Hilda Neatby's 1950s and My 1950s

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2006 by Dewar, Kenneth C

The renewal of war, in other words, served to heighten already deeply felt concerns and demanded self-scrutiny on the home front as well as confrontation on the battlefield. While the return of peace brought relief and optimism for the future, it did not quiet the fears of those, like Neatby, for whom the meaning of twentieth-century history thus far lay in the threat it posed to civilized society. Especially worrying, beyond the horror of specific events, was its seeming contradiction of the fundamental (and hopeful) liberal assumption that, the more people were educated, the more willing they would be to follow the leadership of the educated elite and to accept their mores. During the 1950s, books and conferences assessing the state of the nation proliferated, almost all of them proclaiming their forward orientation-Canada: Nation on the March, Canada Looks Ahead, Canada in the Making (Pearson et al. 1953; Laugharne 1956[ Brown 1953). Neatby's contribution to one such gathering, the Canada's Tomorrow conference held in Quebec City in November 1953, concerned "Cultural Evolution," no doubt because of her role in the Massey Commission. She looked to the past as a guide to the future, and her conclusion summarized mingled elements of anxiety and optimism: "The last halfcentury with two major wars, the unexampled period of the depression, and the present unexampled accession of power and prosperity have seen an amazingly rapid rate of economic and constitutional development." Would it be possible in the future, she wondered, to say the same of cultural development? Or would Canadians regress into "premature decadence and a relapse into barbarism" (1954a 221-23)?

IV

There were in Neatby's diagnosis of cultural crisis undoubted elements of pessimism and anti-modernism. Sceptical herself of the premises of the Age of Enlightenment-"the power of reason and the essential goodness of man"-she traced the origins of the malaise of modernity to its revolutionary beginnings, which had overthrown everything of the Old Regime indiscriminately and sown the seeds of the worship of force itself. The "democratic cycle" of her wartime article referred to the progression from absolutism through individualism to the tyranny, ostensibly of the masses, but in fact of "a gang of fanatical autocrats" in her own time, a process she described, in sum, as the "degeneration of eighteenth century idealism." The remedy she offered was a recovery of common moral standards "accepted and enforced," and grounded in some transcendent ideal that would also lift "man"-her term-beyond what she regarded as his own self-worship. It was a remedy easily seen as a desire simply to return to an earlier and better arrangement of society, when order and authority were accorded their proper due. Yet, if we are to take her at her word, the purpose of this recovery, and of cultural re-examination more generally, was the repair and reconstruction of the foundations of "freedom and individual worth"-that is, of modern liberalism conceived of from her own idealist point of view (Neatby 1943, 474).