Candid Conrad Black charms Winnipeg

Conrad Black. Photo by Lee Harding, Western Standard

Conrad Black, one of Canada’s leading historians and a featured editorial writer, has many dectractors, including the Globe and Mail’s Peter Scowen who wrote this after a luncheon meeting to discuss Black’s his 2014 book.

"In critics' eyes, Mr. Black's sin has been to use [his] book [Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present] to issue an unwarranted corrective to modern, inclusive ideas about native Canadian history. He is incredibly dismissive of indigenous peoples. His comment early in the book that 'Indian society was not in itself worthy of integral conservation, nor was its dilution a suitable subject for great lamentation' could have been uttered in the 19th century by an idiot British colonel over a round of gin and tonic."

This is what another reviewer had to say about the same book:

Masterful, ambitious, and groundbreaking, this is a major new history of our country by one of our most respected thinkers and historians -- a book every Canadian should own.

From the acclaimed biographer and historian Conrad Black comes the definitive history of Canada -- a revealing, groundbreaking account of the people and events that shaped a nation.

Spanning 874 to 2014, and beginning from Canada's first inhabitants and the early explorers, this masterful history challenges our perception of our history and Canada's role in the world. From Champlain to Carleton, Baldwin and Lafontaine, to MacDonald, Laurier, and King, Canada's role in peace and war, to Quebec's quest for autonomy, Black takes on sweeping themes and vividly recounts the story of Canada's development from colony to dominion to country. Black persuasively reveals that while many would argue that Canada was perhaps never predestined for greatness, the opposite is in fact true: the emergence of a magnificent country, against all odds, was a remarkable achievement. Brilliantly conceived, this major new reexamination of our country's history is a riveting tour de force by one of the best writers writing today.

---

My take on this is that there used to be thousands of band, tribal, and chiefdom societies around the world speaking mutually unintelligible languages but not uniquely distinct ways of life, peoples who nevertheless were of immense interest to anthropologists like me. Most such small-scale societies disappeared or were radically transformed over the millennia due to local extermination or assimilation, a process that accelerated with the age of European discovery, conquest, and colonialism.

As fascinating as their lifeways were, few such people made any lasting or earth shattering contribution to science, technology, philosophy, mathematics, medicine or any other fields of knowledge.

There is little need or reason to now spend billions in scarce public funds to support or resurrect the generally long-lost or radically transformed traditional lifeways of such people.

They surely had their place in prehistory and some even formed the roots of modern civilization. But except perhaps for a few pockets in underdeveloped or developing societies, their traditional ways of life hardly deserve sustained and prohibitively expensive external support.