"Dear Madame Marois": a confused letter from a pretentious academic

Matt Friedman, a guy who teaches history at Rutgers University, recently wrote an annoyingly self-righteous letter to Pauline Marois, premiere of Quebec. I find Friedman's letter annoying because I always find pretentious academics who don't know what they're talking about annoying. But let's get into some specifics.

Friedman is writing to protest against the imposition of the "Charter of Quebecois values" currently being proposed by the government of Quebec. After an impassioned recital of his bona fides as a real Quebecois who holds real Quebecois values - though he is temporarily in exile from sa patrie -, he gets into trying to tell us what is wrong with the Charter.

He first explains that the law would allow certain things and disallow others, then, after making the accusation that the proposed Charter is essentially totalitarian, he writes: "Indeed, it is an axiom of both the Common and Civil Law that, for a law to be just it must apply equally and without discrimination. Yet the secularism you seek to impose on Québec is fundamentally unequal and discriminatory. It is therefore unjust."

Now I'm pretty sure the axiom he refers to means that the law must apply equally to all of those who fall under its prescriptions. It doesn't mean that the law itself must fail to make any distinctions, that is, that the law itself must not discriminate, that the law must regard every possible state of affairs as 'equal' - in other words, that the law should be nihilistic. The purpose of law is precisely to discriminate, and to do so in a way that is just and that will promote the common good... isn't it?? Friedman's claim is analogous to the claim that laws against murder discriminate against murderers - yeah, that's the point! (This all-too-common argument is one that annoys the heck out of me: "X is discriminatory; therefore X is unjust." No; to be discriminating is a good thing; it is to be capable of seeing reality and making sound judgments. To call something unjust is an act of discrimination, so if discrimination as such was really unjust, then it would be unjust to call anything unjust! That way of talking is thoroughly nonsensical.)

But then we might ask, how do advocates of unfettered tolerance, like Friedman, feel about someone wearing a KKK outfit, or displaying a big swastika tattoo? I'd actually be okay with that (i.e., tolerate it, not be happy about it) in some cases, perhaps in the case of a student, for example - but students are not agents of the state. As students they are expected to be open-minded, to want to learn, to be willing to examine their beliefs and values. But they are not representatives of the state and of societal values. (On the other hand, when it comes to a student having a covered face, I would incline towards intolerance. I think seeing someone's face is an important part of communicating with her, and I don't think that there are any real religious or cultural values tied specifically to the niqab that are worth defending. Are there any??) But Friedman, like Marois, seems reluctant to talk about - let alone defend - any of the specific values that are associated with any specific cultural symbols.

Friedman goes on to accuse Marois of not understanding her own cultural patrimony, of embracing, without realizing it, a "profoundly Christian secularism." [Insert extended discussion of this apparently oxymoronic concept here.] He writes: "To prohibit the display of religious symbols by citizens in public employment while the government of Québec displays them on its letterhead, in the Assemblée nationale, on Sureté de Québec cruisers – the physical embodiment of state power – and our society displays it in its geography and calendar, is not to preserve neutrality but privilege."

He thinks that Marois and co. don't understand this, and perhaps there's some truth to that [again, insert extended discussion here of exactly what that truth is], but he is just as confused as they are, because his own viewpoint no less than theirs pretends to value value-neutrality (to promote a culture of cultural neutrality) - which is impossible. And Friedman is even more confused than Marois, because he ignores the fact that most Quebecers - especially the Francophone ones - support the proposed legislation and fails to recognize that he too is endorsing a similar individualistic anti-cultural multiculturalism, which at its core is merely nihilistic. He thus fails to realize that the Charter is perfectly congruous with mainstream Quebecois culture - of which he is unwittingly a good representative in many ways -, because, au contraire de his conceited panegyric, mainstream Quebecois culture is simply nihilistic and shot through with irrationalism. I suspect that Friedman's self-righteous endorsement of Levesque and the noble humanism (or whatever) of the Quiet Revolution is simply nonsense and that in reality Marois and Drainville are, if anything, better interpreters and more genuine heirs of the legacy of Levesque than is Friedman. In any case, if Friedman wants to pretend to promote neutrality, it is a mystery how he can so baldly privilege (his interpretation of) the ideological legacy of Levesque.

And finally, I'm disgusted by Friedman's lack of ingenuousness: First he writes, "I believe that you are a very reasonable, well-meaning person, Mme. Marois, and I don’t doubt that you are motivated by the best-possible intentions." Then he concludes, "It appears that you believe that you can play the people of Québec like a violin; that you have so much contempt for us that you can manipulate us at the basest level. I hope I am wrong about you..." Really, Mr. Friedman? Make up your mind, man! But hey, let's face it: that kind of double-speak is just how lefties roll. Friedman or Marois, take your pick: when it comes to fundamentals, I don't see much difference here.

Value positivism and religious neutrality: "La charte des valeurs québécoises"

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.