There are few things that bring me more joy than listening to the gabble of a language that I barely understand in the background. Montreal is essentially the bunny hill of foreign travel…everyone speaks English, but given the choice, they’ll speak French. They are even quite kind about me trying to speak my broken French back to them (that sense of grande morveuse  seen in French in the metrepole seems to have been bred out over the past 300 years.)

Montreal is a beautiful city, a fusion of Chicago and New York with a certain old world charm that cannot be replicated. One can feel the French influence here in much more than the language. You can feel it on the sidewalk on a 75 degree night…partially because those sidewalks are filled with people who actually walk, but more so from the way that they dress. There are suit shops seemingly every third block, and women are obviously more influenced by Parisian fashion than the crass utilitarianism of Gen Z Americans.

I’ve managed to “collect” a fair amount of foreigners in my current role, which by no means breaks my heart. Kit loves to say that I collect two things, tribal masks and foreign men (I do feel like she’d be slightly more upset if I collected foreign women at the same clip.) My interesting position in the world of battery minerals and rare earth elements is a perfect place to make and collect foreign friends. Whether the Belgians in logistics or the German engineers or the Ghanian sovereign wealth fund or the Quebecois battery chemists or the Korean metal traders, there are few days when I speak to more domestics than imports.

Living in Indianapolis, a place not known as a magnet for immigrants, it is a welcome change of pace.

I have always thought that the immigrant story of “how you got here?” was one of the most interesting that could be told, but being in Montreal, a place that is jealously (and perhaps somewhat foolishly) protective of its unique French heritage, I find that I have a certain respect for the Gallic stubbornness that has kept Quebec, after two quintessentially Canadian (re:polite) attempts at a “Quexit” from the rest of Anglophone Canada, a place that sits in the middle of a jagged Venn diagram between its nation (Canada), its mother country (France), and its most important trading partner (US).

The economist in me completely understands how homogenization happens. To duplicate and translate everything for a population of less than 9 million people is…less than efficient. But for as much as capitalism has raised people out of poverty, it has also destroyed plenty that is “valuable but hard to quantify.”

Arguments against homogenization arise across many fields, from biology to education to culture. They are rarely successful, as one side shows up with numbers and heterogeneity shows up with a general feeling of “this could end badly.”

Let me tell you, numbers beat a general sense of “this could end badly” 99x out of 100.

As my mentor Doug Wilson once said to great effect, “More is not an achievable goal…it is just more.” Whether monoculture in industrial agriculture harming bees or Amazon destroying the local bookstore or China dominating the rare earth market there is a loss that is easier to feel than to quantify.

Modern man has traded instinct for spreadsheets, just as it has traded the 400 year old stone buildings of old Montreal for the big box store that will inevitably be torn down in 20 years, the quarterly profit of a corporation for the steadfastness of  Molson and Sons, LTD.

This is not some scathing critique or enlightened ephiphany, as I now look at Quebec as a nearly impossible place to do business for an Anglophone American with an aversion to bureaucracy, but a recognition that there is ALWAYS a tradeoff in decision making. What Quebec has kept in its heritage has inevitably cost it something in quantifiable economic prosperity. But it has kept something, like those little lobsterman villages in Maine or the UNESCO Heritage sites in German, that could never be purchased with a larger allocation of GDP.

Heritage is a much like land, there is an opportunity cost in keeping it, but once sold, it is impossible to get back at any price. As my astute sister in law once said, having read my favorite novel, East of Eden, “I get why this is Chris’ favorite book, its all about family and land.”

In a world where answers seem to be instantaneous and readily available, I find that the appropriate questions are asked less and less. I don’t pretend to have the answer for the balance between tradition and progress, heritage and modernity, I only wish that more folks would  bother asking the question.

But my steak tartare has arrived, and I never miss a chance to eat raw meat in foreign lands. The Quebecois have done a fine job of keeping this particular tradition alive.