Fuzzy left

Now, how can one explain the current collective identity crisis that Quebec seems to be undergoing, and this sudden desire to play the part of the tyrannical majority, for whatever panic over its cultural future, or maybe because it just doesn’t know what to do anymore, with the sovereignty project on the ice for now? Note that the tyranny it flirts with is relatively benign: nobody is being stripped of the habeas corpus here. At worst, the humiliation that is being cast on some appears just as justified to others as that which the latter feel they have been subjected to, and actually believe they got stronger for it. This is no gaz chamber, right? I’d still like to understand our little game a bit better. We can’t make those 19 dodo birds who crashed Boeings in skyscrapers responsible for everything weird in western cultures post-9/11, can we? So I read this book on accommodations by sociologist Yolande Geadah a few months ago, in the hope that some valid reasoning had just escaped me in all this paranoïa. But there was nothing there, nothing but the usual slippery slope sophistry applied to religious symbols, as well as some very plain categorical mistakes, such as confusing religion with irrationality. Yet surely we all know reasonable people committed to all sorts of religious beliefs, and a few atheist nutcases just as well. That we may have gotten oblivious all of a sudden to such a common-sensical truth is a bit troubling on its own, isn’t it?

Seems to me then that this goes way beyond how this debate has been framed in the first place. Some pundits here would interpret this as just the result of a generation gap, others as an urban/rural or Montreal versus Rest-of-Quebec divide, but something more fundamental is missing in this picture. There must still be an explanation of how these divisions are being bridged so ineptly: how is it that we can’t find our way, that we can’t understand our own social networking, unless others come off somehow as reproducing faithfully the beliefs and preferences of our own selves? The Bouchard-Taylor commissionners did identify at the outset some crisis in francophone Quebecers’ self-confidence - a problem I would also impute to the larger Canadian, or maybe just “Que-canian”, society, but I must keep some of my weird musings for future posts. Yet contrary to what their respective intellectual baggage is likely to lead our two eminent thinkers to conclude, I would venture to attribute the central problem here to the obliteration of modern individualism in our current cultural consensus, light-years away that is, from the lack of some “collective project” or other such mystical-collective intentional process.

In fact, I’m suggesting that what the typical francophone Quebecer fears most is neither the Anglo, nor the Canadian, nor the Muslim, but the typical francophone Quebecer himself. Or more precisely, what the culturally, historically, collectively defined Quebecer fears most is the individual Quebecer, that ever-menacing potential traitor to his own tribe, that plain individual of muscle and bones, who can be bought, seduced, corrupted, converted, who can speak english, make money, and move to the dark side of the force, while the collective Quebecer remains a prisoner of his North American peninsula, with his minority language and historical victimization. What makes the real Québécois tremble with fear is thus his own freedom, because he knows very well that the other one, the enduring victim, is just a figment of his imagination, like Santa Claus, my favorite martian, or the homo economicus. The real animal then is afraid to abandon himself, I suppose, or more to the point, he’s afraid of letting go of an image of himself that he got way too comfortable with. That’s psych 101, right? And playing the part of the control freak, as we are currently doing, screaming wolf in the face of neo-individualism or other inauthentic consumerisms, is exactly what is needed to make sure that we will collectively obliterate ourselves out of existence, as opposed to using our resources efficiently towards self-realisation. But we’d first need to accept that the world is a-changing, yet we just go on as if we needed to feel guilty for wanting to adapt and succeed, as if making the best of what we got was akin to letting our oppressors of yesteryear off the hook. What a crime that would be.

For sure, I’m recycling here my earlier hypothesis relative to what I called a Cambronne complex. Others will say that I’m simply echoing what they abusively call “neoliberal” dogmas, because that’s what anybody who values economic efficiency has now become associated with in our own Newspeak. Yet I am going one step further, as I’m not only pointing to our overflow of guilt for desiring plain human things, but also to a real cultural deficit in valuing collective destinies against, rather than through, individual choices, and this deficit is all the more debilitating as it discourages our own investments in ourselves, as well as those of others who could otherwise have been attracted by what we really are. Money is not all that is at stake here, obviously, but money is also a part of this, as a major determinant of real freedom, that freedom which precisely infuriates our own little parish priest within. Here’s an interesting translation twist, by the way, as “curé” does not have an exact equivalent in english, so that it is more difficult in this language to distinguish clearly between the peculiar political authority of the local church cleric in traditional Quebec, and the specifically spiritual function that defines priesthood in general. The argument I’m making, basically, is that this church cleric has remained, despite and behind our Quiet Revolution, the dominant sociological figure through which many Quebecers’ have mediated their own self-judgement (remember the impartial spectator?), as this “curé du village” was perceived as the real guardian of our collective heritage. Yet it is against our own individual desires for freedom and success that he pulled this off, constantly reminding us of how our very social fabric required unflinching communitarian loyalty - and sacrifices - against the corrupting influence of rich protestant anglos. Granted this is pretty pathetic in any 2007 western society, but it actually served us well for a while, in a relatively simple agrarian society, where solidarity itself remained the best insurance policy against bad weather. Now its crippling effect on our modern economy makes it an obstacle to our development, but it has comforted us for so long that its lingering in the public arena is not particularly surprising. However, there is no more reason to go on with such a self-destructive process. Hence we must now convince our inner chuchman to stop judging muslim women and start his own business. He can actually make it like everyone else, in a real world with no metaphysical villains, and this is the true secret that should be made public in this land.

Darn. I wrote five paragraphs. But it’s my own blog after all, so I’ll just do what I want. Ciao.