Our Heritage; M. Shumiatcher

It is a real and integral part of living. It impels us to look back on what has been, but it can never be preoccupied with history alone. Like the Janus-faced deity of the Romans, it demands an ever-present consciousness of our future as well as our past. Our heritage is the linkage of yes terday with tomorrow. It bridges the generations of mankind and defies the truncations of time. It is a vitality springing out of the present, but rooted in the past that This article is an excerpt from an ,ddress delivered to a Conference of "Heritage Canada" at Saskatoon by Morris Shumlatcher, a Saskatchewan lawyer and author. produces, in our time and upon our land, structures and monuments and places for creation and recre ation, that can be used and cherished by men and women with educated minds and understanding hearts. If these impulses lift the spirit of man in any age, the works they succeed in creating will· surely be come a part of the enriched inheri tance of succeeding generations.

The principal value of preserving the past is that it assures the pres ence of models of perfection that may inspire great actions, high pur poses and the production of good and beautiful works-today and in all of our tomorrows. How did the treasure-houses that are the heritage of mankind come into being? They were the products of the in267 268 THE FREEMAN May spiration of individual men and women who built structures to be inhabited and used for whatever purposes suited the age in which they took shape-some sacred, some profane. National Heritage A humble log cabin erected on a riverbank of the Prairies in 1810, to store pemmican and furs, which later served as a schoolhouse, and later still as a granary, may be a significant part of our national heri tage for many years to come. A great cathedral that was a sa cred place of worship for the estab lishment of our largest city a hundred years ago, and now serves as the outer shell for a dozen bright boutiques, is also a part of that heri tage.

Usefulness and use are the hallmarks of the buildings and places that measure our progression through the pages of history, perhaps more felicitously than a Taj Mahal, with its perfect symmetry and matchless marble. Mter all, the Taj is a memorial not to life-but to death. Few individuals today are able to conceive, create or build (let alone finance), like Emperor Shah Jahan, overpowering structures of monu mental dimensions. The man who would now build inspirationally for the future is discouraged in many ways. First, the skills of the great craftsmen who created our architec tural heritage having all but disap peared from the land. The ancient cathedrals and tem ples, palaces, and monuments re flect the skills and genius of the men who conceived and designed and fashioned them: the architects and stonemasons and carpenters and ironmongers and glaziers. Their expertise is mankind's rich est heritage because it makes possi ble a rebirth of the wonders of other ages.

Most are lost to us, save in the gardens of a few museums and in the reconstructed shops of an tiquities where a handful of dedi cated, costumed men and women act out the roles of spinners and weav ers and cobblers and smithers and pretend to keep alive a thimbleful of lost and long-forgotten arts. Secondly, it has grown too costly to insist on excellence and beauty. Draining the innovative energies of the architects and engineers and builders and designers and work men of all descriptions are the om nipresent parasites that fasten themsel ves like leeches upon the vessels of the body politic. If a businessman were to plan to injure a competitor by impeding construction, he could do nothing more effective than to design the building codes that inhibit us in every part of this country.

1979 OUR HERITAGE 269 If a foreign enemy wished to crip ple our development, he could achieve no greater victory than by perpetuating the multi-tiered bureaucracies that require commit tees and commissions and boards and regulatory agencies and au thorities ad nauseam, to hold hear ings and inquiries and publish find ings, reports and recommendations and, at will, withhold licenses, per mits, exemptions and releases so that in the end, our principal and ultimate, and probably our most durable national manufactured prod uct will be paper: a glorious end for our magnificent forest heritage! Thirdly, the heavy burden of taxa tion effectively discourages those who would erect structures of an unusual character from investing their time and treasure in such luxuries because they are unlikely to produce enough to provide an adequate return on investment. The result is evident in our cities: the monolithic office buildings con taining hundreds of thousands, in deed millions of square feet, are en cased in pre-fabricated grey concrete slabs embellished by a street number outside, and wall to-wall carpeting inside, all aping the architectural sterilities of Mos cow: Stalin Style.

These structures, praised for their utility, are the outer shells of the heritage of our generation. It is said that they are functional; that they serve a useful purpose; that they will remain standing a long time. Capable of More If they do, they will generate the same kind of bemused interest in the inquisitive minds of our heirs, as we discover in the coral deposits, which are all that is left of the lives of the anonymous billions of mi crocosmic creatures that mindlessly produced the vast ocean barrier reefs of the Pacific. As. homo sapiens, we are capable of producing a richer, more diverse heritage than· that! But this we shall do only if the individual and his genius are held to be of higher worth than the physical collectivity of mankind-the organi zation, the party, the cult, the state. To answer the question, HHow best may we conserve the structures and artifacts that are our heritage?", I would ask another question: ((How best may we create the stuff and substance from which tomorrow's heritage will emerge?"

If we value our heritage of the past, we must cherish the individ uals who are today capable of pro ducing the heritage of the future. We can affirm the worth of such persons only in an environment in which the individual is highly moti vated and moved to develop his strengths to the utmost of his capac ity in order that he may become an 270 THE FREEMAN educated and cultured citizen. When he has learned to express himself according to the highest standards that excellence can at tain, he must be free to work and to produce in a place where merit is not penalized nor success filched or taxed away from those who have achieved it. Clear Priorities It demands a recognition that beauty is more necessary to life than safety, and invention is more vital to society than security. It requires an acceptance of the fact that a group is not an organism apart from its constituent individ uals. A group has no brain or stomach of its own; it must think and feel with the brains and nerves of its members.

When a nation flourishes, it is through the success of its intellec tual, artistic and political leaders. When it declines, it is through no mystic malaise in the state, but through a failure of its citizens to assume the role of leadership in our homes and businesses, our schools and hospitals, our laboratories, fields, factories, workshops, theatres and courts. When I speak of the need for an environment that is compatible to the creation of a great heritage, I like to believe that each age is capa ble of generating physical forms that will strike not only a contemporary chord that is responsive to the spirit of the times, but one that will be heard and understood far into the future. All of this can be achieved in a society that is vigorous and robust: capable of meeting the challenges of competition in the marketplace; re sourceful in adapting to changes in the sources and cost of energy;. de termined to resist luxury, corrup tion, the erosion of families and the blandishment of immorality; and determined to overwhelm the sloth of slobs with work, and to overcome the skepticism of the age with faith.

Our heritage can never flourish except through the individual who possesses these elements, and dis penses them like the gifts they are, with open hands, in his lifetime. While the public may be in terested in heritage property, it is the individual who will always be responsible for producing it. Public policies and the law, there fore, must concern themselves, prin cipally, with the rights and the needs of the individual in relation to property which may be, or may be come a part of the inheritance of future generations. Then, will the individual natu rally come to assume his obligation to produce and preserve and per petuate it, saying, with the Psalm ist, that great riches: ~~are fallen unto me in pleasant places; Yea, I have a goodly heritage." i W)rld in th8J grfR9fan Ioea, Clarence B. Carson 29. The Cold War: Coexistence, Detente,and Convergence WHEN the Cold War was at its height, it was sometimes suggested that there was a parallel between it and the religious wars of the six teenth and seventeenth centuries.