I plead not guilty

It never ceases to amaze me how often I come across people who assume that because someone like me belongs to a designated group, that means that I and others like me must necessarily benefit from belonging to that group, or are necessarily guilty of all the alleged crimes committed by the selfsame group. These very peculiar people automatically assume that everyone in the reference group always participated fully in whatever collective activity that they wish to praise, or to denounce. Personally, however, I plead not guilty to dozens of presumably good or evil undertakings in which I did not participate at all.

The most obvious case has to do with my nationality. For as far back as I can remember, the fact that I was born in Canada, more specifically in English Canada, and spent almost my entire life here, in anglophone provinces or the anglophone part of Montreal, is somehow interpreted as proof that I did something, or refrained from doing something else, because of that. Patriotic English-Canadians, for example, often refer to how “we” beat the French-Canadians at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and therefore separatists nowadays should watch out lest “we” do the same thing all over again. Canadian nationalists also like to reminisce about how “we” won the War of 1812 against the USA, or the fact that “we” were on the winning side in the First and the Second World Wars, not to mention the cold war, and that therefore “we” are somehow better than the inferior people who were born in countries that were on the other side of the aforementioned conflicts.

The accident of birth in any country, however, has nothing whatever to do with personal participation, or even symbolic participation, in any historical event. In the first example, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham was mostly fought by British and French regular troops rather than by any of the local Canadian militias, just like the War of 1812 was fought mostly by British and American regular troops, even if most of the action took place in Canada. The Seven Years War (1756-1763), fought simultaneously in Europe and in several colonies all over the world, included the 1759 British-French skirmish on the Plains of Abraham, just as the Napoleonic Wars of 1799-1815 included the War of 1812-1814 as a North American sideshow. The outcomes of both of those wars did not depend in any significant way on what the very few people who thought of themselves as Canadians did or did not do back then. Neither did Canadian participation in the major conflicts of the twentieth century change much so far as the overall results of those wars are concerned.

None of those confrontations were anything like the kinds of conflicts that most patriotic Canadians assume that they were. Just to give one example among dozens of others, during most of the Second World War, the liberal-democratic group of nations that presumably included Canada, was allied with one major totalitarian dictatorship (the USSR) against the Axis coalition of other totalitarian dictatorships. Moreover, the liberal-democratic nations participating in that war did not often act in what are assumed to be liberal-democratic ways nowadays. In Canada, the War Measures Act of 1914, re-adopted in 1939, turned this country into just another totalitarian state, democratic rights being explicitly suspended once again for the duration of the war.

An even more important realization, however, is the fact that every country in the world has changed enormously over the past centuries and even more rapidly in recent decades. The kind of people who lived in English Canada, or in francophone Quebec, or in the USA, or any other place, two hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, are not generally the kind of people who live here today. At the same time, significant minorities within those populations, long ago, more recently or nowadays, did not and do not think in the same ways that the majority of those same populations did then, or do now. People who assume that “we” won any battle or any war in the past, or participated in the same way in any other event over succeeding periods of time, are just creating fantasy worlds inside their own heads. In all those cases, the designated group known as “we” never really existed and does not exist right now either.

Moreover, significant minorities in every country in the world, including Canada and the USA, did not then and do not agree now with at least some of the decisions taken by their “leaders” over the years, not only on issues of war and peace but also concerning  every other sort of public policy. For example, during the world wars of the twentieth century, when the Canadian government insisted on conscription in order to provide sufficient cannon fodder for its army, this policy was opposed not only by the majority of the French-speaking population, but also by significant numbers of political radicals in English Canada, most of them from the left wing of the political spectrum. No country on Earth has ever presented a totally united front on any major issue.

Governments and political pundits, however, still insist all the time on including everyone in any given country whenever they talk about how “our nation did this” and “our nation decided that”. In fact, all that these sycophants are referring to in every case is some decision or another made exclusively by a very small number of people in power. Sometimes, those decisions did indeed reflect the general sentiment of a majority of the adult population, in most dictatorships as well as in most democracies, but quite often the leaders point of view was in at least partial contradiction with the majority sentiment, not to mention the fact that there always existed a significant minority opinion on every major issue.

This kind of thing is particularly evident when it comes to refuting assumptions about Western nations made by a lot of people from the Third World. Critics from Asia, Africa and Latin America often assume that everyone in the West always agrees with, and still profits from, every rotten action or policy carried out in the Third World during the colonial period of history, not to mention the neocolonialism that still exists nowadays. Activists in, or from, those places are constantly denouncing “the Western imperialists” or “the crusader states” for mistreating their peoples over the past few centuries, without taking the time to reflect on whether or not all the people of Western origins really supported, or profited from, any of the aforementioned policies.

In those cases when the majority of the people disagree with government policy, they are sometimes more conservative than the people in power, and sometimes more progressive. At all times, however, some of the people are always opposed to every policy, often for quite different reasons. It is therefore extremely disgusting, particularly for people like myself who have practically never agreed with any official decision on anything, that the pundits, the ideologues and the publicists always refer to the whole country when announcing any decision, rather than admitting that the number of people within the country who made that particular decision is always a very small minority. I get particularly incensed every time someone associates me with any particularly stupid decision taken by any Liberal or Conservative government of Canada, since I have never voted for, nor otherwise supported, either of those parties.

