Are you on the Conservatives Enemies' list?

The other day I received an unidentified letter in the mail warning in big bold letters (exactly as written) “Are you on the Conservatives Enemies’ list?” I opened it eagerly to find that it was from the NDP telling me, among other things, of a data base operated by the Conservatives.  I was heartened to learn that I am likely not alone on that data base.  But I was also bothered by the bad grammar.  The envelope should have read: “Are you on the Conservatives’ Enemies list?”  Apparently the federal NDP, while no longer socialist, still has problems with its possessives. 

This closure was 'nuts'

Did you know that British Columbia has its own controversy over “values”?  In Quebec the PQ government intends to discriminate against religious minorities – in particular Muslims. In B.C. the Liberal government of Premier Christy Clark, and Premier Gordon Campbell before her, along with previous governments, has consistently discriminated against the mentally ill, or at best ‘tolerated’ them, even when they were bused into this province free, thanks to Premier Ralph Klein of Alberta.  Now, the Lower Mainland has a full-blown mental-health crisis on its hands.  If the mentally ill were again being served by Riverview Hospital, then quite likely the violence on the city streets of Vancouver would not be increasing. And maybe, since the start of the year, St. Paul’s Hospital, in the heart of Vancouver, would not be seeing nearly a 50%-increase in the number of “dual diagnosis” individuals – people with severe mental health illnesses and addiction problems.

Completely downsizing Riverview Hospital and then closing it was a mistake, born of arrogance and misguided judgement – skewed by Hollywood’s “cuckoo’s nest” mentality and by Ronald Reagan’s neo-conservatism.  Christy Clark’s veto of the BCUM proposal to reopen Riverview was simply a brazen exercise in political power, with smiles, fresh off her enhanced mandate.  Given the nature of her party line, she also is probably still inclined to see mental illness entirely as an “individual” problem that has nothing at all to do with “society”.   This is why “society” is obliged to owe the mentally ill nothing, neither a hospital – nor the dignity of employment.

When governments eliminate hospitals they do not eliminate illnesses.  Downsizing is supposed to be “cost-effective,” but it is also a denial of state responsibility.  The severely mentally ill often have any number of concurrent disorders beyond the skills of Community Living workers.  Having the resources of a centralized and specialized hospital offers peace of mind to those who have little or no peace of mind, and it boils down to a matter of fairness to the underrepresented, which is a good for society.  In other words, it’s nuts not to have Riverview Hospital, but then again we already know provincial political leaders to be cuckoo. 

Sink the Semester System

Did your mother not tell you “everything in moderation, nothing to extreme”?  That old adage derives from the ancient Greeks, among them Aristotle, who emphasized balance and a sense of proportion.  Today, with the semester system of high school education under the Coquitlam District School Board, that old adage is thrown out the window.  Ancient Greek wisdom has been replaced by North American “workaholic” types and Asian “obsessive” models, and we think that we are doing our kids a favour, by making them “tougher”.

Coquitlam high school classes resemble educational silos, where course curriculum is designed to over-the-top standards.  This can be especially daunting for kids who actually care about what they are being taught.  The guilty party is not any teacher, or school, but the School Board, which (following the industrial model) wants to “compress” time and learning – and presumably costs.

    

The never-ending “factory work” is not healthy.  We try to do the best for our kids yet there is no time to live. There has to be a period in a student’s day when homework is finished, and when free play begins. Students need to feel like they can successfully complete their assignments to achieve this sense of balance.  And the more we endure excess in our schools, the less critical might we be of extremes in our public politics, but that is another story.

Keep in mind, as well, that most Coquitlam District high schools are at best pretentious, because they do not offer year-round courses in mathematics, preventing students from building consistency in a vital foundational skill.  Looking closely, for example at after-school programmes, the overall net effect is that the offspring of immigrants are destined to become superior doctors, lawyers and engineers, because many immigrant parents – not the School Board - are the ones who recognize the problem-solving significance of mathematics in the first place.  Go figure.

And as for the over-programmed semesters (here I borrow from Karl Marx) - Parents in District 43: unite!

The Parti Québécois and Article X

Here are some Lessons from the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” (August 26, 1789):

The Representatives of the French people, organized in National Assembly, considering that ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public miseries and the corruption of governments, have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man, so that this declaration, being ever present to all the members of the social body, may unceasingly remind them of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, and those of the executive power, may at each moment be compared with the aim and of every political institution and thereby may be more respected; and in order that the demands of the citizens, grounded henceforth upon simple and incontestable principles, may always take the direction of maintaining the constitution and welfare of all.

