Fuzzy left

Enough with that, then. Let me get to the point that I want to make today. On the french twin of this blog, I will have done it in two steps (take 1 and take 2), two weeks apart. Here, I’ll do it all at once, testing, that is, a home-grown sociological hypothesis of mine on a couple of newsmaking surveys in Québec. In fact, a dozen days apart, two competing polling firms provoked highly concentrated debate about apparently unrelated questions, except for the fact of a generalized blame game about who should be held responsible for mishandling these complex questions. If this seems ridiculous, it could well be because it is. And then it’s already off the radar. Until it gets back on, obviously.

So let me start by giving some quick perspective about these two polls. The first one was done by CROP, and was intended to estimate how many Quebecers now agreed with a group of people, headed by Lucien Bouchard (you remember the man, right?), and who produced their “Manifeste pour un Québec lucide” in the fall of 2005. This had been quickly followed by a kneejerk reaction, the “Manifeste pour un Québec solidaire“, signed by a mixed bag of socialist and nationalist figures, headed this time by new party leader Françoise David (her “Québec solidaire” is something of an NDP with a tad more idealism if you can believe it). Since then, and on top of the ever-present federalist-sovereigntist polarization, almost every policy debate in Québec has been filtered through these opposing sensitivities, quickly taken to reflect some conventional right-left ideological conflict, rather than the right-wrong pair of economic analyses it actually supports.

Basically, the “Lucides” had come out pointing their fingers at the huge economic hurdles that threatened the capacity of future generations of Quebecers to maintain their public services, and had called for a debate about some difficult choices that had to be made for the sake of our social and economic progress. This transcended the traditional poitical divide, as prominent members from both the federalist and sovereigntist political families were part of this group, agreeing quite simply that confronting these problems would certainly not be any less vital to an independant Québec.

Now the difficult choices they alluded to did include things like raising university tuition and stopping to subsidize hydro power consumption. They also suggested to shift some of the tax burden from income to commodities, and they did take big unions to task for their political role in stifling badly needed debate about handling the upcoming massive retirement of baby-boomers. Yet, not only did they also propose a form of minimum garanteed income, which in my own fuzzy left-wing mind is actually their weakest idea, but more importantly, both in their writing and in their public comments, they made it very clear that consideration for lower income families and individuals was nowhere to be neglected in their view, as all these means of strengthening our economy were perfectly compatible with more generous support of those who needed it, whether through improved loans and bursaries or other means-tested measures.

As I see it, a responsible left-wing movement would have pushed for more debate on such mitigating measures to preserve and even enhance social justice, but our collectivist intelligentsia has actually decided to deny the relevance of the whole thing, as if this was just another strategy for the rich to get richer and the poor to be left out in the cold. Their response in Manifest number 2 was just another instance of your regular well-intentioned misrepresentation of the consequences of rational behaviour with limited resources: let’s think up a beautiful world instead of working with the one we have. Not too promising for those left out in the cold, but I guess that’s all they’ll get from this piece of day-dreaming. Replacing some despair with anti-capitalist anger might certainly be somewhat liberating, but it won’t fill nobody’s fridge, nor does it help learn a new trade or start a business.

Ultimately, a largely shared romantic bias against making money will probably have caused these people to identify heavy-handed interventionnism with social justice, and this mythology has made our new quarrel of the manifests into a sort of Litmus test. If you identify with the “Lucides” rather than the “Solidaires”, you’re betraying the true modernity that the founding fathers of the “Quiet Revolution” of the 60s and 70s have left us to uphold and cherish. And unfortunately for the “Lucides” side, its messengers are also the same people who benefited from the state-centered engineering of what is sometimes called “Québec inc.”, which was part and parcel of that special sort of revolution, and they now seem to be asking younger, less affluent people to clean up the mess, and this has certainly played in the hands of the other bunch of priviledged baby-boomers who are calling instead for money to grow on trees.

