions, and self-discipline allowed us to resist that siren call. And part and parcel of this view of happiness was that we had an obligation as a society to support each other in the often difficult struggle to get our selfish impulses under control. A world in which people could too easily live from the efforts of others wasn’t just a world that was expensive for those who paid the bill; it was a world that set temptation before fallible people and encouraged them not to strive to achieve the discipline and self-control by which human beings reach their greatest good.”

Crowley, as many of us have had to do over the years, confesses fully to having been a youthful adherent to the presumed verities of the 1960s and 1970s until, well, he realized the numbers didn’t add up. Nowhere is this more evident than in his meticulously footnoted (there are 60 pages of bibliographic appendices annexed to Fearful Symmetry) outline of the decline of the family unit and how the state has not only failed to support it but enacted policies that encourage its fracture.

Quebec “is close to a situation whereby only half of the population marries, and of that half, between a quarter and a half divorces.” And yet, “despite having the most complex and well-developed welfare state in the country . . . a total of 22.7 per cent of Quebeckers aged fifteen and older indicated symptoms of high psychological stress, the highest level of any of the provinces. The highest proportion of respondents suffering from stress—31 per cent—was found among unmarried Quebeckers . . . Quebec’s suicide rate has consistently eclipsed the rates in other parts of the country and, for some time, was the highest in the world . . . . And yet before 1975 suicide in Quebec was less common than anywhere else.”

Don’t believe Crowley? Take it from former Partis Quebecois premier Bernard Landry whom Crowley quotes:

“The revolution (of the 1960s) changed so many things in such a short period. We made a break with Catholic morality and have been trying to build an ethical and moral code that is not linked to religion . . . and we haven’t found a good way to do that.”

One of the more fascinating aspects of Fearful Symmetry’s argument—one that is no doubt achingly apparent to most women—is the reluctance of Canadian males to cross the bridge to manhood and become worthy of female trust. While the world wars and Great Depression of the 20th Century rapidly turned generations of boys into men, modern male adolescence merrily stretches deep into the 20s and early 30s. Wisely, women are equipping themselves with education and skills and delaying motherhood while they patiently wait for boys to matriculate.

All of these arguments could easily be termed the mantras of “social conservatives.” Crowley, however, is careful to avoid exposing himself to that critique through his aforementioned use of facts. The strength of his argument for work and family is therefore neither ideological nor theological: it is based on statistical and sociological measures of what structures and behaviours best contribute to human happiness.

Speaking of which, the most attractive aspect of Crowley’s book is not his detailing of the decline of Canada’s founding values. That, after all, is not new. The argument that society is destined for hell in a hand basket has been made before. What is compelling—perhaps capable of exciting even the steadiest of Calvinist pulses—is Crowley’s forecast of the resurrection of these founding values—the essence of character—that will occur as demographic pressures force us to recover them.

The current generation’s combined lack of thrift and fecundity has created what will become a dire shortage of labour in Canada beginning in less than two years. So, whereas the Baby Boom encouraged policies that discouraged real work (as opposed to faux work or no work), the bust that Boom left in its wake will force policy makers to act to encourage way more making and a lot less taking. To be clear, this will be a good thing for the emerging workforce. Crowley notes that employers will need to compete hard to attract talent and will have to pay it well, innovate technologically in order to manage labour costs and, overall, create a Canada with much higher productivity than that which currently exists.

Immigration, thought by many to be the solution to this dilemma, needs to be encouraged and will be helpful, Crowley points out, but it is not going to solve the problem. Recently productive sources of immigrants such as India and China, for instance, are emerging as powerful economic forces that will be seeking—no doubt with great success—to not only retain their workforce but repatriate it.

Canada will therefore have not only to pay and treat its employees well, it will also need to enact policies that encourage its citizens to have more children (Quebec is already slightly ahead of this curve) if it wishes to survive. Further, the best way to encourage women to have more children is to give active support to stable social units such as families. It doesn’t require a doctorate in political economy such as Crowley’s to understand that women are far more likely to have more children if they feel they can trust the man they have chosen to father them to, in fact, father them into adulthood and, well, be a man about it.

To be clear, Crowley’s is not just an argument for the restoration of Canada’s founding values and structures that support them; it is a forecast of how economic and demographic forces will be the catalysts for their return. He goes to great length, however, to make it clear he is not asking for a return to ages past when, for instance, women were denied educational and economic opportunity. In that, he has been successful. Efforts to find robust denunciations of his work as the ranting of a knuckle-dragger have proven unsuccessful. To date, his arguments have proven persuasive even to reviewers such as Chantal Hebert of the Toronto Star and Lawrence Martin of the Globe and Mail.

There is, it turns out, no louder testimony to the strength of an argument than the silent pondering of its likely critics.