In consequence, the National Assembly recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and citizen:

10. No one should be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious, provided their manifestation does not upset the public order established by law.[1]

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[1] Article X.  – Nul ne droit être accusé, arrêté ni détenu, que dans les cas déterminés par la loi et selon les formes qu’elle a prescrites.

Tout citoyen, appelé ou saisi par l’autorité de la loi doit obéir à l’instant; il se rend coupable par la résistance.

For the full text of the Declaration, See The History Guide. Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History: www.historyguide.org/intellect/declaration.html 

Calvin's Geneva and Harper's Canada: some more thoughts

Did you know that Prime Minister Harper can be summed up by the cartoon strip “Calvin and Hobbes”?  Some thinkers, for example Michael Ignatieff and Mark Kingwell, have looked to Machiavelli to explain Harper, while others, for example Stéphane Dion (as I have discussed in in my blog review of Harperland), have erringly looked to Harper and Leo Strauss.[1]  Meanwhile, if we peruse Paul Wells’ latest narrative, The Longer I’m Prime Minister, he sums up the Conservative party as “’neo-con’ and ‘theo-con’” – and that, sadly, is about the full extent of Wells’ intellectual analysis.[2]

I have already discussed Harper’s relationship with Hobbes in a previous blog entry (see my book review of Leviathan).  But to get at the first half of the cartoon reference that I suggest here, may I recommend an impressive study – Calvin: Origins and Development of his Religious Thought (1963, English translation) by François Wendel.  It is this work that opens up a window to Harper and the Conservative party’s ‘theo-con’ arguments.

It is important to realize that at the core of Calvin – and Harper – is a break from Renaissance humanism.  While Luther represents the liberal “protest” – and right to resist - against the abuses of the medieval Catholic Church, Calvin’s Geneva “Reform” movement represents a conservative rejection of the culture of the Renaissance (while keeping with its spirit of commerce). Instead of an awakening of man’s greatness and sense of human potential, or humanism, which followed the medieval period, we see instead a profound “consciousness of sin” – and the clearest explanation (outlined almost 500 years ago) for Harper’s anti-crime agenda.[3]  And we find in both Calvin and Harper, as well, an explicit predilection for the victims of crime, rooted in notions of predestination.

Calvin’s Reformed Churches in Geneva functioned in French (as well as Latin), and Calvin himself was well-known for his unwillingness to admit discussion as well as for his “principles of discipline” at the heart of which was his right to excommunicate, which now gives justification for “the Harper government” to take control of the Canadian Senate.[4]  Everything in Calvin’s Geneva was supposed to be saintly.  Inns were forbidden (replaced by ‘abbys’), and all guests were supervised (accompanied by a French version of the Bible, as well).  In other words, all aspects of Renaissance culture were forbidden – art, music, dance, theatre, and today the CBC.  Geneva was governed by “ecclesiastical police” and at one point even the most common personal names were attacked – apparently because they were not biblical enough.[5]

When attempting to discredit their opposition at election-times, Calvinists called them “libertines”, because they appeared (according to argument) too shy of the rigour of discipline.[6]  The position of the Calvinists in Geneva continued to improve over time, because of ongoing religious persecution in France.  The more refugees flooded into Geneva, thereby reinforcing Calvin’s party, the more “the Harper government” today sees the need to court the vote of Canada’s most recent immigrants.

Central to Calvinism is the idea of predestination: there are the ‘elect’ and the ‘reprobate’ – both of which are the result of divine will.  Calvin finds supporting evidence in the New Testament Sermon on Ephesians: “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.”[7]   Ultimately, however, Calvin generates his notion of predestination from Augustine’s City of God (AD 413-427):

… God almighty, the supreme and supremely good creator all beings, who assists and rewards good wills, while he abandons and condemns the bad (and yet controls both good and bad) surely did not fail to have a plan whereby he might complete the fixed number of citizens predestined in his wisdom, even out of the condemned human race.[8]

While Augustine dwells primarily on the notion of the ‘elect’, it is Calvin who develops the logical counterpart – the idea of the ‘elect’ and the ‘reprobate’, and in so doing Calvin (perhaps unintentionally) diminishes the message of Christ, for some men, in spite of themselves, are apparently incapable of understanding or achieving redemption.[9]  (It is worth noting that Martin Luther, long an Augustinian monk, does not dwell on predestination but instead looks to unilateral faith, against which Calvin reacts).[10]  To put it in François Wendel’s words, Calvin’s thinking is that “the elect cannot lose salvation whatever they do” and the “reprobate are condemned justly by their own fault.”[11]

 

It is this type of binary thinking in Calvinism, combined with notions of predestination, which is at the heart of Harper’s Conservative movement (the confrontational style of which brooks no notion of the middle). In other words our prime minister’s ‘theo-con’ playbook is almost 500 years old, and Canadians actually have much to learn from Calvin’s theocratic Geneva. Calvin has been combined with Hobbes (who also does not cater to the middle) to become a powerful religious and intellectual force on the land – the results of which, unfortunately, are not always comical.