Another major objection to the all-inclusive way of thinking is the fact that hundreds of millions of people all over the world do not in fact have an accurate vision or knowledge of their own origins. In my case, I found out rather late in life that my family origins were not the ones that I thought I had during the first several decades of my existence. Not only were my ancestors not from the same families, in some cases they were not even from the same ethnic or linguistic groups, an observation that applies not only to my European ancestors but also to my Amerindian ancestors.

There were thousands of different reasons why people’s biological origins often differed greatly from what they were led to believe initially. Racism often had a lot to do with that. Over the centuries, people’s true origins were often hidden by their families in order to avoid the stigma attached to “inferior races” or to minority religions. Millions of individual family names were changed in the process, either partly or completely. Anyone with a good general understanding of world history soon realizes as well that the “races” considered “inferior”, or the religions considered anathema, were not always the same ones, from one part of the world to another, or from one period of history to another. Every identifiable group in history has suffered from some kind of exclusion or mistreatment at some point or another, even if certain groups ended up suffering a lot more than others.

As a result, practically every ethnic or religious origin in the human universe has in one place or another, at one time or another, been subjected to some kind of voluntary ignorance of its existence. Even in “pre-historic” tribal societies, millions of people have been inducted over the years into every tribal group who did not biologically belong to it at first. It is therefore impossible for anyone living nowadays to know for sure that he or she is really and truly of some “racially pure” ethnic origin, or some “completely pious” religious or ideological origin, for the simple reason that no such purity exists now, nor has it ever existed in the past. In today’s world, people who build their entire lives and identities around some particular kind of ethnic or spiritual origin, are just being ridiculous. No one alive today really knows for sure where and from what all his (or her) ancestors really came.

The same general kind of observations can be made about dozens of other presumed collectivities and not just about ethnicity or religion, nations or empires. I remember when I was going to high school during the 1960s and being encouraged to show a little “team spirit” toward  “our” local sporting associations. People from whatever local area were expected to support “their” teams, as they are still now, whether or not they particularly liked some of the jocks who dominated those teams, or some of the adults who ran them, or even some of the local mayors, who were not always the marvelous leaders that everyone was expected to pretend that they were.

Team spirit in sporting activities often also overlaps with ethnic chauvinism, such as during the Olympic Games, when “we” are supposed to support “our” athletes, whether they won or lost, not to mention whether they behaved well or poorly towards the host country. This problem is particularly evident in bicultural or multicultural places like Canada, because some people do not like identifying with certain athletes, if they are too “French” or too “English”, or too whatever. But racism or religious bias means that politically incorrect reactions to athletes or other heroes takes place all the time, and in every country.

Like everyone else, I also ran up against the same “team spirit” ideology many times during the 49 years I spent working for a living. Most private companies and public institutions adopt what are called loyalty pledges or mission statements that make it clear that everyone who works there has no choice but to support whatever its leaders support and to denounce whatever its leaders denounce. Nations, cities, towns, counties, corporations, schools, hospitals--all those institutions require every private or public employee to go along with the gag and to necessarily accept whatever the people in power want them to accept at any given time.

If they disagree in public with official institutional policy, they can lose their jobs, or their freedom, or even in extreme cases their lives. Personally, I can remember being made aware of dozens of different situations, in many of the places in which I worked, that I would like to have denounced directly to the media, but was prevented from so doing by forced loyalty. Many of the decisions taken by “our” leaders were completely bogus to me, particularly the many times when those leaders refused to do anything at all about poor working conditions, even though problems were frequently brought to their attention by the employees whenever they put everyone’s health and security in real danger.

Since I have lived all my life in a relatively democratic country, it is obvious because of everything that I have been pointing out, that the “democracy” everyone is supposed to enjoy so much, is not all that convincing. People who live in dictatorships have no freedom of speech whatever, but people who live in what we choose to call democracies do not have that many more real opportunities to convince “our” leaders that they should be working for all of us rather than just for some of them.

I have similar objections to comments I heard recently about how the baby-boomers ruined the natural environment when they were running the world, leaving more recent generations with a whole host of ecological problems. Once again, leave me out of the equation. In the first place, people alive now, of whatever generation, are still being influenced in all kinds of different ways by decisions taken by leaders who have been dead for decades, or even for centuries. As a group, today’s baby-boomers were not any more collectively responsible for the current ecological crisis than the soldiers in the trenches were responsible for the First World War.

As I pointed out earlier, the main reason why that is true is because the world’s major decisions are always taken by a very small proportion of the world’s population. Very few of the hundreds of millions of baby-boomers had the opportunity to participate in any of the important decisions leading toward today’s massive environmental degradation. As in similar social situations, such as the 2008 financial crisis, millions of people cannot realistically be expected to lay down their lives on the barricades every five or ten years, in the hope of creating some kind of successful revolution, whenever the big shots make some particularly odious decision. This is especially true because in the past the new gang of leaders who took over after most of the world’s successful revolutions always found a way to betray their disciples and to follow in the footsteps of the old gang of leaders, instead.

Nevertheless, it is true that millions of ordinary people do not go out of their way very often to oppose whatever rotten decisions their leaders are making. Large-scale complicity is a very real problem, even if most public opinion is being manipulated every day on an even more massive scale than it was in the past. In Canada, for example, the Harper government has been systematically doing whatever it could for the past several years to help the country’s major polluters greatly enhance their already enormous carbon footprints, without suffering any discernible loss of support from ordinary voters. People from the baby-boom generation certainly do have a tendency to drive their cars to and from work every day even when public transportation is readily available. But those of us older people who have been taking the subway to work, nine times out of ten, for the past several decades, are still tarred with the same brush as the owners of the tar sands.

