Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Sunday, March 28, 2010

A Land without Liberty: Canada, Prorogation and the Olympics

Who cannot agree that Canada’s prorogued parliaments are our most recent and glaring examples of arbitrary government? Abuse of power damages political morality because it makes people afraid to challenge authority (witness Michael Ignatieff), and Canadians demonstrated ultimate servility with their Olympic ‘civic’ madness, ironically imagining “community” (to borrow from Benedict Anderson) in its highest at a time when there was no representation, decidedly so. In single-minded fashion, we - the modest people – and members of the Cabinet focussed on the face-offs outside of Parliament, putting aside the fact of our democracy denied. Canadians subsumed their liberty, handed it over to the spectre of bread and games, deferring to a prime minister boasting economic plans and administrative skills, one who “recalibrates” but offers no higher elevation (and lucky to have Whistler on his side), ever retreating to the polls after he “thinks” and “leads.” Oh, Canada!

The spirit of the Olympics favoured this nation, but we were (and are) a land without Liberty. Considered a once in a lifetime opportunity, we were taken in - and took in the Olympic moments as amused subjects not engaged citizens, and in this way we condoned the Conservative “government” as would good-mannered sheep. How can we possibly say (as does Maclean’s Magazine) they were “the best games ever”? This is true only because readership and circulation is considered a priority - not critical thinking in journalism, as editors join in the flag waving. Perhaps it is also indicative of our general lack of culture, as our inner lives give in to physical musculature and extremes, typical of Reality TV. Let us turn from popular optics to other works in an effort to decipher what has been going on.

In his Odes the Roman poet Horace says that “laws are useless without virtue.” Yet our government ignores the findings of our Supreme Court, and Omar Khadr remains in Guantanamo Bay. Does the prime minister and his government assume it is above our Laws? Has power distorted judgement, as it is prone to do? There appears no high virtue to the Harper government, no greatness to its political character, no aspiration worthy of emulation –only relentless opportunism - and, consequently, no high freedoms in the Land as the machinery of the administration and party grind away at opposition, stacking here, sacking there.

In The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu says that the guiding principle of a monarchy is honour; the principle of a republic is virtue, or patriotism; and, the principle of despotism is fear. There is not much “honour” in the way the Harper government conducts itself (witness the pre-prorogued phone call to the Governor General), and we are presently moving away from the underpinnings of a monarchical system. Harper’s evangelical Protestantism adds to this spirit of independence from the British Crown, a marked difference from our previous Catholic prime ministers (Trudeau, Mulroney, Chrétien, Martin, among others), prone as they seem to be before symbols of Crown authority.

There is something quasi-republican about the present administration, but, selfless, pre-modern, community-oriented “virtue” is not Harper’s strong point, and it is terribly hard to inculcate in a country the breadth of Canada – so far from the Greek polis or Roman city state. Even the word “patriotism” does not suffice, if we are to consider the boisterous, almost mindless “nationalism” associated with the Olympic events: “own the podium” and the unceasing flurry of flags. Canadians (sometimes unrestrained) praised themselves as well as the disciplined Olympian bodies on view (in search of heroism), but we conveniently forgot the fact that we had no sitting government in Ottawa. Where is Leni Riefenstahl when you need her?

There is something rather despotic about Harper’s Ottawa. One element of change in Canada is the climate of fear brought about in no small part by negative advertising. Horace counters this sort of thinking in his Odes:

Virtue knows nothing of humiliation at the polls
but shines with honours unsullied. She does not take up
the axes or lay them down at the breath
of the wind of popular opinion.

The Harper government caters to popular opinion (often rootless rootedness), united by puck alone (the other common denominator being fear), pitting region against region, when it serves him: it is nothing short of “authoritarian populism” – the people themselves resist democracy, particularly in the West. Note the frequent critical (small “l” liberal) references to England’s Charles I and thoughts on Cromwell: fear of uncivil division, West versus East (for no one thinks of themselves as ‘Easterners’) - the redefined solitudes which permeate Canada’s current political discourse, and our landscape is pitted with unconstitutionalities.

Slavoj Zizek explains in his In Defense of Lost Causes (an interesting work which re-examines Heidegger’s Nazi dalliance, among other things) that “power is, by definition, in excess, or else it is not power.” Government is about power, be it Conservative, Liberal, NDP (or other), so government is always “in excess.” Under the previous federal Liberal governments, secular, statist and so-called multicultural democracy was considered “in excess”; and under the current Conservative government, a Western (Albertan) sense of a timeless moral authority derived from outside of the state (after many decades of “white” Tory rule) is considered “in excess.”

Every government is about power, but for the Harper Conservatives power is also about realpolitik. The point of Harper’s power is more (military) power – and for a government that crusaded against the limits of the state we have its unflinching defence, so-to-speak. Harper’s revival of our military forces are reminiscent of Cromwell’s army (again hints of republicanism), and one wonders how much this recent development in Canada is associated with any notion of (monarchical) “honour” and our highest freedoms in the name of the Crown, which the prime minister sullies by means of prorogation. Perhaps Wilhelm von Humboldt expresses it best in his The Limits of State Action:

"Now, a warlike spirit is only honourable in conjunction with the highest peaceful virtues, and military discipline, only when allied with the highest feeling of freedom; if these are severed – and how this separation is promoted by the existence of marshalled armies in the midst of peace – the former rapidly degenerates into wild and lawless ferocity, and the latter into slavery."

In other words, although we are a nation at war, ostensibly to preserve our freedoms (one could argue), we have not at all maintained our highest freedoms within the home front – or more particularly in the Houses of Parliament. We cannot celebrate our freedoms without security, but our prorogued losses of freedom are vastly disproportionate (and in excess) to the war that is being fought. Canadians too easily conformed to the fact they had no federal government during the Olympics, and the “freedom” they displayed during the Games bordered on the profane. Let’s hope this was all just once in a lifetime.