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[1] See Michael Ignatieff “Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince” in Globe and Mail (March 14, 2008).  Ignatieff wrote this piece while he was Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, and his concluding sentence (remarking on Machiavelli) was: “Those who fail in politics sometimes live longer in the memory of posterity than those who succeed.”   See also Mark Kingwell ”If Machiavelli were prime minister” in Globe and Mail (October 15, 2013) .

[2] Paul Wells, The Longer I’m Prime Minister: Stephan Harper and Canada, 2006- (Toronto: Random House, 2013), p. 55.

[3]  François Wendel, Calvin: Origins and Development of his Religious Thought, tr. Philip Mairet (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002), p. 44.

[4] Ibid., p. 82; p. 60; p. 73.

[5] Ibid., p. 85.

[6] Ibid., p. 39.

[7] The Bible: Ephesians 1.4

[8] St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, tr. Henry Bettenson, intro by G.R.Evans (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), p. 591.

[9] Wendel, Calvin, pp. 280,281.

[10] Ibid.,  p. 257.

[11] Ibid., p. 277; p. 281.Calvin's Geneva and Harper's Canada: some more thoughtsCanada's Geneva and Harper's Canada:some more thoughts

Quebec's Charter of Values: from Huguenots to the Hijab

In order to understand where the Quebec Charter of “Values” comes from, one must look into history – in particular French (and some German) history. We see that Quebec’s PQ government is inspired by legislation from the Fifth French Republic. In March 2004 the French government voted overwhelmingly for a ban of “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliation within the school system. In theory the ban applies equally to all those who live in France, but it is essentially directed against headscarf-wearing Muslim girls, who appear to resist “neutral” secular modernity endorsed since the Third Republic. Republican political allegiance requires that the individual adhere to the State, and because it exercises “power” on the public (not unlike – it is argued – people of ‘conspicuous’ faith) so French liberal thinking deems that religious affiliation should not have undue expression - or ‘influence’ - in the school system.

Article One of the French legislation states:

In public elementary, middle and high schools, the wearing of signs or clothing which conspicuously manifest students’ religious affiliation is prohibited. Disciplinary procedures to implement this rule will be preceded by a discussion with the student. [1]

It continues with an explanation of the term ”conspicuous”:

The clothing and religious signs prohibited are conspicuous signs such as a large cross, a veil, or a skullcap. Not regarded as signs indicating religious affiliation are discreet signs, which can be, for example, medallions, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, or small Korans.[2]

These terms must sound eerily familiar to Canadians today. Not unlike French Republicans, Quebec political leaders, too, are careful to delineate the difference between “conspicuous” and “non-conspicuous” items of wear, and PQ government officials took the measure of publishing pictograms (for presumably the less literate among the public) of what was acceptable and what was not.[3] Church and State have been officially separate in France since 1905, with secularization of education beginning in earnest in the early Third Republic under the Ferry laws of the 1880’s, when elementary-grade schooling came under the control of the French state and declared mandatory. Quebec followed almost a century later with the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960’s, when laïcité first was introduced to la belle province. Today a large proportion of the French and Quebec populations are considerably post-religious, yet in the interest of so-called fairness we see that both governments are determined to clamp down on “conspicuous” persons wearing “large” crosses.

However, the experience of France and Quebec is different. Out of a total population of 66 million, France has approximately 5 million Muslims, or 7.5% of the total population. It is also estimated that less than 2,000 women in France wear either the niqab or burka, or 0.04% of the Muslim population[4]. In Quebec there are about 250,000 Muslims out of a total provincial population of 8 million “souls”, or 3.1% of the population. Relatively speaking, France has more than twice as many Muslims than Quebec, and it has the legacy of colonialism and deep memories of war with Algeria, to boot. France began its laïcité by focussing primarily on its school system, while today Quebec is looking to impose laicite on its entire public service AND the private sector. And if we are to use the same French rate for the number of niqab or burka clad women in Quebec there might be as many as 10 such people in the entire province. Simply put (because it bears repeating): there might be only about ten people in all of Quebec who actually conceal their faces from the public by means of veil - yet the might of the PQ government is clamping down in the name of “secularism”. Generally-speaking the French experience with laïcité can be seen to operate out of a republican and (later) feminist inspiration, while in Quebec the PQ caters to misguided ‘opinion’ while clearly importing French republicanism. It is worth remarking that the PQ appears just as illiberal as the comparable faction behind the “Harper government”.

