The Rights Revolution Read online

  Let’s concede that no nation is ever only ethnic or civic in the principles of its cohesion. We are talking here of ideal types.16 America is held together by both the civic contract enshrined in its constitution and the fact that a majority of its population, while striated with a vast mixture of minorities, remains white, Christian, and English-speaking. Yet the dominance of this silent majority will soon pass. In the next century, a majority of Americans will be not be white, Christian, or English-speaking. Hence the anxiety with which commentators, most of them from this vanishing majority, ask whether equality of rights will be enough, in the absence of common origins, to hold the republic together.17

  Canada faces similar challenges. It is held together not just by its constitution, but by formidably strong links of common ancestry. The problem, however, is that our ancestry is a double, even triple, inheritance. In Quebec, the majority francophone community traces its ancestry to the original French settlers, and English Canadians trace theirs to the Scottish, English, and Irish immigrants who opened the frontier from the eighteenth century onward. One million aboriginal Canadians, meanwhile, trace their ancestry back to the heritage of the tribal nations of North America. This triple inheritance doesn’t necessarily weaken the country — it may even strengthen it — but it does mean that the principles of national unity cannot be found by joint appeal to common origins.

  This is essentially why Canada has no choice but to gamble on rights, to found its unity on civic nationalist principles. Its unity must be derived from common principles rather than common origins. The importance of these principles of unity is only redoubled by the impact of immigration. If there are more than seventy languages spoken in the homes of only one of our major cities, Toronto, then it is clear that we need a single common language to communicate together, and it is also clear that rights, not roots, are what will hold us together in the future.18

  The Canadian majority in the next century will be unrecognizably different from the majority I grew up in as a child. Already Canadians of Chinese, Sikh, and Ukrainian origin have occupied the highest offices of state, and more will do so as time goes by. The new Canadian elite has no common origin, only a commitment to common values. But as “new Canadians” make their way to the top, their demands for inclusion are forcing a change in our most basic mythologies. Canadians from these new communities refuse to accept the very concept of Canada as a pact between founding races — that is, the English, the French, and the aboriginal peoples. This concept seems to accord no place to them. Most of them can accept that original inhabitants may have claims to territory and language that are withheld from newcomers. But as these communities grow in number and size, it will be rights delivery, not myths of common origin, that will hold us together. Indeed, without a common fabric of citizenship, without common rights, it is difficult to see what will enable a multicultural society to cohere.19

  There is no reason why ethnic heterogeneity is incompatible with national unity. The proviso is simply that all Canadians accept and respect each other as rights-bearing equals. We have a long way to go in this regard. That is why, for example, police brutality towards ethnic minorities is — or should be — a national-unity issue, for when servants of the law do not obey the law, when they select particular groups for ill treatment, the very identity of the country as a community of equals is put in question. The proper response to incidents of police brutality in our community is not, as is often argued, more race sensitivity training, but rather is more training in justice, more understanding that the sine qua non of unity, civility, and social order is equal protection under the law.

  As the rest of Canada moves rapidly towards ethnic heterogeneity and a concept of unity based on shared civic values, Quebec still hesitates over the temptation to pursue a different course, to separate from Canada and seek national sovereignty on the basis of ethnic majority rule. It does so in the face of the exactly the same demographic forces that are changing the face of Toronto. There must be as many languages spoken in the playgrounds of Montreal schools as there are in Toronto or Vancouver. The new Quebec is black, brown, Asian, and white.

  Quebec has always been a heterogeneous society, and most people’s origins are not exactly pure laine, as the happy frequency of entirely francophone O’Neils and O’Briens attests. But a minority current in nationalist opinion thinks of Quebec as the homeland of Quebecers de vieille souche (i.e., ancestors of the original inhabitants). Independence is seen primarily as a vehicle to create ethnic majority rule. In moments of crisis and disappointment, such as the defeat of the Quebec referendum in 1995, these nationalists blame defeat on Quebec’s minorities, the alien enemy within. Not surprisingly, Quebec’s minorities do not believe their rights will be secure in an independent Quebec. They look to Canada, and to its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as the ultimate safeguard of their liberties.

  Quebec separatism is undoubtedly an ethnic nationalism, rooted historically in a myth of separate ancestry, but most nationalists aspire to a civic Quebec, capable of incorporating all of its inhabitants. This split between an ethnic heart and a civic conscience is the fundamental contradiction in Quebec nationalist appeal. And the nationalist project is fated to political failure as long as it is unable to persuade the increasingly significant immigrant minorities of the sincerity of its civic and inclusive aspirations.

