Saving Canada Part 2
When one is in a
feedback loop it becomes impossible to resist the temptation to double down on
the very things that created the loop in the first place. An example is
demands: in a feedback loop demands replace proposals though a demand by itself
can generate nothing but a counter-demand. I suppose this reflects the fact
that in our day praxis is immediate. The truth is what is brought about in
action. Action posits the very truth it seeks to realize. Alas, someone else’s
praxis can be just as immediate as mine. Then we have two absolute and
unmediated ‘truths’ in competition: two ‘little Hitlers’, to cite the Elvis
Costello song, who seek to force the other to their will. If we belong to the
tradition of philosophy (Western OR Eastern I must add) we cannot quite
conceive it this way. Action must be embedded in reflection. This is why an
activist once insulted me by accusing me of being a ‘philosopher’! This is a
charge to which I plead guilty. A philosopher is someone who dissolves
immediacy, who divides us from the direct flow of life and movement. To the
activist this is damning for the world must not be understood but changed
NOW!!!! We are always in the now of the struggle and in that struggle
reflection is cowardice and treason. Reflection is always working for the other
side by deferring the eschaton. This is why a Catholic like Rick Santorum can ridicule the teaching of philosophy even though the church to
which he belongs has patronized it for centuries and even today philosophy
departments remain the flagship departments at Catholic universities.[1]
He belongs to a conservative movement and a movement does not
conform to the dead, static categories of reason. A movement moves and acts and
changes. This is why a movement needs to encapsulate itself in talking points,
slogans and demands, half-truths and, all too often, direct fabrications that
can be quickly conned and endlessly repeated. A movement unites praxis with the
flow of life and the great struggle! This is why it is very difficult to TALK
to someone in a movement and why movements provoke counter movements that cause
the movement to double down on what made it a movement to begin with.
Escalating
confrontation is the lifeblood of a movement. So is the feeling of belonging to
a tribe and tribes in our discursive age, when people are expected to be
productive of discourses not silence,form around words. I encountered
this just the other day on Facebook: a list of words that every person of
progressive sentiment would assent to. One that struck me was ‘humanist’. Every
progressive is a humanist. This left me very puzzled as to whether I was a
progressive or not for ‘humanism’ was put forward as a magical word of power
without any context or specification. Did the creators of this meme mean
Secular Humanism? Renaissance Humanism? The Christian humanism of Jacques
Maritain? Does it matter what they meant? Did they, in fact, mean anything at
all? Really, though, the meaning of humanism is irrelevant for the function of
this word is not to signify who WE are but who THEY are. The poster is not
interested in humanism but in ANTI-HUMANISTS: the people excluded by the term.
To this extent they are exactly like Christians who are more worried about
where the Spirit isn’t than about where it is. This, of course, has the
advantage of keeping people on their toes. If magic words are left sufficiently
imprecise then anyone at all can be found on the wrong side of them and
suitably called out and shamed.
It is one of the
limitations of a democracy that things are debated whether in theory they ought
to be debated or not. To the activist of a certain stripe debate should not
exist because everything is framed as an absolute.[2]
Say the question is pumpkin pie. I might well be a devotee of this dish. I may
have invested my identity as a human in pumpkin pie such that anyone who
expresses disdain for it expresses disdain for me. What is denied in the debate
about pumpkin pie is my very humanity. The very fact pumpkin pie
is up for debate is a dehumanizing act of violence. This is
disastrous framing if what we want is social consensus on the right of all to
enjoy pie (which is actually what most people would settle for) for now the
persons who dislike pumpkin pie feel their humanity is at
stake. They feel the demand to recognize pumpkin pie is braided with an
accusation that they are culpably blind in not hitherto celebrating it. Worse,
when pumpkin pie parades become a thing one is forced to make a declaration for
or against by participating or not when one may not be the faintest bit
interested in pies or cakes. Indeed, pumpkin pie parades then threaten to
become a form of CHURCH: a place you go to be seen and, especially, to note who
is NOT there. A scenario is set up which FORCES polarization on people just
wanting to go about their business.
We have, in fact,
a polarization generating machine which creates a feedback loop which is
unfortunate for people should have as many parades as possible without the
molestation of others. On the other hand, no one should have to explain why
they prefer this parade to that one (to that extent I remain a sort of
qualified libertarian!). However, those who stubbornly and often irrationally
resist pumpkin pie raise a new level of energy and angry determination in its
proponents and on one goes. One side thinks that its just demands are being
stubbornly and perversely, indeed wickedly, denied and the other thinks it is
being subject to moral blackmail by obnoxious scolds.[3]
Further, all sides know that whoever prevails in the struggle will be a lousy
winner, seeking to rub the noses of the other side in the dirt by way of
retroactive punishment through the withdrawal of things like prizes or other
public honors. This kind of adversarial framing is baked into the very
structure of how we conceive of the clash and conflicts of various rights in a
liberal society which is why I think we need a new sort of society that does
not consist of adversarial assertions of rights which are only met by equally
adversarial counter-assertions. “You are violating my rights by saying I am
violating yours” is a loop that will never close on its own. It will spin
forever, faster and faster. In that way, it is no different from “you are the
real racist for calling me a racist” or other similarly bad infinities.
