Communitarian fetishism

The well-known Quebec theatre director Robert Lepage, along with Ariane Mnouchkine from the Théâtre du Soleil in France, have recently become embroiled in a huge cultural controversy with militants from both the black and the indigenous communities over the past several weeks. First of all, a musical called “Slav”, about slavery in the southern USA, in which most of the roles were played by white people, was cancelled by the Montreal International Jazz Festival after only three performances, when several black artists got upset about what they called “cultural appropriation”. Then, another upcoming collaboration between Lepage and Mnouchkine called “Kanata”, focusing on the clashes between indigenous peoples and those of various European origins throughout Canadian history, also ran into similar charges of cultural appropriation from indigenous militants, especially since none of the roles to be played had been assigned to artists of indigenous origins. It, too, has now been cancelled, although in the meantime it seems that the Slav production may soon be revived by another theatre company.

As usually happens in this kind of controversy, most of the people involved, on both sides, resolutely put forward their own particular points of view about what was happening, over and over again, without ever seeming to directly address any of the arguments or the claims of the opposing point of view. So far as most of the commentators favouring the Lepage/Mnouchkine side were concerned, for example, the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, since artists all over the world should always be allowed to present their own artistic interpretations of real historical events without having to run their ideas by “censors” coming from current (self-appointed) representatives of the cultural communities being depicted. The people on the Lepage/Mnouchkine side also asserted that important cultural realities such as the history of slavery, and the history of conflict between indigenous and “settler” communities, all over the world, are universal themes that can be treated by everyone, from every country or culture, just as long as their representations of those stories from the past treat all the cultural communities involved without bias.

However, so far as most of the commentators supporting the black and indigenous militants were concerned, those prominent white (European-origin) cultural figures from Quebec and France should never have felt that they could get away with presenting such themes without extensive prior, and ongoing, consultation with both black and indigenous community activists. They also stressed that most of the roles to be played, concerning people from both communities, should necessarily always be assigned to actors and singers coming directly from those communities. From their point of view, the white people involved were practising “cultural appropriation”, which is to say stealing control over their own history from black and indigenous communities, both of which are still very much oppressed by white people nowadays.

Some commentators from the militants’ side also alleged that their “multicultural” point of view was supported a lot more by the anglophone community (English-speaking people from all sorts of ethnic origins) than by the francophone community (French-speaking people from a similar variety of ethnic origins), in both Canada and Quebec. This latter claim seems to have been undermined somewhat, however, when several English-language periodicals in Quebec published dozens of letters to the editor upholding the Lepage/Mnouchkine point of view, especially concerning the right of artists to combat censorship of their work.

My own take on this whole controversy is that people on both sides seem to be extremely alienated from one another. One of the anthropologists participating in this debate made the important point that we should not be mixing up “racial” discrimination (such as under-employment) with the alleged stealing of other people’s cultures. The way to fight against majority discrimination in all societies, involving minorities of various different origins, in every part of the world, ought to be by ensuring that all the minority populations in every country have equal access to information (in the largest sense of the word), equal access to the media (to express divergent points of view) and equal access to gainful employment. Which is, without a doubt, much easier to proclaim than it is to put into practice, given the inherent tendency on the part of all dominant, or majority populations (not only dominant ethnic and cultural origins, but also dominant religions, genders, and social classes), to “democratically” impose their selfish will on everyone not belonging to their particular category.

People in the theatre business should also take care not to willingly upset militants coming from minority populations that are not well represented among those theatre companies’ usual customers. Even if many of the minority people in any society may not feel that they are properly represented by the usually self-appointed militants, they are still much more likely to side with the militants than with the theatre companies in any dispute of this kind. Some of the people in those companies do not seem to be very good at doing business with minorities, and therefore cannot very well look forward to expanding their customer base in that direction.