There is a clear difference in dynamics in France than in Quebec. France has had a long legacy of statism: the state is regarded as a social good; it looks out for the “general will,” and we can see that in the French Revolution as well as Napoleon. The French find liberty in conjunction with the state (we find it in Rousseau, well-known for his “forced to be free” argument which prefigures Robespierre) unlike the Anglo-American tradition which sees liberty in opposition to the state, notions which emerged from the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, as well as from the Huguenot tradition, which we find in Locke.

In Quebec today one finds similar elements of French statism, but the PQ veer on a kind of imperial secularism which brings us to the more to the pre-Revolutionary era of Louis XIV’s absolutism, a period with which Quebec is better acquainted, given that their link with France was severed with the Seven Years’ War, apparently finalized in 1763. In effect the PQ threaten to revisit Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes of 1685, when Henri IV’s act of “toleration” of French Protestants was declared illegal in the name of “unity” – so Protestants were to be converted to Catholicism. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, Huguenots were persecuted, thus making their way to the Netherlands, Germany, and North America. It was a significant knock to the French economy, for many Huguenots were from the commercial and industrial classes – and very mobile. PQ leader Pauline Marois is inviting such a migration of the “ethnic vote” from Quebec today; either that, or she wants return the province to the era of the French Wars of Religion, characteristic of the late 16th century.

France has not had a great legacy of religious toleration, and French thinking has always been more “clear and distinct” (as Descartes would have it) than that of the thinking across the channel (mind you, the Irish were clearly and distinctly discriminated against by the English). But the point is that French reasoning lends itself to the state – not against it. Similarly the ‘individual’ is less apparent in French thinking; ‘he’ or ‘she’ is conceived more sociologically than empirically, which is possibly why we are witnessing an ‘alternative’ expression of laïcité by the French. In other words, French liberalism is abstract and disembodied: individuals are not involved; the individual is “erased” from French liberalism, as Lucien Jaume has explained.[5]

The overall impact of the French Revolution bears witness to the problems France face’s today. Its legacy was égalité. According to Francois Guizot, France’s 19th century Protestant historian and one-time Prime Minister (a conservative liberal with a strong influence on Alexis de Tocqueville), the French Revolution did away with feudalism and “intermediate powers” – including the powers of the Catholic Church – so nothing remained between government and its citizens.[6] Unlike England, which retained its “local powers”, thanks (or no thanks) to its aristocracy and its implicit inequality, France had nothing to act as a bulwark against the state, because everyone is considered politically equal. Today in France, because of Revolutionary - and Republican moments, the state is viewed with prestige: it is all-knowing and it is there to tutor the people.[7] Because Muslim culture in France appears distinct (ironically faceless in some instances), Muslims are consequently less easily integrated into “neutral” and abstract units of French citizen sameness.

The other problem that France faces is that it has never had a successful Protestant Reformation.[8] After the French Revolution granted civic rights to Protestants in 1789 and religious freedom in the Charter of 1814 (when Catholicism was declared the state religion under Louis XVIII) we find that France’s most liberal thinkers were Protestants – not Catholics.[9] French Protestant liberals of the 19th century include Benjamin Constant and Madame de Stael, daughter of famed Jacques Necker (Louis XVI’s last Finance Minister), who originated from Geneva. The great aristocratic-liberal thinker Montesquieu, author of The Spirit of the Laws (1748) is something of an exception but he predates the Revolution and married a Huguenot. Montesquieu advocated religious tolerance (in an era when harried Huguenots numbered 2 or 3 percent of the total French population), and he understood the “virtue” of a Republic to be its “love” for equality, an affect seemingly missing from the French legislation of 2004. France’s other great, early liberal thinker, by the way, Alexis de Tocqueville (author of the classic work Democracy in America) married an English woman.

