The principle goal of the Charte des valeurs québécoises (the Charter of Quebecois Values) is supposedly the following: "to affirm Quebecois values and the religious neutrality of the state." In other words, the Quebecois state wants to affirm Quebecois values while remaining religiously neutral. So the implication here - that is, in the view of Pauline Marois, Bernard Drainville, and a majority of Qwee-beckers (in particular most of the ones who are francophone) - is apparently that there is no contradiction between the Quebecois state's affirmation of Quebecois values, on the one hand, and the religious neutrality of the Quebecois state, on the other. But this means that 'Quebecois values' (i.e., the values that the Quebecois state wants to affirm) must be 'religiously neutral' - otherwise the supposedly 'religiously neutral' Quebecois state couldn't affirm them.
So are they? Are 'Quebecois values' actually 'religiously neutral'? Is that really a difficult question to answer? If they were neutral, then the levels of support/abhorrence for the Charter affirming these values would be found to be uniform across all of the diverse religious/irreligious communities that exist in Quebec. Is anyone - Marois, Drainville, anyone - daft enough to think that this is actually the case? That people's religious views are in fact irrelevant to whether or not they support the Charter and its 'values'? Not likely.
So what is the real problem then? Is it that the Quebecois state has no right to affirm Quebecois values? No, that's not it: it is simply not possible for a state to be value-neutral. No society could possibly exist without affirming some set or other of values. And since no particular set of values is truly 'religiously neutral,' no state and no society can ever be truly 'religiously neutral' either. (In fact, 'religious neutrality' is itself a value, and indeed, a 'Quebecois value,' but it is a value that is not religiously neutral - you clearly can't value and advocate for religious neutrality and at the same time remain religiously neutral! - so in reality this 'value' simply doesn't make sense.)
So the problem with the Charte of 'Quebecois values' is first of all that it pretends to incarnate a contradiction. The truth is that it attempts to affirm Quebecois values, and in so doing makes manifest certain ways in which the Quebecois state is not religiously neutral. So why do Marois, Drainville, and all those French-speaking Quebeckers want to pretend otherwise? Why would they want to pretend to be religiously neutral? That's a trickier question.
I suppose that some of them are not stupid, and in the purely political machinations of their devious minds they simply feel no compunction about abusing their electorate with straight-up doses of double-speak whenever it suits them. I suspect that most of them, however, are not in this category. I think that most of them are just very confused. They sincerely embrace a view of themselves as morally progressive beings who are quite enlightened when it comes to values: values, they believe, are merely subjective things, and so, they reason, no one has the right to impose his values on anyone else, and certainly not by means of the state. Therefore the state must be value-neutral; value-neutrality is in fact valuable; in other words, value-neutrality is not value-neutral. But of course if you are trying to be value-neutral, then you can't show favor to the value of value-neutrality. And that is exactly what they want to do!
So they come to a compromise: "We can't possibly embrace genuine value-neutrality: that is psychologically and socially impossible. But fundamentally our values are merely subjective constructs, so we have no real right to impose them on anyone. We believe quite fervently in individualism, in the right of every individual to define him-/her-/it-self and the world around him/her/it however he/she/it sees fit. We recognize the wrongness of arbitrary exercises of power as a means to constrain the individual's right to self-expression. But as a practical matter we can't possibly live in a society that has no shared values. So we will impose our values; but as a salve to our conflicted liberal consciences we will declare ourselves to be religiously neutral, even though we evidently are not; which is to say that those among us who are not stupid are simply lying. But our lie is a noble one, because it at least expresses our noble liberal intention to respect the individual; and it is a useful one, because it makes us feel better about ourselves, gives us an ideological tale to spin to those who are less intelligent, and facilitates our ability to exercise power over those who disagree with us."
And the bonus: they are spared from ever having to call into question the basic liberal, 'progressive' premises - about the essential, metaphysical nature of man and of values - which produce their confusion and necessitate their lies in the first place.
No comments:
Post a Comment