This can be
illustrated by the secular/non-secular split I adverted to in Part 1. If only
25-30% of the population falls decisively in one half or the other this
scarcely matters for minorities can easily triumph over majorities if they
outdo them in zeal and energy. Evangelical Christians with a smattering of
Catholics, Anglo-Catholics and Jews have convinced themselves that Canada as it
is currently constituted is an existential threat to their existence. They are
convinced the Canadian State or perhaps a global super state headed by Soros
and Obama will come for their Bibles and their children. They are the chosen,
the righteous minority who will be persecuted in the end of days. Even if they
do not literally believe this (some are sufficiently well educated) they still
feel deeply that in some sense current adjustments in Canadian society are a
smoke screen, the thin edge of the wedge for the forcible suppression of their
religion and the imposition of ‘post-modern ideology’ on their children. They
fear a progressive theocracy in which they will be not insiders but outsiders
subject to legal restrictions in the practice of their religious and family
lives. This is why many Christians, I am told, do not support BLM: they think
race is being used as an excuse to promote Marxism, eco-feminism and other
supposedly ‘corrupt’ doctrines. After all, if the latter two are cast as a part
of the struggle of black liberation then one cannot oppose them (or even feel
uncomfortable with them) without opposing black people themselves. Indeed, in
his mind, the religious conservative is being asked not to recognize his black
neighbor but to choose between Jesus and Marx. This is the mental loop through
which religious conservatives come to defend every atrocious thing denounced by
the other side to the ultimate hollowing out of any genuine (i.e. non fear
based) religion. Of course, as they retrench in this way they become
more and more odious to their critics with a fresh wave of ‘critique’ provoking
another round of retrenchment and mounting paranoia as the religious
conservative thinks his character is under attack as someone who likes caging
children (and after a few more rounds of this he WILL start to fantasize about
taking his resentment out on children or other suitably vulnerable objects).
Thus, persons who at bottom are apolitical (in many cases) attempt to highjack
civic institutions before those institutions highjack them (this is one of
those mutual suspicion loops that cause wars).
Again, it is no
use complaining that this is silly or inaccurate or shows a poor understanding
of contemporary politics and a naïve theology to boot: it is the impression and
it is set in stone. Beneath ALL this, though, lurks a simple and glaringly
obvious point (so obvious, it seems, that no one can see it). People have
invested time in things like the nuclear family, churches, the
oil patch and small businesses so when progressives rail against these things
as vectors of oppression it is pretty easy to see why such critiques fail to
resonate with people in nuclear families, oil patches and churches. When people
invest time and energy in something they do not wish to be
told their life choices are stale, conventional and flat at best and murderous
at worst (and this message, note, is conveyed by TONE and does not at all need
to be explicitly articulated). This, alas, is all the result of what I called
above the immediacy of praxis. If the good is constituted immediately in praxis
then whatever opposes that praxis must be the immediate form of evil.
Opposition is not something to be internalized and transcended but denounced
and suppressed. Racists are not to be made non-racists but simply ‘afraid’ (as
if fear were not the underlying problem!). However, as Burke attempted to point
out concerning the American colonies, suppression is not victory and that is
the limit of all violence physical or rhetorical. At any rate, the adversarial
framework of bourgeois civil rights, where I assert my abstract right to x
against another’s assertion of an abstract right to y, destroys one basis on
which civil organization rests which is empathy: empathy is the form is which
the polity constitutes itself on the level of feeling. If I assert my
right to my property as a ‘human’ right, then you assert your right to a fair
wage against my very humanity and vice versa. There is, then, no mediating this
dispute which is now about which of the two of us a is a human. There is no
issue whatever which can be solved once this becomes the framing.
It could be that
there is no victory here for anyone. It could be that there is not even a
‘settlement’ all sides can live with. At any rate, it is clear that if we are
to have culture ‘wars’ in which different constituencies compete for an
inherently scarce ‘recognition’ that may end with a bang and not a whimper.
There are a number of things that need to be socialized in our current polities
like the vast funds sitting in offshore accounts. One of these is recognition.
Every significant group needs some form of it to prevent the formation of
factions that disengage from the civic project because they do not feel
represented in it. This is so in spite of the fact that not all vectors of
conflict can be removed. Cultural issues will still divide churches and indeed
families (sometimes with tragic consequences). Schools, especially, have to
decide what to teach and not teach and in the end they cannot please everybody.
