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Originally Posted by someone123
I think I know what you are getting at but I worry this is a little superficial as an analysis of what's going on. The international airport is associated with sterile retail and boring waiting areas and seems like purgatory when you're there for 4 hours but it would be a dystopian hell to live in. Nation states, citizenship, and the sense of responsibility of the state toward specific groups of people still matter. Canada cannot look out for the whole world. We need to have a strong sense of differentiation between Canadians and non-Canadians. I am not sure there's much agreement anymore on where that line is, and a lot of Canadians have really odd and unworkable beliefs about it now. They have no sense of shared identity with their compatriots and feel like citizens of the world, but there is no world government to help when the local factory shuts down and all of the jobs disappear. Worse still many other nation states are still strong actors and so if you're in a weak nation state you could be worse off than if all of them were weak actors.
Collective goals and frameworks for thinking about the world and trust also all have a huge impact on what societies can tackle.
The US is suffering from related issues a lot more than we are. Little sense of shared norms and sympathy between cultural groups that share a country, and a lot of elites don't believe that it matters if you were born in West Virginia or Guatemala when it comes to who looks out for you.
On an abstract level maybe we can say that culture and sense of place should be completely disconnected from legal entitlements but I doubt that is workable politically, particularly when it's open to emotional attacks from outside.
In summary my overall impression is: (1) culture and character actually can matter a lot to quality of life even though they're often intangible/aesthetic and so get ignored in the optimization game and, (2) we cannot afford to ignore culture at our current level of development and realpolitik constraints.
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Well, first of all, nobody lives at an international airport, so most of the reason why things feel sterile there is because nobody has any skin in the game. There will never be a city that really feels like the airport; if people think that a city has the soul of an airport, they're not looking hard enough.
Secondly, I don't think Canadians think of themselves as citizens of the world. Maybe some of the more haughty ones do, but that's true of people in most other countries. And I also think that having an identity usually does jack shit if, as you say, your material sense of wellbeing goes out the window. So if the car plant closes, being a proud Canadian with a rich cultural tradition isn't going to help you materially. I find that the groups that cling to their identity are usually the ones who are the most materially deprived. In fact, you can pretty much make a perfect inverse correlation between asserting one's cultural identity as a group and socioeconomic status of your group in society.
And I don't think people are capable of living in a collective arrangement without some form of culture springing up. Like I said in my reply to wave46, not all culture is tied to place; much of it - most of it, really, for most middle class people under 60 in Western countries - is the culture of a time/epoch or belonging to a subculture. I really don't think my life as an Ontarian is culturally poorer and less meaningful than a French Quebecker of similar age and class.