Unfortunately, none of the problems enumerated above are ever likely to go away any time soon. Most people seem to truly enjoy doing the same thing over and over again, no matter what the consequences. The world’s conformist majority also loves to blame “everyone” for every problem, the better to deny any possibility that some people might in fact be a whole lot more guilty than others.

Voluntary slavery

Forty-nine years ago, I started my adult life as a wage slave, working for about a third of the total time in manual jobs, another third as a part-time teacher and a final third as a full-time teacher. For about half of that period, I was simultaneously involved in left-wing politics and read several thousand pages of text about the history of the labor movement since the nineteenth century. I even managed to contribute a few dozen more pages myself of published articles on the same subject. Nowadays, in preparation for retirement, I often reflect on the recent evolution of the class-based societies in which all human beings are obliged to live.

When I first started out back in 1965, most people in North America, Western Europe and Japan were industrial workers, slaving away five or six days a week to make their employers a lot richer than they would ever become themselves. A half century later, the bosses have transferred most of those factory jobs to newly industrialized parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where billions of low-cost laborers are doing their best to keep nineteenth century British economist David Ricardo’s “iron law of wages” fully operational. Which means that most of them are still being paid only a few dollars per year more than what is biologically necessary to keep them alive and reproducing.

In those same countries, hundreds of millions of other people are still poor peasants, most of them lacking any title to the land. About a billion of them earn as little as one or two dollars per day, making them even poorer than the cheap labor contingents in the factories. Many commentators in the world media often make a big deal about how still other millions of people in those same regions have recently left behind abject poverty to join a huge new “middle class”. But those observers seem to forget that the Third World definition of the middle class refers to people earning a few thousand dollars a year, less than a tenth of what is required to get into the lower ranks of the middle class in the world’s richer countries.

Meanwhile, back in those somewhat richer countries, tens of millions of people are still working in factories, but the majority of the population now toil instead in the service sector. Professional optimists also classify many of them as middle class, ignoring the fact that most of them earn only slightly more than the minimum wage. In any case, even though the total wealth generated in such countries has increased hundreds of times since the 1960s for rich people, it has not increased at all for the middle class. In the USA, the American dream has been dead in the water since 1972, overall upward mobility in all the rich countries having become a thing of the past.

At the same time, a very small number of people spread out all over the world are making twenty or thirty million dollars per day, while hundreds of millions of much less fortunate people are barely avoiding starvation. Since the urban revolution in the Middle East 6000 years ago, at no time in history has the income gap between the social classes ever been higher. In Marxist lingo, this means that the objective conditions for world social revolution have never been better.

Unfortunately, however, the subjective conditions have never been worse, since no organized, world-wide, genuinely labor or socialist movements currently exist. The abject failure of state capitalism, back in the twentieth century, to provide a credible alternative to private capitalism, has completely eliminated whatever hope for the future that people may have had in the past. The only international organizations for progressive social change that exist right now are intellectual chimeras, comprising only a few thousand members each. Most working-class people nowadays are either not involved in politics at all or support neofascist parties instead.

In most countries, people are so desperate for jobs that they will do anything to get work. At the bottom of the heap, hundreds of millions of people have been tricked by fraudsters into becoming real slaves with no income at all, even though slavery as an institution became illegal in the last remaining slave state (Mauritania) back in 1980. Millions of young people, including many of those in the so-called rich countries, have also signed on for voluntary slavery by accepting unpaid internships in order to get the work experience necessary for (maybe) acquiring a real job later on. Employers have no compunctions whatever to support slavery nowadays as long as no one uses that term in public, since it was supposed to have died out as an institution back in the nineteenth century.

On a world scale, the industrial working class has never been bigger. The total working class, including agricultural, industrial, transport, service workers and illegal-service workers (prostitutes, criminals, etc.) make up the vast majority of the world’s population. Landed peasants, genuine middle-class people (making between 20 and 100 thousand dollars per year) and homeless beggars make up most of the rest. One percent of the world earn over 100 000 dollars per year, but only one percent of one percent (one person in every ten thousand) belong to the ruling class, defined as all those people (major investors and leading politicians) making decisions every day that are worth at least one hundred million dollars.

Once upon a time, more specifically between 1945 and 1975 (the thirty glorious years), most of the people in the world’s richest countries could feel relatively good about themselves, because in those days most of the world’s large investors were involved in productive investment and only a minority were hooked on speculation (negative investment). This meant that most people’s incomes were rising significantly during those halcyon decades, not only for a privileged few. But since 1979, with the election of politicians like Margaret Thatcher and the simultaneous onslaught of monetarism and neoliberalism, most of the world’s largest investors have moved instead into useless forms of speculative investment. They still claim to be the only ones creating wealth, but in reality they are only robbing the rest of the world economy to create wealth for themselves and no one else.

In other words, nowadays only about 70 million people, out of about seven billion, really have the freedom to do whatever they want. They are the only ones who see life as an amusing comedy, in which they have the power to enjoy themselves to their heart’s content by deliberately ruining the lives of millions of dirty, inferior peons. Most of the rest of the world’s people are forced to see life as a disgusting tragedy instead.

Reverse racism rides again

A number of well-known intellectuals have recently been denouncing the Quebec government’s proposed “charter of values”, mostly because it would prohibit provincial civil servants from wearing ostentatious religious garments and symbols while on duty. Left-liberal philosophers like Michel Seymour and Georges Leroux have been particularly active in their criticisms of this project because they believe that the current Parti Québécois government is using ethnic nationalism to get re-elected, deliberately appealing to the prejudices of the French-Canadian majority against recent immigrants.