Let’s turn now to the subject-matter of the second poll, conducted by Léger and Léger Marketing, the results of which were made very public last week. This time, it was about the perceived difficulties of integrating members of many different cultural and religious backgrounds into the mainstream, and looking into aspects of this such as reasonably accommodating religious differences (as in the matter of the kirpan before the Supreme Court for example), questions of racism, neutrality, equality under the law, values of the majority to be imposed or not, etc. Some of these questions are certainly not specifically relevant to Québec. Other provinces with large multicultural cities have to deal with these issues, and in the larger picture, whether we look at the American melting pot, British multiculturalism or French republican laïcism, all ways of dealing with cultural pluralism have had mixed results. On top of that, the old “conflict of civilizations” thesis (Huntingdon and consorts) renewed its rhetoric with September 11, helping to focus the “Western” world’s darkest fears on all fellow human beings of the Muslim persuasion. It should not really come as a surprise that people get uncomfortable when dealing with these delicate issues, and would rather it all disappeared sometimes, be it by voting and enforcing a few harsher laws here and there.

In Québec though, this is taking an additional level of significance, as it is compounded with the traditional anguish at the perspective of having our special cultural character erased by the relative weight of the anglophone western world in the first place, a world which is already surrounding us “out there”. So what are we to do then with people who are asking us to loosen our cultural grip from the inside as well? This is in good part why the Québec chatting class often portrays our own efforts at dealing with pluralism as something very different from the multiculturalism associated with Pierre Trudeau. Multiculturalism, in this view, is defined somewhat complacently by its worst interpretation, as a positive encouragement of immigrants to maintain communitarian ties within their respective groups, at the expense of the social fabric of the whole, by institutionalizing ghettos and fostering mutual misunderstanding.

But the strength of the Québécois culture is taken to depend on the mainstream of a continental minority. That’s why many prefer a brand of integrationnism that insists on immigrants blending in and acquiring somehow our own cultural traits, as if we wouldn’t have to change ourselves in the process as well. Seems to me that providing real cultural freedom for individuals gives us a flexible enough perspective, but our very own collectivists would rather reduce our options drastically to either many small ghettos or just a big one. Considering how much immigrants we will need in order to compensate for our low birth-rate, if we want to remain demographically significant, we may be putting our heads in the sand a bit deep, but by now, this shouldn’t be too surprising either for the reader of this long and convoluted rant.

Yet, results of both surveys seemed to confirm that a majority of Quebecers expressed sginificant resistance to change, whether economic or cultural. Many commentators started then to tip-toe wildly around the shortcomings of the surveys themselves, or accusing one stakeholder or another in these debates to be pursuing self-absorbed, irresponsible and divisive agendas. But not too far under the surface of some of these comments, there was the idea that the respondents themselves, if not the general population, were being somewhat irrational, or lacked the capacity for critical thinking needed to see beyond the colorful rhetoric. For sure they needed the media to put all this media stuff in perspective. That’s where I started disagreeing. Long way to get there, but here I am.

For example, André Pratte of La Presse, one of the original “Lucides” and a favourite editorialist of mine, may have reacted with some bitterness when he realized how strongly Quebecers were still clinging to the traditional “modèle québécois” (although to be fair, they were realistic enough to be quite open to private medicine taking a larger place in our healthcare system). He suggested in fact that there was something of a “Petula Clark syndrome” in the responses, as a popular french song of hers reminded us that “everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die”. But if this isn’t the best reason to move out of Québec, I don’t know what is. If people are actually that irrational, there is just no hope, period. So hopefully, something else is going on.

Then, as accusations of demagoguery started flying everywhere while the second survey replaced the first one in the public eye, this was actually getting spinned as a simple matter of media and polling firms fabricating hysteria or conflict where there shouldn’t be any. Yet if this fabrication helped sell papers and TV advertising, I guess a demand for it was out there in the first place. If that was fabricated as well, then these critics are asking for rational debate in the name of a bunch of zombies. To say the least, this is somewhat paradoxical.