However, people representing, or claiming to represent, dominated or minority populations,  should not be forgetting that not everyone theoretically belonging to the dominant, or majority, populations, are all guilty of discrimination uniquely by accident of birth. Most “white” people, for example, not only in countries where they seem to constitute the majority of the population, but also many of those belonging to “white” minorities in many other parts of the world, are not responsible for the sad state of affairs currently affecting human societies. Whether it be about the over-exploitation of the natural environment, the increasing likelihood of new economic crises, the ever-increasing gap in every country between the rich and the poor, the continuing existence of the nuclear arms race, or any of the other world problems about which everyone nowadays is (quite legitimately) complaining.

Most of the people who are indeed responsible for all those things, as well as for poor relations between majority groups and minorities of all kinds, belong instead to the very small set of ultra-rich and ultra-powerful decision-makers, in every country, who do not represent (and never have represented) more than one percent of one percent (one ten-thousandth) of the entire world population. Not to mention the fact that in every population, including white people, there are many individuals who have spent their entire lives fighting alongside non-white people, against all the different kinds of discrimination that exist in this world. Those just-minded individuals ought not to be treated in the same way as those who have always adopted a complacent, or a downright reactionary, approach instead.

All the world’s more or less “white” people do not in fact belong to any kind of generalized conspiracy against non-white people than do all the world’s more or less “black” people, or all the world’s more or less indigenous populations, belong to the category of the eternally oppressed. As has already been pointed out by several other observers participating in this debate, making the mistake of treating all white people as oppressors, and all non-white people as victims, is quite similar to the rhetoric adopted by the Muslim terrorists who felt that they had every right to assassinate any “crusader” (Western) cartoonist choosing to depict the prophet Mohamed in a negative way, or indeed to depict him in any way at all.

For the obvious reason that all the world’s Muslims, often considered to include even people born Muslim who choose not to practise their religion in adult life, or not to believe any more in any kind of divine intervention, should not be treated as belonging to any cohesive community. Any more than all the world’s whites, or all the world’s blacks, or all the world’s indigenous people, constitute any kind of cohesive community. All of those “communities” are not really communities at all, at least not in the sense of presuming that all the members of such a “community” in fact participate in some kind of generalized “zeitgeist” of necessarily shared political and social opinion.

For the same reason as the “whites”, all the world’s “blacks” are not part of any legitimate “nation” either, because of the enormous diversity of the designated population, coming from hundreds of different countries and social situations, as well as possessing an endless variety of physical characteristics. As everyone ought to know nowadays, human “races” are not scientific categories and cannot be defined in any coherent, biological way. Most certainly not, for example, according to the USA’s “official” designation of a “black” person as being anyone “containing” one percent or more of “African blood”.

Similarly, all the world’s Muslims, just like all the world’s Christians, or all the world’s believers in any of the other religions, are not separate “nations” either, for exactly the same reasons as those already cited, to wit the enormous diversity of ethnic and cultural origins, and similar diversity of physical characteristics. False communitarianism is a kind of sectarian disease affecting all sorts of groups, all over the world, which is particularly prevalent among those nations that have chosen to adopt a kind of ultra-right-wing populist, authoritarian, often neofascist stance based on any one of several different kinds of designated systems of belief. 

Dozens of countries, all over the world, have fallen one by one into such a trap over the years, including places as almost completely different as Russia, China, India, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea (DPRK), Honduras, Guatemala, Salvador, Colombia, the Congo (both of them), Libya, Egypt, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and so on. The list just keeps on getting longer all the time. Which means that many people in minority populations nowadays may be feeling more and more like those European Jews prior to the Second World War who were so thoroughly integrated into one or another European culture that they had forgotten that they were Jews, until Hitler reminded them about that in the most violent way possible.

Unfortunately, the UK also definitely seems to be going in the same sectarian direction (Brexit), as does practically every other country in the world (France, Germany, Canada, etc.), all of which are threatening to fall over the same cliff just as soon as their very own ultra-right-wing populists take over full control of those countries as well. Meanwhile, the neoliberal ideology still being followed in the countries that have not yet become fully neofascist, is constantly pushing millions more people in the same ultra-reactionary direction.