They feel that it is especially conservative Muslim women in Quebec who are being singled out for exclusion because an increasingly large number of them have begun wearing cover-up garments like the hijab, the niqab, the chador and the burqa. The afore-mentioned intellectuals think that those Muslim immigrants are covering up like that for reasons of cultural identification, and not necessarily because they support the ultra-chauvinist oppression of women that has become a world-wide trademark of Islamic fascism. No one, however, least of all the Muslim fundamentalists, wants to recognize that the culture that those women are identifying with is more tribal than Muslim, since it appears that the Koran has nothing to say about those particular female garments and merely admonishes women to be modest in their appearance.

But a more important point in this context is how odd it is that left-wing intellectuals feel called upon so often to support such ultra-right wing religious movements against “dictatorial” Western secularism. In this particular case, the PQ’s proposed legislation is decidedly hypocritical since they have decided not to include in their ban such rather obvious public symbols as the cross behind the speaker’s chair in the National Assembly and the opening of many municipal council meetings with a Christian prayer. But it is not the rather obvious contradictions in the PQ plan that has the philosophers upset.

These critics are angry at the provincial government because they belong to a rather different, world-wide ideological association known as the politically correct, who are deathly afraid that anyone might accuse them of supporting Western imperialism. Their way of avoiding the charge of racism is to join forces with whatever opposing government, political tendency or group that seems to be most against the prevailing policies of the world’s richest countries. Adhering totally to the Maoist slogan, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, they support any set of ideas that seems opposed to whatever the leaders of North America, Western Europe and Japan seem to be supporting. They are still stuck in the old Third World versus capitalist imperialism paradigm that dominated world politics during the second half of the twentieth century.

Their cultural relativist attitude was attacked as far back as 1983 by Pascal Bruckner, a French author who wrote a book about how many liberal-minded people in the West have abandoned Rudyard Kipling’s racist “white man’s burden” to adopt instead a reverse-racist “white man’s shame”. Bruckner focused on the many different ways in which those Western liberals always blamed their own culture whenever some Third World dictator horribly mistreated his (or her) own people. For them, every Asian, African or Latin American famine, civil war, genocide or manifestation of feudal or totalitarian oppression had to be exclusively blamed on the deleterious effects of Western colonialism and neocolonialism. Bruckner demonstrated instead that Third World leaders and their political movements were quite capable of mistreating their own populations for their own particular reasons, and did not always have to be acting entirely on behalf of Western puppet-masters.

Unfortunately, Bruckner considerably overstated his case and was not prepared to admit that most of those dictators and corrupt politicians were also operating as compradors, helping foreign investors extract as much wealth from their own countries as possible in exchange for a share in the profits. Even though a small minority of those Third World economies have since become much richer and more industrialized than they used to be, the overall situation has not changed all that much since the publication of Bruckner’s book. The ordinary people in those countries are still being exploited as much as they were before, albeit in slightly different ways, but nowadays some of the local political leaders and big-time investors are getting a significantly larger share of the pie than they did in days gone by.

The real world has therefore changed a little bit since the 1980s, but the emotional reactions of the would-be anti-racists have not changed at all. In the case of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, cultural relativists nowadays are still writing books twenty years after the event about how the poor innocent Tutsis and Hutus really got along quite well for eons, until racist theories imported from German and Belgian colonizers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned them all into bloodthirsty zealots. Romantic Western observers seem thoroughly incapable of realizing that mass killings of ethnic enemies have been going on all over the world ever since human beings became numerous enough to separate into warring tribes, and did not have to wait several millennia so that they could all be “caused by” Western imperialist social-Darwinism.

The reverse racism being practiced by the politically correct assumes in a very paternalistic way that people from non-Western origins are incapable of acting on their own and matching the ferocious intensity of planning and execution typical of European cultures. In Rwanda as in Cambodia, in the Congo as in Syria, in Guatemala as in Myanmar, the people doing most of the killing all had their own local reasons for committing mass murder. This does not mean, however, that the world’s largest political and economic empires, based in Europe, the USA, Japan and, more recently, China, were not also involved in every one of those horrific events. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, every single region in the world has been brought kicking and screaming into the global economy and geopolitics, and every local event has also become an international event.

But the same kind of analysis that applies to international relations and the growth of the world economy also applies to ethnic and cultural relations within those countries that have become more culturally diverse than they were before. The most obvious examples are places like Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Uruguay, where the expansion of European empires during the colonial period resulted in populations of mostly European origin becoming the majority. By hook or by crook, indigenous populations (as well as former slaves of African origin) were forced into a minority situation, largely dominated and mistreated by a “Creole” majority.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the cultural relativists from the politically correct crowd also glorify native peoples nowadays. Whenever some type of conflict occurs between European majorities and First-Nation minorities in any of those countries, such as the Oka crisis of 1990 in Quebec and the more recent Caledonian crisis in Ontario, the same kind of romantic fantasizing breaks out once again. Analyses of such events by the would-be anti-racists always assume that everything that the “Europeans” do in such situations is necessarily evil and that everything that native people do (except for a few traitors to the cause) is necessarily wonderful. Once again, cultural relativists seem unable to attribute any blame whatsoever to anyone on “their” side of the equation.