No society with a pulse can avoid existential or near existential conflict so
the issue is how to handle it when it occurs. How does one present social
change to people on the wrong side of it such that those people do not dig
themselves into a pit of sullen and toxic reaction? In this specific case, even
if one thinks that society will convert wholly to ‘secularism’ in one or two
generations would one not want that transition to be peaceful? There are those
who drool over the thought of apocalyptic show downs of good and evil but that
is not most of us (what bland lives they must be compensating for!). Well, like
the chthonic gods in the ancient Greek polis we must define
the place of the sacred in the nation. This is not an easy thing to understand
or contemplate but let me point out that the nations most devoted to a strict
separation of church and state are the very ones most threatened by theocratic
forces. The excluded always takes revenge as Euripides taught us in the Bacchae.
In fact, we face a very Greek situation. ‘Primitive’ emotions like devotion to
family and nation and traditions of the sacred are clamoring for recognition as
did the Furies of old. The chthonic gods want back in though the Olympians have
taken over. As for how this might be done stay tuned.
[1] I
do not consider figures like Santorum or Coney Barret to be Catholics whatever
they do in their private devotions or how many novenas they recite to the
Blessed Virgin. This is owing to their reflexive and unconditional support for
the principle of Puritan-individualist-oligarchy on which the United States is
founded. At the most basic level of social organization they are Evangelical
Plutocrats committed to the dissolution of any bonds of society that transcend
profit and the ‘prosperity’ with which God rewards his followers. This, of
course, is because as ‘Catholics’ and historical outsiders they are desperate
to ‘belong’ and conform to the worst aspects of the regime to prove they are
more American than any other Americans. If there is practical atheism there is
practical puritanism as well and that is the actual religion of these figures.
It is for this reason I have met American Catholics so blind that they thought
Aquinas’ Treatise on Law and the radical atheism of Ayn Rand
amounted to the same thing.
[2]
Alas and alack the fact that something should NOT be up for debate has little
bearing on what actually gets debated. There is no use lamenting this fact. If
I frame what I say as a simple self-evident truth that all good people should
give immediate assent to I can only frame opposition to what I say as stubborn
self-will if not ontic evil. Thus, I have framed the problem, whatever it is,
in such a fashion that it can never be resolved for what is the solution to a
will in the other aboriginally dark and evil? The attribution of simple,
stubborn evil precludes in advance any solution. I think, however, that if the
obvious has to be explained again and again then it should be even if that is
frustrating to those in the know. Different knowers are differently situated and
the simple assertion that x thinks what x thinks because of some culpable
prejudice will only provoke the response from x that HE is not prejudiced at
all but that YOU in fact are prejudiced against him for assuming he is prejudiced.
This is why my policy is always to address x as a rational agent capable in
principle of understanding and correcting his errors even if he is being stubbornly
reactive or plain foolish. One might question this approach, it is true, but if
you do so I challenge YOU to explain how all that calling out and shaming is working. Plus, I hate to go all Marxist here, but if you remove vectors of material
oppression you will find people, overall, a lot less cranky. Indeed, and I can’t
stress this enough, it will then be much easier to isolate and overcome the genuinely
vicious.
[3]
At this point the reader may be wondering at my neutral tone. Surely, they are
thinking that for a rational person with even a modicum of virtue people there
not TWO sides but ONE (i.e. mine) and not reproducing (at every possible
opportunity) the rhetoric of polarization shows a callous indifference to the
suffering of the oppressed or a demon inspired hatred of God and Jesus. For the
record, then, let me state that by personal conviction (which
is NOT what I am writing about here at all) I am a social democrat because I
happen to think that is the least ideological and the least dogmatic/utopian
stance. I want you ALL to prosper and if I am annoyed at some of you I am not
angry nor do I think your errors are any but human errors such as I myself
frequently commit. I want Christians and Muslims to live and raise their
families as they see fit and queer people to pursue their lives unmolested by
the judging eyes (or for that matter angry fists) of their neighbors. I want
indigenous people to freely enjoy the lands that are theirs under the treaties
we have signed with them. I want this on the sound Burkean principle that this
is the form our laws and institutions are seeking to instantiate. I will
support this form of polity until someone articulates a better one and by
better I do not mean more abstract, remote or imaginary. I do not sit about
devising ideal ‘rational’ or ‘godly’ polities like residual Stalinists or
crazed Theonomists. I deal with the polity that is here and now and do my best
to interpret and thereby liberate its underlying spirit. This is one of prudent
accommodation of disparate and even contrary interests in a single social body
and if this cannot be done then our society will fail and all bets will be off
as to what would replace it. If I had to guess, though, it will as likely be
communities like the Amish as anything else.
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