"A Fish Doesn't Know. . ."

"A fish doesn't know it's in water until you take it out of the water" was a favourite saying of the late Marshall McLuhan, my former teacher and mentor.  He used it to point out that when we're totally involved in an environment, we cannot see, or understand it objectively.  McLuhan used to say that it's like asking a drowning man what he thinks of Richard Nixon; the drowning man is too busy trying to stay afloat to worry about a politician.  McLuhan used this saying as a metaphor for the advantage Canada has in trying to understand the U.S.  The Americans, McLuhan would say, were too busy being totally involved to really understand what was happening to them, while the Canadians had the advantage of an objective distance from the turmoil and thus could understand the phenomenon more clearly.

The "fish" saying came to mind the other night when my friend Ali phoned and asked for my opinion on an assignment his teenage daughter Taslima had.  I said sure, and he put Taslima on the phone, and she explained the assignment.  The class was studying the life of Tommy Douglas, the founder of the CCF party (later to become the NDP) and the father of Canada's health care system.  The teacher had assigned the students to find a website about Tommy Douglas and then to write a critique of the website showing its strengths and its limitations.  Taslima found a website written by a former NDP premier of British Columbia and could find strengths but not limitations.  In fact, what was meant by "limitations"?  I saw immediately that the problem was that she, the writer of the website, her father, and myself all agreed with Tommy Douglas' politics, so we were blind to "limitations" of the website, like the fish in water.  I suggested that she do a search of the words "Tommy+Douglas+critic" and see what those who disagree with the ideas of Douglas have to say, and then compare the two sites.  We only know what something is, by comparing it to what it is not.

So that's my story.  A fish tale?  I urged Ali to join my blog.  Do you think he will?  Maybe he'll think there's something fishy about it.