Needless to say, the same kind of misinterpretation also takes place whenever the same crowd has to deal with conflicts between European-origin majorities and more recent immigrants from the Third World, particularly those who are not Christian. Ever since many Western countries started admitting larger numbers than before of Asian, African and Latin American immigrants, during the 1960s, a new situation has sprung up to allow today’s cultural relativists another field in which to exercise their romantic delusions.

In the charter debate in Quebec, Left-liberals like Michel Seymour and Georges Leroux are once again using so-called reverse racism, paternalistically defending religious minorities, particularly conservative Muslim women, from their Christian-European tormentors. They assume that most of those women are naive victims of cultural identification with their communities of origin, unable to realize the implications in today’s world of showing off their vehement rejection of women’s liberation and their obvious promotion of Islamic extremism. According to the politically correct, the Quebec government should leave those unfortunate women alone, not because a ban on people’s clothing is difficult to enforce, nor because the PQ is practicing a throughly hypocritical kind of secularism. The cultural relativists feel instead that the only way to fight such unacceptable “racism” is to allow all minorities, even ultra-conservative religious minorities, to do whatever they want. For them, anything less would be unconscionable.

In point of fact, however, reverse racism is just a paternalist form of ordinary racism. The cultural relativists in the charter debate act as if well-educated immigrants from the Third World had never heard of secularism or anticlericalism before they arrived in the West. They conveniently forget that even countries as presumably backward as Afghanistan were already governed by home-grown modernizers like Amanullah Khan during the 1920s and the communist government of the 1980s.

Politically correct proselytism also seems to have affected the judges in several recent Canadian cases who decided to give much lighter sentences to rapists of Haitian origins, or wife beaters of native origin, ostensibly because those perpetrators grew up in horrible conditions. According to this theory, it was the living conditions during these people’s formative years that “caused” their attitudes towards women and not their individual decisions to solve their personal problems through sexist violence.

However, belonging to an oppressed group of people does not give someone the right to oppress others around him, any more than belonging to an oppressor group gives someone the right to oppress socially “inferior” people. British judges should not be punishing workers of Irish origin more because some of them hate the Irish individually, nor less because the British have been collectively oppressing the Irish for several centuries. Judges in the USA should not be giving heavier sentences to Black murderers than to White murderers because they hate Black people, nor lighter sentences to compensate for four centuries of White oppression of Afro-Americans.

Similarly, pro-socialist workers should not be allowed to get away with mistreating their women any more than anti-socialist workers should. Victims of wife-beating do not have the right to beat up their children in protest against their husbands violence against them. ANC leaders in South Africa do not have the right to mistreat their own people, like their Boer predecessors did, just because those leaders fought against apartheid thirty years ago. Communist totalitarianism is not better than fascist totalitarianism just because the proclaimed goals of the communist movement were superior to the proclaimed goals of the fascist movement. People have to be judged by what they do, not by what they say that they are doing. Oppression is oppression, bad behavior is bad behavior, racism is racism, no matter what the source.

None of this means that people should therefore ignore important differences in the severity of the crimes being committed. The bankers and the traders who stole trillions of dollars from the world economy during the 2008 crisis should not be treated in the same way as are treated ordinary con artists who defraud their own victims of mere thousands of dollars. Fraud is the name of the crime is both those cases, but a trillion dollars is still millions of times greater than a thousand dollars. Those who commit the greatest crimes are much more reprehensible than those who commit lesser crimes. But when the crimes have exactly the same effect on the intended victims, the punishment should be equal, regardless of the social or cultural origins of the perpetrator.

Those who wish to denounce the PQ’s charter of values in Quebec, therefore, should be denouncing it for several appropriate reasons, but those do not include supporting Islamic extremism. The Left-liberal cultural relativists in Quebec are a lot like the equally naive Left-liberal elements in the Arab spring movement, who fought hard against political and military dictatorships in alliance with Muslim extremists, only to see the Muslim extremists set up new dictatorships as bad as the old ones.

Unfortunately for the politically correct, Islamic fascism has become an enormous problem in many different parts of the world, including the Western countries, and is not just confined to countries possessing a Muslim majority. It is true that several Western intelligence agencies spent hundreds of millions of dollars decades ago promoting Islamic fundamentalism, to help them fight against communist and nationalist movements threatening Western political and economic domination. That is one of the reasons why that ideology has become so dangerous nowadays, but it is not the only reason. Intelligence personnel cannot create such a movement out of nothing, and such movements only become dangerous when they are well anchored within the victims own culture.

After neoliberalism, religious fundamentalism as a whole is probably the most dangerous ideology in today’s world. Not just Islamic extremism, but also the even more  dangerous Christian varieties, not to mention the Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist and Shintoist versions. Tribal animism of antediluvian origins is also still damaging millions of other people’s lives, often in combination with many of the afore-mentioned kinds of extremism. Progressive intellectuals all over the world should avoid naively helping any ultra-conservative ideology, thereby bringing world domination by the extreme right-wing closer to victory. If they do, they may soon find out that the individual rights for everyone that they so eagerly want to protect may soon be abolished for everyone, everywhere, by some of the very people that they tried so hard to save from their would-be oppressors.

Rot in your rights

Prior to the 1970s, if the local authorities thought that they were sick enough, hundreds of thousands of mental patients in North America and many other parts of the world used to be confined to what were then called lunatic asylums. In some of those institutions, most patients were treated reasonably well, according to the standards of the day, but in many other places thousands of people were treated very poorly indeed. The trend then became to move almost all those patients out of the asylums, the intention being that more appropriate treatment would take place instead in hundreds of newly created community centers and outpatient clinics.