As for the USA, ever since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, that country seems to be following its own distinct pattern of former-superpower disintegration, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the extremely humiliating, Boris Yeltsin meltdown of the former Soviet Union, during the 1990s. The USA as a whole seems to have lost its former collective psychology of resolute patriotism, the majority of the population having followed their billionaire leader by themselves trying to behave like egotistical maniacs, just like him. How could anyone possibly think to “make America great again” by getting closely involved in dozens of sex scandals, not to mention dozens of investment scandals based on using political domination of a country for personal profit, and also hero-worshipping such authoritarian champions as Boris Yeltsin’s immediate successor? How the mighty hath fallen, and so quickly! It’s no wonder that Quebec film-maker Denis Arcand has followed up his hit movie about the “decline” of the American empire with a new one about the “fall” of the same empire.

Given the kind of world that we seem to be living in nowadays, it is therefore wrong for commentators like Montreal newspaper Le Devoir columnist, Christian Rioux, to describe the ideology of the black and indigenous militants involved in the theatre controversy mentioned above, as being an example of “left-wing communitarianism”. There is really nothing genuinely “left-wing” about adopting a racist attitude that ascribes universal characteristics (good or bad) to every designated “race”, culture or religion on this planet. This kind of hyper-alienation is just another, slightly hidden, version of ultra-conservative ideology. It is completely inappropriate to assume, as many thousands of naive people (from every country) often do, that all opinions coming from “eternally oppressed”, non-white populations are necessarily “left-wing”, even when it is clear that hundreds of millions of non-white people really do support politically and socially conservative points of view instead. People who resolutely uphold fundamentalist religious beliefs, who condemn women’s liberation, homosexuality, government “intervention” into economic and social policy, and so on and so forth, cannot be presumed to be “left-wing”, no matter from which “race” or culture they may happen to originate.

I think there is a parallel to be made here with another kind of ideological fetishism that is also quite popular these days, the one that glorifies youth over older people. Samuel Vanasse, the president of the youth council of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Montreal, wrote an article in Le Devoir (July 23, 2018) about militant young people, in which he denounced the current tendency in some circles to consider young militants as being necessarily more progressive than older ones. While it may have been true fifty years ago, when the baby-boom generation came of age, that young people in many countries tended to be a lot more left-wing than older people, it is certainly not necessarily true nowadays. Treating young people as being necessarily left-wing seems to be the same kind of ridiculous fetish as treating non-white people in the same way. There is just not any necessary sort of coherence between political bias and the accident of birth, not in the dimension of time and not in the spatial dimensions either.

Fifty years ago, the leaders of all the world’s totalitarian “communist” countries were also considered to be genuine left-wingers themselves. If we define “left-wing”, however, as being the common political characteristic of all those people who militantly oppose unjust treatment of all oppressed populations in this world, be they oppressed workers, peasants, poor people in general, oppressed genders (especially women), or oppressed minorities of every possible kind, then the totalitarian “communist” leaders should not have been treated as “left-wing” people either. With a few, relatively minor exceptions, such as the medical sector in Cuba, none of those totalitarian countries ever really tried to put into practice anything remotely resembling a classless society.

Similarly, the left-wing terrorist movements of days gone by should also not be qualified as being genuinely “left-wing”, since terrorism has never succeeded anywhere in “jolting” any oppressed people into all of a sudden becoming much more militantly anti-establishment than they ever were before. Nowadays, any “left-wing” terrorist groups that still exist anywhere in the world, as well as authoritarian regimes pretending to practise “left-wing populism”, such as the Maduro regime in Venezuela or the Ortega regime in Nicaragua, should also be deprived of any “left-wing” credentials that they may still be claiming.