  Separatism is also fated to failure as long as Canada manages to persuade French Canadians to participate in national life. Quebec has never been the only national home of French-speaking Canadians. In reality, as John Ralston Saul has done so much to remind us, Canadian national politics has always been held together by a partnership between French- and English-speaking leaders. From Baldwin and Lafontaine in the 1840s to King and Lapointe in the 1920s, Québécois leaders have made Canada, and not just Quebec, their home.20 These partnerships realized the quintessential Canadian achievements: responsible government, independence from Great Britain, the creation of a national railway, and equality of citizenship. These partnerships endure to this day, and English Canadians, who have been ruled by three French-speaking prime ministers since 1945, do not understand why Québécois feel compelled to seek mastery in a small house called Quebec when they already exercise mastery in a larger one called Canada.

  There is little doubt that Quebec qualifies as a nation, if by nation we mean a human group who think of themselves as such, speak a common language, and adhere to common myths of origin and common political principles. If Quebecers are a nation, they ought to be able to govern themselves. Yet self-determination does not necessarily imply a right of secession. Secession, with full statehood, is justified when nations are threatened with destruction, when only the possession of state power can guarantee their survival. Kosovars, for example, have a claim to both self-determination and secession, because under Serbian rule, they were subjected to unquestionable oppression. This oppression made it impossible for them to survive in Yugoslavia.21 But Quebec does not face a challenge to its existence, and Quebecers do not need to have a state of their own in order to rule their own affairs. Most nations, in fact, secure self-determination by sharing the state with other nations, by securing effective self-government within a devolved system of power. And so it has proved in the devolved federal experiment that is Canada.

  In the absence of a claim to secession based on clear evidence of oppression, Quebec separatists work up their appeal by alleging that federalism blocks the province’s aspirations to full self-determination. Yet the claim seems specious, since anyone with eyes to see realizes that the Quebec government enjoys full power in education, language policy, employment, and immigration. This suggests that the ultimate issue is not the real division of powers within the federal system, but the symbolism of sovereignty. Many Quebecers do not feel they have ever taken full psychological and emotional possession of the federal state, and they look to the creation of their own to feel the final sense of being masters in their own house. If this is the issue, the
n further constitutional devolution in Canada is a waste of time. Further concessions are beside the point.

  The real issue is that we do not share the same vision of our country’s history. The problem is not one of rights or powers, but one of truth. We do not inhabit the same historical reality. And it is time we did. For two generations, English Canada has asked, with earnest respect, “What does Quebec want?” It is time for English Canada to say who we are and what our country is. The answer is: we are a partnership of nations, a community of peoples united in common citizenship and rights. We do possess a common history, and like it or not, we had better begin sharing a common truth.

  Here, for example, is the truth as most of English Canada sees it. The British Conquest of 1763, far from extinguishing the French fact in North America, actually brought the Québécois their first experience of self-government. This has been the case since the Quebec Act of 1774, when the British Crown recognized the rights of those of the Catholic religion, the distinctiveness of French law, and the right of les habitants to use French as an official language. The result is that for more than two centuries, Quebec has shared the same democratic institutions as the rest of the country, as well as enjoying recognition of its distinctive national character. Indeed, one essential element of Quebec’s distinctiveness, in comparison with the American republic to the south, is that its National Assembly follows the norms and traditions of British parliamentary democracy.

  The point I am making is that rights will not keep us together if competing visions of historical truth continue to divide us. In the Canadian case, the truths each side holds to be self-evident are the truths that divide us. So how are we to proceed? One way is simply to lay the two truths side by side, acknowledge their incompatibility, and then seek, in so far as it is possible, to put these disagreements to one side. Few societies ever achieve genuinely shared truth between majorities and minorities, however, so let us shed our illusions about securing a unity based on consensus. Yet agreeing to disagree is not enough. We need to narrow the gap between our versions of the truth, always accepting that a gap of some kind will remain. The Conquest will always be the Conquest for Québécois, but we may in time persuade them that this was a conquest like no other, for it ultimately laid the basis for the survival of a democratic Quebec in North America.

  Conceding special status for Quebec in constitutional negotiations is probably inevitable, but it does nothing by itself to alter each side’s view of the historical truth of Quebec’s place in the Canadian confederation. Special status will not redress the Conquest. Nor will it necessarily make. Quebecers more willing to accept the English version of the historical record. This means we should cease believing that constitutional settlements can end historical arguments. In reality, they can only produce a new basis for ongoing and unending dialogue.

  Truth is truth and rights are rights, and the debate about the proper extent of both will go on. Indeed, it is only when dialogue becomes frozen, when there is no movement, that rupture becomes likely. To commit ourselves to the idea that the search for national unity has no end is not to despair, but merely to acknowledge that it is the very essence of nation-states that they harbour within them incompatible visions of the national story. Holding a nation together does not require us to force these incompatible stories into one, but simply to keep them in dialogue with each other and, if possible, learning from each other. And we have learned. No one in an English-Canadian school today learns the history I did as a child, a history that excluded Native peoples and the Québécois experience of being hewers of wood and drawers of water in their own land.