During the 1980s, however, the world was overtaken by the individualist ideology known as neoliberalism, according to which all governments were supposed to cut back on ever expanding public expenditures and free everyone from “creeping socialism”. Overall government spending never really declined at any point, but was instead gradually shifted toward other more worthy objectives, such as conducting hugely expensive foreign wars and giving incredibly generous tax breaks to large investors. As a result, a large number of social programs were adversely affected, among which were most of the community based alternatives to asylums.

At the same time, the individually based neoliberal disease also deeply infected the justice system, making it very difficult to confine anyone, even very sick people, to any kind of compulsory treatment. And thus it came to be that the downtown areas of most major cities and towns were overrun by thousands of homeless people, many of whom were former inmates of asylums, or newer patients who would have been sent to asylums in days gone by. It soon became obvious to the rare numbers of horribly overworked health professionals, and to the police officers forced to take up the slack, that many thousands of mental patients were being allowed to “rot in their rights” by not receiving any serious treatment at all.

But the rot in your rights strategy has not by any means been confined to the under treatment of homeless people. It has also been extensively used in many other, seemingly unrelated, aspects of public policy. The multicultural lobby, for example, is currently using a rot in your rights approach as a neat way of protecting religious extremists from the separation of church and state. Charters such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights were initially designed to protect individual rights from the enormous excesses of totalitarian and theocratic governments. Recently, however, in many different countries such charters are being deliberately misinterpreted by the politically correct as a weapon to help the world’s fundamentalists succeed in reviving religious control of the state.

For example, in Quebec the multicultural lobby raised an enormous outcry against the provincial government’s attempt to enact a secularist statement of principles that would include a ban on civil servants wearing ostentatious religious symbols. If the government’s charter ever gets passed into law, the multicultural individualists threaten to invoke the Canadian or the Quebec charter of rights to get the courts to block the alleged attack on religion. Similar conflicts have also popped up in many other countries, notably in France, Britain and Germany.

The kind of extremist behavior that seems to draw the most attention in these debates is the tendency on the part of a growing number of Muslim women to wear some kind of religious garb in public. All over the world, female cover-up garments such as the hijab, the niqab, the chador and the burqa have been identified with an extremist, male chauvinist, nominally Muslim insistence on controlling female attire as a way of returning to an antediluvian, almost tribal level of social control. On the opposite side of this debate, secular attempts at thwarting extremism put the emphasis instead on upholding the equality of rights between men and women.

Curiously, no one on the multicultural side seems to have recognized the incredible irony of trying to use a charter of rights in order to uphold the flaunting of “voluntary slavery”. In Germany, a similar sort of symbol promotion would be a neofascist argument in favor of wearing the swastika based on an individual’s right to support the ideology of his choice. An even closer equivalent would be letting collaborationist Jews in today’s Germany wear the Nazi-imposed, yellow Star of David on their clothes as a form of perverse identification with their former aggressors. For some odd reason, people in the politically correct, multicultural lobby think that proclaiming female submission in public is an inalienable religious right, whereas promoting racial submission in public is much more disgusting.

In fact, condoning female submission in public is just another way of getting people to rot in their rights, by refusing to do anything that might be seen by fundamentalists as anti religious. Somehow or other, the refusal on the part of millions of more moderate Muslim women to wear such garments in public is not seen by the political correctness lobby as being even more anti religious than government attempts to control such behavior. But if each religious extremist is supposed to be allowed to follow his or her own conscience, regardless of symbolism, why does the same right not apply to extremist political symbols? Why allow some people to rot in their rights, but not others?

Another argument that has to be dismissed in the same debate is the contention that it is unfair for either side to focus on religious attire. To be sure, any government attempt at controlling something as personal as one’s fetish was bound to elicit enormous resistance from people who simply oppose government intervention of any kind, for any reason whatsoever. But those supposedly more reasonable secularists who do not want to focus the debate on symbols have instead suggested that governments would be better advised to focus on more important things, such as rejecting government funding of religious schools, or taxing religious property. In many parts of the world, including Quebec, most “private” schools are in fact not all that private, since they receive 50 or 60% of their overall funding in order to compete against 100% public schools, while most religious property remains 100% tax exempt.

However, that argument also turns out to be bogus, but only in this particular context, because the people making those suggestions do not seem to have realized how colossally bigger a stink the politically correct, multicultural lobby would raise if ever anyone tried to get serious about controlling public spending on religion. The amount of hatred directed against any secular government making such an attempt would be a thousand times more virulent, even violent, than what we have so far heard in the current debates over symbols. Religious people certainly enjoy “rotting” in those particular rights, since non religious people are also forced to help them pay for exclusively religious privilege.

But once again, this by no means the only other recent application of the “rot in your rights” approach to public policy. Even though it is not immediately obvious, the increasing number of train derailments in North America is also indirectly affected by the same social trend. Big corporations continue to fight against the “creeping socialism” that I mentioned earlier by refusing to allow governments to regulate their activities sufficiently. And they get a lot of support from millions of ordinary people, who continue to use their democratic right to vote in order to elect pro-business governments like the Conservative government of Canada, or to support pro-business lobbies in the USA like the Tea Party movement. In this case, through the democratic process, massive manipulation of popular opinion by rich lobbyists is being successfully used to overcome government regulations against all sorts of dangerous activity. The transport of oil products by rail, which was relatively rare until very recently, is just one of the environmental issues being affected by powerful lobbies successful control of millions of alienated minds.

