Narcissism, the writer John Fowles has observed, consists in this: that when we grow too old to believe in our own uniqueness, we become obsessed with our complexity. We have reached this present pass in Canada largely because we have tried to design a Constitution that would properly reflect the uniquely complex nation we suppose ourselves to be. We have dignified this with the name of pragmatism; it is in reality nothing more than narcissism.

There is a real danger, as we embark upon a period of intense introspection, that we will succumb utterly to our own fatal charm. For there can be little doubt that Canadians fancy themselves in the role: a nation so blessed, yet so tormented; riven by history and race and a thousand unvoiced conflicts; difficult, brooding, and above all, complex. Perhaps, we may even imagine, the world will notice us at last: after so many years playing the horsey, healthy type, Canada has become pale and interesting.

So we will engage in still more elaborate attempts to tailor the nation to the demands of its constituent groups, to stitch together arrangements of varying permanence that might keep the country whole a little longer. Principle will be discarded: In an ideal world, we will say, we might found our Constitution on high principle. That, indeed, might be appropriate for other countries. But this is Canada. Our situation is unique. We are too complex. We must compromise; we must be flexible.

Yes, we are complex - but not uniquely so. Our attempts to capture that complexity in our Constitution have only made matters worse. We cannot possibly codify all the many ways in which we identify ourselves - men, women; black, white; native, immigrant; East and West, North and South; let alone French and English - in one document. To try to do so is only to harden social divisions, and aggravate social tensions.

Complexity is resolved in abstraction, not description. In pursuit of all that is unique and complex about Canada, we have asked our Constitution to do too much. A Constitution should rather be a simple document. It should seek to distill from the many particulars of our governance the central truths, to reveal the underlying values we hold in common: the ''highest common denominator,'' in Pierre Trudeau's phrase.

We should not imagine, nor should we desire, that these principles would be peculiar to Canada. Indeed, it should be our explicit and conscious intent to draft a Constitution that could, with minor modifications, be adopted by any country in the world. The idea of the universal - that there are certain essential principles of political and economic life that are not specific to certain cultures, but apply in all cases - has undergone something of a revival of late, in the global triumph of liberal democracy and free markets.

The currency of the universal is the individual. It is in our shared individuality that we find our common humanity: and, as a subset, our unity as Canadians. This country will never be united on traditional lines of language or race. It might stand together if it stood for something: if it were a dominion not only of laws, but of virtue.

Yet the most consistent trend through much of our debates seems to be a belief that the universal is of no relevance to Canada. Consider what we have done to our Charter of Rights, specifically, the equality rights clause, section 15. The original clause states, in part, that ''every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination.'' Even with its catalogue of particularly excluded bases of discrimination - race, sex, etc. - the clause was acceptable: the sort of thing that might be found in any liberal democratic constitution.

But then we added clauses instructing the courts to interpret the charter in light of Canada's ''multicultural heritage,'' and aboriginal rights, and that got the women's groups alarmed. So we inserted another clause, section 28: not only was everyone equal, but women were especially equal. Then came the Meech Lake Accord's ''distinct society'' clause - not in the preamble, as originally proposed, but in the body, so that it would have equal weight with the ''multicultural'' clause. Which meant that multicultural and aboriginal rights had to be asserted again in the ill-fated ''Canada clause.'' Frank McKenna even proposed guaranteeing women's equality a third time.

Someone said at the time the problem with Meech Lake was that not everyone in Canada saw themselves reflected in it. I suggest the problem lies in believing the Constitution should be a mirror for our vanity.