  We need to understand recognition between peoples as something more than a process of concession and negotiation alone. Properly considered, recognition is an act of enlargement that enables both sides to envisage new possibilities of living together. We don’t simply recognize each other for what we are; we recognize what we could become together. To do that, we have to recognize what we already are: a peaceable kingdom, a place where languages, cultures, and peoples shelter together under the arch of justice. This is our raison d’être, our example to the world, our never-quite-realized possibility.

  These lectures have tried to point out exactly where this Canadian possibility lies. But the lectures have also tried to situate the Canadian experience in a larger context. The revolution has been global, and the challenge it has posed has been to all democratic societies trying to cohere and live justly in an age of rights. The challenge has been to reconcile community with diversity in an age of entitlements. The rights revolution has made us all aware of how different we are, both as individuals and as peoples. Our differences, small as they may seem, are the basis of our identity. Call it the narcissism of minor difference.22 We don’t dwell on what we share; our every fashion statement declares that we are singular.

  This doesn’t mean we share nothing at all. Isaiah Berlin used to say that our moral language inscribes us within a “human horizon.”23 We disagree about the ultimate ends and purposes of human life, but in the end, we do so within that horizon. Values — to call them human at all — must be within the human horizon. That is why a rights culture is not relativistic: murder, violence, theft, betrayal, and lying are recognizably the same in any culture or historical epoch. But this common human horizon is far away; it is the outer boundary. Closer to home, within this shared horizon, we can have profound disagreements: murder is murder, but is abortion, for example, murder? Irreconcilable moral conflict occurs constantly because even when we start from the same principles, we disagree as to their meaning or application in specific cases. So if we really are that different, how do we ever manage to generate enough agreement to live together in peace?

  This is where empathy — the human capacity to enter other people’s minds — plays such a constitutive role. We enter other minds not merely because we can, but because we need to. We need other people’s approval; our very selves depend on knowing what others think of us. We need others because we are blind to ourselves. As Virginia Woolf said, there is a shilling-sized circle in the middle of the back of our heads that, try as we might, we can never manage to see. Only others can see it for us and tell us what it looks like. Our very individualism is social.

  The precondition for order in a liberal society is an act of the imagination: not a moral consensus or shared values, but the capacity to understand moral worlds different from our own. We may be different, but we can imagine what it would be like to be each other.

  Our capacity for empathy is limited. In Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s film about the Holocaust in Poland, you will remember the Polish farmer whose fields abutted a death camp. Ash rained down on his fields. He was asked what he felt when he saw fellow human beings going up in smoke. He replied, “I cut my finger, I feel it; when someone else cuts his finger, I only see it.”

  Imagination carries us only so far; our own sensations are invariably more real to us than the experience of others. We live at the centre of concentric circles of decreasing impingement: first ourselves, then those we love, and only much later, and much more imperfectly, our fellow creatures. But the imperfect moral impingemerit that others make upon us is as much a fact about us as our selfishness. It is on these facts — and our capacity to imagine them — that we build such community as we can.

  How do we generate a world in common? We take actual human individuals — rich, poor, young, old, homosexual, heterosexual, white, black, in between, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew (i.e., human beings in all their embodied difference) — and we imagine them as equal bearers of rights. Go into any courtroom, police station, or welfare office, and you will find real individuals ignoring the different surfaces of each person they deal with and addressing the juridical equal beneath. They are addressing a moral fiction. Yet it is this fiction, and our devotion to it, that enables us to be just. The entire legitimacy of public institutions depends on our being attentive to difference while treating all as equal. This is the gamble,
the unique act of the imagination on which our society rests.

  It is a new gamble, conceived in the seventeenth century by the founding fathers of liberal political philosophy, men like John Locke. It could be argued that they never thought a rights community could be composed of literally anyone. Their original thought experiment was confined exclusively to white propertied males. But once this ideal was imagined, the die was cast. No sooner had white propertied males begun to imagine themselves as rights-bearing equals than the propertyless began to ask why they were excluded … then women … then non-white peoples. Once this type of liberal imagination takes root in a society, it becomes logically untenable to withhold its promise from all humankind.

  The political and social history of Western society is the story of the struggle of all human groups to gain inclusion. This vast historical process, which began in the European wars of religion in the sixteenth century, has been brought to a successful conclusion only now, in the rights revolution of the past forty years.

  All of this is so much a part of our lived history that we barely notice its enormous historical significance. We are living in the first human society that has actually attempted to create a political community on the assumption that everyone — literally everyone— has the right to belong. We are all on the same perilous adventure, whether we live with our differences or die because of them.

  From Bosnia to Afghanistan, from Rwanda to Kosovo, ethnic warriors seem bent on proving that rights equality among human beings of different races is a sentimental fiction. In place of societies built on rights, they are hacking out societies whose unity is based in blood and fantasies of common origin. What we are trying to prove, in societies that incorporate all human beings into the same political community, is that the ethnic cleansers are wrong, and that their vision of the future need not come to pass, for us or for the people they tyrannize.