As a result, millions of ordinary people have come to hate government regulation of anything at all because they have been convinced that it makes the things they want to buy that much more expensive. According to them, letting people in poorer countries get higher wages is bad because it increases the prices at large discount stores in Europe, North America and Japan. Many short-sighted working-class and middle-class people have come to support deregulation because it is too humiliating for them to accept the fact that real incomes for most people in the so-called “rich” countries have not increased at all since 1972, whereas the incomes of the genuinely rich have multiplied hundreds of times over.

They have also been convinced to support the contention that fighting against the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas is bad because it means relying on higher-priced oil from the OPEC countries. Using public transit more often is bad because it takes away from spending more on the upkeep of roads and highways. Refusing to allow large pipelines to be built, even though they are constantly rupturing all over the place, is bad because it is the only viable alternative to shipping large quantities of oil by much more dangerous methods.

The rail companies who transport all that oil, as well as the petroleum companies and the neoliberal governments who egg them on, therefore get to do whatever they feel like doing. The July 2013 Lac Megantic derailment in Quebec, that killed 47 people, was caused by a perfect storm of “rot in your rights” collusion between several different perpetrators. The railway companies in between North Dakota and Quebec were allowed to use defective cars and operate with insufficient staff, the oil companies were allowed to label the shipment with an inferior classification of the dangerous goods being transported, and the pro-business governments refused to do anything to protect the millions of people living right beside the rail lines in order to promote a rather obvious form of unsustainable economic development.

Since that time, many more derailments have taken place at an ever increasing rate, thereby causing all the companies and the governments involved to bombard the media with ads and mission statements about how they certainly intend to do something about all this in the very near future. But given the intensity of those very powerful people’s long-term commitments to neoliberalism and letting the masses rot in their rights, the chances are quite good that many more ordinary people will die before any kind of real control is put into place, if ever.

The best recent justification for adopting such a skeptical attitude toward official bleating about oil transport has been the way that the 2008 world-wide financial meltdown was handled by many of the same class of people. It was also another excellent example of how millions of less well-off people were allowed to rot in their rights in order to buy homes that most of them could not afford. In that case as well, the most important financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s was caused by the collusion of several deregulating governments, most of the world’s most important banks, thousands of traders in derivative financial products, hundreds of private and semi-public real-estate firms, car company executives and many other VIPs, spread out over dozens of different countries.

After “investing” thirty or forty trillion dollars in helping all those too big to fail, and letting ordinary homeowners rot in their rights once again, the world’s leading governments and financial regulators kept right on helping big business survive its ongoing crisis of confidence, by pumping hundreds of billions more borrowed dollars into the system, month after month, year after year, right up to the present day. They also tried to placate public opinion over vastly expanded public debt by fining some of the larger banks involved in the crisis, those “huge, unprecedented” fines collectively amounting to about three or four months worth of overall bank profits. Then they started a massive propaganda campaign to convince ordinary taxpayers that all the rules were going to change so that such a crisis could never happen again. Which is what they had already said the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that, all the way back to the royal bankruptcies that preceded the Black Death of the fourteenth century.

None of those otherwise unconnected events, however, seem to have any effect on the millions of ordinary conservatives, all over the world, who continue supporting deregulating governments, using their hard-won right to vote to make sure that those who wish them the most harm can keep on doing whatever they want, whenever they want. “The beat goes on.”

The Meeting of Extremes

I saw in the newspapers that Ken Stone, described as a longtime peace activist in Hamilton, Ontario, became very upset about having been recently visited by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Apparently, he had written a public letter roundly criticizing the Harper government for describing Iran as the world’s most serious threat to international peace and security. According to the newspaper reports, Stone felt that the Canadian government’s description of Iran contributed to a fear of Muslims among Canadians, since for him Iran is a country that lives in peace with its neighbors. Apparently, he made this observation when he was visiting that country a couple of years ago to attend an international conference supporting the Palestinian cause.

Later, he was also reported to have complained to the independent Security Intelligence Review Committee about the CSIS visit, saying that the interview was an obvious attempt to intimidate him and to keep people like him from exercising their freedom of speech. It seems that CSIS also refused to release their records of their visit to him on the grounds that his opinion constituted a threat to national security.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing has been going on since this country was founded. Canada belongs to a large group of nations proclaiming their formal adhesion to the principles of democracy and human rights, while simultaneously reneging on those principles whenever they feel the need to do so. Whenever they want to get around the freedom of speech barrier, they invoke the national security excuse instead. Then they feel that they can do whatever they want with anyone who criticizes some aspect of their official foreign policy.

Unless Stone did something else that was not mentioned in the newspaper reports I read, just the fact of disagreeing with the government’s attitude toward Iran or Palestine is not nearly enough to justify the allegation of a threat to Canada’s national security. If the Canadian government really adhered to the principle of freedom of speech, CSIS would not be bothering critics of its foreign policy any more than it is supposed to be bothering Canadians who disagree with the government’s domestic policies. Personally, I find the Iranian government’s attitude toward its own citizens to be considerably more totalitarian than the Canadian government’s own attempts at intimidation. But the difference between these two governments seems to be one of degree rather than one of principle.

