Fuzzy left

Let me still focus on these real crises though, if only to start a bit of thinking through them. After much reading already, in the hope always of perfecting somewhat my very partial views, one article, one book, one thesis and counter-thesis at a time, I am consistently wondering what has happened to our intellectual elites, and what has happened also to a social science that seems unable to think contemporary liberalism without caricaturing it, whether that is, in fact, in promoting or criticizing it. And when I say “our” intellectual elites, again, I’m not thinking about Québec or even Canada in particular, but about the very global difficulty that those who purport to do it have in diagnosing the ailments of the human condition with proper judgement and intelligence. Consider economist and philosopher Amartya Sen writing, a few years ago, that anti-globalization advocacy was raising important questions, even if its proponents poorly understood the very object of their discontent. For sure the intent of his analysis was to support a movement which was throwing real political weight towards correcting unacceptable inequalities, but the counterpart was a clear recognition of a crucial kind of ignorance, an ignorance that is particularly troubling because of the fact that such advocates do count as major figures of today’s intellectual elite.

It is a similar vertigo that I experience when scaling the perspective down to Québec’s intellectual production, whether I’m reading Le Devoir’s op-ed page or recent publications of our most public talking heads. Here for example is a large group of credible PhDs - nice enough individuals, actually - seriously thinking of themselves as resisting the evermore engulfing “neoliberal” wave. Good grief. And here, in a book that came out this fall, political thinker Bock-Côté actually appeals to his readers’ common sense (trouvez l’erreur) to re-awaken their loyalty to Québec’s “national destiny”, a destiny obviously in search of some new Messiah. And then a respected sociologist, Jacques Beauchemin, laments in the previously cited issue of Argument, the fact that (my translation) “our modernity devours utopias and offers no other horizon than that of emancipating practice without final ends or clear projects”, as if the infantilism that was part and parcel of the lamented utopias was to be preferred by any reasonable person who had a choice in the matter. I mean, when all these nostalgias of a time when meanings were simpler are expressed, not as some sectarian mystique or marginal misadaptation, but as the priviledged perspective of reigning intellectual “authorities”, is it really an exaggeration to speak of a crisis of an intelligentsia?

Not that much of these writings aren’t entertaining, far from it, and it must be said also that many sub-theses scattered along this delirium are actually worth much further thinking. Yet the received discourse which is the main thread here is a completely idealized one, fitting its own ready-made world into its logical categories, a world where individual subjectivity itself, regardless of any neurological or proprioceptive evidence, belongs to the realm of social and political norms, as if its own phenomenal prominence could be tempered with enough collective will. As if the very capacity to choose together, to join in a common cause, to feed one’s own identity with pre-existing cultural “stuff”, as if all this did not have as its immediate corollary the irreducibility of such individual subjectivity, a subjectivity that cannot be attributed to groups per se, unless one is happy with that peculiar sort of animistic regression. This is why social sciences have no choice but to let go once and for all of this romantic holism that has certainly contributed to much of their traditions since the early nineteenth century, but which threatens their practice, now more than ever before, with historical irrelevance and sheer lack of scientificity.

There lies that second crisis then, that of a science of aggregate behavior also facing the failures of its technocratic projects, failures which certainly account for much of the intensity of the illiberal and anti-modern reaction that is now taking place, however futile and self-defeating. We shall hope it recovers soon enough from this insanity of sorts, as real people are suffering from all resulting inefficiencies. But let me conclude, albeit temporarily, by linking back these two crises to the present bifurcation of a sovereigntist perspective that had always represented itself, at least until now, as a historical turning point of the kind habitually promised by revolutionary theory. In fact, it is the emptiness of such promises that reveals itself through the failure of collectivist approaches, these modes of thinking that have been largely promoted by social science, nurturing in return the special priviledge of credibility that much of the intellectual elite is currently losing.

And hence this void in justification ushers in a similar void in motivation, a void which the crisis of the québécois sovereignty movement instantiates almost trivially. Now that we are barely sensing a new hope for recovered lucidity, more reasonable plans for a desirable future should be proposed and discussed, as far away as possible from traditional mystifications - and as an aside, my fellow federalists would certainly help that process by re-thinking also the canadian “dream”, a dream still soaked into a brand of anglo jacobinism which is understandably fuelling Québec nationalist sentiment, but I probably shouldn’t be too hopeful there. Whatever. Belated Merry Christmas anyway.