This entire controversy over the alleged “cultural appropriation” of the above-mentioned theatre companies is just another example, if another one was needed, of just how thoroughly today’s world is divided up almost completely into right-wing and ultra-right-wing tendencies, with very little space left over for any genuinely leftist viewpoints. On the “ordinary” right-wing side, we have the longstanding hegemony of the neoliberal movement, that has dominated a very large number of countries for the past four decades, following the neoliberal economists (“Chicago boys”) initial partnership with the military dictatorship in Chile (1973).

From that day to this, dozens of countries have been ravaged by neoliberal excesses, such as that of the Canadian Pacific Railway company, charged along with the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway company and the Irving Oil company, for shared responsibility in the 2013 petroleum-car “accident” in Lac-Mégantic (47 deaths). As well as dozens of other train wrecks like the one just outside Montreal (Saint-Polycarpe) a short time ago, that luckily did not kill anyone (this time around). CEOs like the late Hunter Harrison have been pushing thousands of such companies all over the world to perform better for their all-important shareholders, by speeding up whatever they could get away with speeding up, without any thought for the consequences for mere “stakeholders” (such as company employees and the residents of towns dependent on those companies).

Nationalist reaction to neoliberalism, as well as to classical liberalism, becomes a form of communitarian fetishism whenever the definition of the nation is confined to only one religion or one ethnic group. Just like what happened in Nazi Germany (1933-1945), as well as what is now happening in today’s Israel, following the adoption of the recent Jewish nation-state law. Nationalism is sometimes capable of becoming a good thing, especially when it is combined with genuine social-democracy, but only if the nation involved is not too narrowly defined. For example, Quebec’s Charter of the French language (“Bill l0l”), adopted back in 1977, passed that test, at least theoretically, because it included people coming from all religions and ethnic origins living there, all of whom could participate in a pluralist society simply by adopting the French language as the official language of public communications.

Which means that social progress in the future is deader than a doornail if everyone decides to cling to exclusively right-wing (neoliberalism) or ultra-right-wing (neofascism) modes of thought. People cannot just go on forever writing articles for the media about how everyone ought to be doing the right thing, such as treating seniors properly, or providing proper day-care, or educating young people correctly, or solving problems caused by greed, masculine toxicity, financial concentration or geopolitical sabre-rattling, once and for all, without indicating how society is supposed to accomplish all these wonderful goals. Before signing off on such an article, authors and journalists ought to be suggesting some credible instrument, or strategy, capable of achieving those ends. Spontaneous uprisings occur all the time on a local level, or occasionally on a national scale, but never all over the place at the same time. These things have to be organized, using a coherent message that is not going to be swept off its feet by the determined resistance of the anti-democratic establishment.

Several decades ago, when there was still an international communist movement, as well as an international (democratic) socialist movement, millions of ordinary people thought that they could look forward to a period when such things could have become feasible. Because back then, if such movements had ever truly wanted to do all those things, they could have been accomplished, at least technically speaking. Even nowadays, all of those goals are still technically doable. None of them, however, are ever likely to be achieved for real these days because the social forces strong enough to push aside the tremendous resistance of the world’s ultra-rich and ultra-powerful reactionaries, do not currently exist.

On paper, the world communist movement and/or the world democratic-socialist movement, could have presumably pulled it off. That it was not done was not so much because those movements were too weak, although that very real problem certainly contributed to their failure. But more to the point because most of the world’s “communist” leaders, and most of the world’s “social-democratic” leaders, did not really want to implement communism, or democratic socialism, as such, but merely wanted to use those very large movements for their own self-aggrandizement.

Today, the illusion that those movements were really aimed at doing what they said that they wanted to do, is gone, along with the movements themselves. Nowadays, there are no social forces on earth even remotely capable of getting within a billion light-years of such a goal. Peter Sellers’ first big movie, “I’m all right, Jack” (1958), said it all. The world’s greatest and most pressing problems are not receiving anywhere near adequate treatment because none of the world’s leading lights ever remain faithful to their childish dreams of real progress, and never want to participate in anything more than just the usual wheeling and dealing, to become big-shots and to remain big-shots until the day they die.