Well, if ever there was an ideal setting for trying out my pop-sociology hypothesis, this was it. At first, I just wanted to reconcile the economic wishful thinking with some basic rationality. But with what followed, I had many more reasons to use my Cambronne hypothesis: reconciling cultural conservatism with much needed openness was one, but another was that I might make sense of these assumptions of mass manipulation that basic conspiracy theory feed upon. And finally, providing an anchor for a more general understanding of masochistic resistance to change did also become a kind of overarching purpose.

So yes, I called this hypothesis the “Cambronne complex”, and it refers in fact to this episode at the end of the battle of Waterloo, when Cambronne screams his well-known word to Wellington’s officers, after they give him one last chance to surrender and keep living. Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables: “To thunder forth such a reply at the lightning-flash that kills you is to conquer!” Here we have that one criterion of human dignity that transcends all ideology: if I have no choice, then I have nothing left to lose that is worth being chosen. I might as well die. And that’s where the psycho-social complex kicks in. If I feel somewhat powerless in any given situation, and that people around me insist on how desperate my situation will become if I don’t adapt my behaviour to their vision, the rational reaction, given this powerful human preference for freedom of choice, can very well be to scream Cambronne’s word at them instead of accepting the proposed change. This is not a rationale for suicide or masochism, on the contrary, this is one for being in charge. People need to be given choices, that’s all. Makes sense, right?

Actually, it is still too simple. We have so many choices that this whole thing is just surreal. But so many choices mean most of them look pretty bland or insignificant. We want real meaningful choices, and between choosing a brand of toothbrush and choosing real freedom at the cost of real tragedy, the latter is both more dignifying and entertaining. Painting ourselves in corners becomes a way to feel freer, more alive. This is what radicalization and polarization of most of our debates is all about, isn’t it? I’m not being cynical here, believe it or not. I’m trying to make sense of our inefficient ways of handling important public discussions. Yet freedom can be preserved without accepting tragedy, and this is the message that is lacking, I think.

How does this all mesh with the hot polls of the last couple of weeks in Québec? Well the fact is that economic and demographic constraints have been consistantly portrayed in these times of globalization as requiring some sort of necessary optimal response, and this has certainly provided fertile grounds for painting ourselves in corners. The idea, dear to a large part of the left, that neoliberal or neoconservative economic reforms have been a sort of powerful wave sweeping the earth, works in a very similar way to that other idea, which is dear to a large part of the right, that immigration pressures on lifestyles and security also reflect powerful waves that must be resisted. But then, what about this third idea, that corporations, politicians and journalists have this sweeping power as well to carry ordinary human minds into zombie territory?

Let me quote Michael Kazin if you will, a liberal critic of American historian Howard Zinn (thanks to Le Périscope for this unintended part of his Xmas gift). Kazin’s main point is that there is too much of a tendency on the left to reduce complex political debates to a stark moral struggle between conservative elites who only care for their own interests and a majority of the people being lied to and believing the lies:

“This cynical myopia afflicts an alarming number of people on the left today. The gloom of defeat [against conservative forces since 1980] tends to obscure the landscape of real politics, which has always witnessed a clash of ideologies as well as interests, persuasion as well as buy-offs and sellouts. Zinn fiercely details [in his famous book ‘A people’s history’] the outrages committed by America’s rulers at home and abroad. But he makes no serious attempt to examine why these rulers kept getting elected, or how economic and social reform improved the lives of millions even if they sapped whatever mass appetite existed for radical change.”

But we observe the same thing on the right, don’t we? And have we not been going on here with generalized myopia of the said kind, making news about which side of over-simplified debates people are choosing, and then over-simplifying the role of news-making in the process of making news about the news previously made? Wow. Not sure this is helping us get a grip of the actual choices we have. Could we not make some collective effort to realize that we can make real choices, that we can choose to sacrifice some real goals in order to attain others, that neither moral perfection nor wholesale social failure is really in the balance here?

Or we can go on like this, obviously. Our inefficient theatrics are probably at least giving a competing edge to the Chinese and other people who deserve to get way richer than they are. Too bad it will primarily hurt the less affluent among us though, as usual. Maybe we just don’t care that much. I don’t know. Guess it’s time to pay attention to something else now.