In other words, religion plays a role in French liberalism but what is absent from France is a deeper sense of the Reformation, for example a Martin Luther, or (perhaps more indigenously) a Jean Calvin (who escaped Paris and found safety in Geneva). Let us first consider what Luther has to say about the separation of Church and State in 1523:

If the emperor’s power extended to God’s kingdom and God’s power, and were not something distinct and separate, there would be no point in distinguishing the two. But, as has been said, the soul is not subject to the emperor’s power. He can neither teach nor guide it; he cannot kill it or bring it to life; he cannot bind or loose it, judge it or sentence it, hold it or release it. And yet he would need to [be competent to do all of these] if he were to have the power to legislate for it and issue orders to it. But as to goods and honour, here is his proper domain. For such things are subject to his power.[10]

Luther continues On Secular Authority:

My good Lord, I owe you obedience with my life and goods. Command me what lies within the limits of your authority, and I will obey. But if you command me to believe, or to surrender my books, I will not obey. For then you [will have] become a tyrant and overreach[ed] yourself, commanding where you have neither right or power. If he then takes away your goods and punishes you for your disobedience, then blessed are you, and you should thank God for counting you worthy to suffer for the sake of his Word. Let the fool rage; he shall surely find his judge. But I say to you: if you do not resist him and let him take away your faith or your books, then you will truly have denied God.[11]

We observe here the emergence of the Lutheran doctrine of resistance which was more fully articulated and endorsed in 1530. As the eminent Quentin Skinner points out, the doctrine of lawful resistance is more authentically Lutheran – not Calvinist, though the reverse has been usually perceived to be the case, possibly since the First or Second World Wars.[12]

What has this to do with Quebec’s Charter of Values? We see clearly from Luther and the Reformation that political resistance has a religious impetus, hence Protestantism. This sense was somewhat duplicated by Calvin but only in a manner which invited “self-conscious caution”.[13] Resistance found considered voice under Calvin’s continental disciples (see my blog), especially in the light of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 - and certainly under the influence of Scottish and English radicalism. So when a modern state today wants to eliminate ‘conspicuous’ signs of religious ‘influence’ it is also eliminating the right to constitutional resistance which was at the heart of the Reformation. The harmless hijab is an expression of conscience and resistance to the state, but “neutrality” is just another word for desired “non-resistance” (thereby increasing public apathy), and this can be harmful in a pluralist society – or any democracy for that matter. In other words, “neutrality” only adds to the state; this is not a plus. Moreover, post-religious reliance, or faith, in the state’s role and capacity to control religion is of dubious merit.

In Geneva Calvinism approached something of an ecclesiastical police state (not unlike Harper’s Canada); meanwhile Quebec is reliving the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.[14] These two opposing poles of French history, one authoritarian and the other excluded and authoritarian, are alive and well in Canada today. We also see that France overcame its Protestant Reformation, and because of this it has a poor, if not odd, tradition of liberalism, despite generations of republicanism, so are their secular laws worth emulating? Meanwhile Quebec’s relationship with the Reformation (and its erstwhile Protestant or English-speaking minority) has been reversed - and in a number of ways corrected – certainly by the Quiet Revolution and less so by successive acts of PQ “sovereignty”. Across the Atlantic, but especially in Quebec, notions of Papal “infallibility” and the “seamless” robe have now found severe, contemporary inversions by means of state-led laïcité.





[1] Quoted in Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 1.
[2] Ibid., p. 1.
[3] Globe and Mail, “Quebec draws its line,” Wednesday, September 11, 2013.
[4] See Sheema Khan’s column, Globe and Mail, Friday January 29, 2010. Khan mistakenly calculates the figures as “0.004%”.
[5]Lucien Jaume has written an interesting book with this topic in mind: L’individu effacé, ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français, Paris: Fayard, 1997. See also Celine Spector “Was Montesquieu liberal? The Spirit of the Laws in the history of liberalism” in French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the present day, ed. Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 65.
[6] Lucien Jaume, “The unity, diversity and paradoxes of French liberalism,” in French Liberalism from Montesquieu to Present Day, p. 49.
See how François Guizot praises feudalism as a form of resistance, as well as its Germanic roots, along with Luther in The History of Civilization in Europe, tr. William Hazlitt, ed, Larry Siedentop (Toronto: Penguin), pp. 79 and 202,3.
[7] Ibid., p. 54.
[8] See Helena Rosenblatt, “On the need for a Protestant Reformation: Constant, Sismondi, Guizot and Laboulaye” in French Liberalism from Montesquieu to Present Day, pp. 115-133.
[9] See George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 94.
[10] Luther, “On Secular Authority” in Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. and tr. Harro Höpfl (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 28.
[11] Ibid., p. 29. Emphasis added.
[12] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Vol. 2: The Age of the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2010), p. 206.
[13] Ibid., p. 221.
[14] Francois Wendel, Calvin: Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, tr. Philip Mairet (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2002), p. 85. See my forthcoming blog entry.

St. Peter tweets Pauline Marois, PQ Leader

“We must obey God rather than men.” (Acts 5.29)

Source: The Bible. Also quoted by Martin Luther in “On Secular Authority” (1523).