For me, those newspaper reports were also a blast from the past since Stone used to belong to the same radical socialist organization, known as the Canadian Party of Labor, that I was in more than forty years ago. The only thing that I can remember now about him, however, is being impressed by a small booklet that he wrote on the history of the Hamilton steel strike of 1946. As I pointed out in the autobiographical part of my blog, the CPL was one of several  tiny outfits back then that thought that private capitalism was the source of all evil, including class oppression, racism, sexism, war, famine and frequent economic depressions. In those days, we were convinced that supporting the Maoist version of the Marxist-Leninist alternative was the only way to get rid of all those horrible things once and for all. How wrong we were! It turns out that Chairman Mao was not at all the progressive leader that we thought he was, but in fact one of the worst people who ever lived, not only in his public policies but also in his private life.

All we ended up supporting was an extreme version of state capitalism that was just as evil, sometimes even more so, than the disgusting private system. To make things even worse, many of those little groups of extreme leftists also adopted Mao’s slogan according to which “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. As a result, in 1979, many of them supported the Islamic revolution in Iran, apparently believing that any radical opponent of both the USA and the USSR must be doing something good. Doing that, however, only meant replacing one horrible, totalitarian dictatorship with another one, the Islamic theocracy turning out to be somewhat better than the CIA-imposed Shah’s regime in some respects, and a whole lot worse in many other respects.

In my case, I left the CPL quite a few years before the Iranian counter-revolution and ended up briefly joining what I thought then was a much more intelligent socialist organization, then called the International Caucus of Labor Committees. Unfortunately for me, that outfit promptly got involved in an ongoing war of fisticuffs with all the rival leftist groups, becoming more and more paranoid as time went on. I quit that group two years after I entered it, along with a large number of other supporters. Their leader, Lyndon Larouche, then followed in the footsteps of Benito Mussolini by gradually turning his ultra-leftist organization into an ultra-rightist formation. By the early 1980s, he had adopted a form of ultra-patriotic Americanism and styled himself as a conservative Democrat, favoring extreme forms of economic nationalism rather than free-enterprise libertarianism.

What those two separate political developments, Iran and Larouche, have in common is a meeting of extremes. Whenever extreme leftists support extreme rightists, or themselves decide to become extreme rightists, they are not contributing anything at all toward what were supposed to have been their original goals. No one can in fact get rid of class oppression, racism, sexism, war and depression by supporting state capitalism. Neither can anyone get rid of any of those evils by supporting Islamic extremism, or patriotic extremism or any other “true-believer” philosophy.

When radical socialism does not work, it is not a credible alternative to substitute the extreme right for the extreme left. Nor is it a credible alternative to become a sycophant instead, and lapse back into saying that private capitalism is not that bad after all. This was proved once again back in 2008, when truly enormous dollops of private greed led to a world financial crisis that is still very much with us five years later. If it were not for major government intervention, such as the so-called quantitative easing (in the USA alone to the tune of 85 billion dollars a month), the entire private capitalist system would have fallen apart completely, taking the rest of the world economy with it.

So there does not seem to be any way that any of the evils identified by the leftist radicals during the 1960s and 1970s can be eliminated, or even lessened, by supporting private capitalism, or state capitalism, or religious extremism, or extreme patriotism or ultra-individualism. These days, neither the moderate left nor the extreme left, neither the moderate right nor the extreme right, and most certainly not the God-forsaken political center, seem able to deal adequately with any of humanity’s major evils. Most of today’s political parties and movements, all over the world, are either supporting the kind of wrong-headed policies already identified, or are much too weak or compromised to solve any of those horrific problems.

So far as I can tell, the only thing that can be done nowadays by people who still believe in some kind of progress is to keep on supporting whatever democratic freedoms that still exist, keep on denouncing the ever-increasing gap between the social classes, denouncing racism, sexism, religion and belief in magic, keep on supporting secular skepticism and critical thinking. And hoping that the next financial crisis will not become the kind of uncontrollable disaster that will convince all the world’s governments to do away with freedom of speech altogether.

The Conspiracy against Progress

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, “Religious Identity Crises”, the province of Quebec has been recently divided over the government’s attempt to ban the wearing of ostentatious religious symbols by public employees, particularly those in positions of authority. About half the population is opposed, on the grounds that this would infringe on freedom of religion and minority rights. The other half of the population supports the move, believing that government employees should be neutral and avoid trying to win everyone over to their cause by showing off their own religious affiliations in public.

Unfortunately, the entire debate has been undermined by several factors, not the least of which is the enormous difficulty governments always have in trying to control people’s religious behavior through legislation. This time around, the government initially weakened its own case by refusing to ban the crucifix attached to the wall behind the speaker in the National Assembly, as well as the Christian prayers that still often precede meetings at the municipal level of government. The constitutional division in Canada also interferes in a clear understanding of the debate, with most federalists opposing the government’s position and most separatists upholding it.

Among all the various religious symbols targeted by this initiative, the one that seems to upset most government supporters is the head scarf (hijab) worn by a minority of Muslim women, as well as the far less frequent face mask (niqab) and the even rarer burqa that covers a woman from head to toe. This particular practice of hiding various parts of the female body from public view has also divided the feminist movement. The more orthodox feminists think that all those garments are in fact religious symbols of female oppression, rather like the yellow Stars of David that Jews were required to wear  in Nazi-occupied Europe. The more revisionist feminists, on the other hand, think that banning those garments among public employees would simply isolate those particular Muslim women even more than they are now (a minority within a minority).

Opponents of the government’s point of view, as well as some of its supporters, also believe that it is wrong to focus on such superficial issues, instead of controlling much more serious problems involving mainly immigrant minorities, such as female excision, female infanticide, attempts to impose sharia even when that would mean breaking dozens of Canadian laws, virginity checks being performed on young girls, religious schools refusing to cover the government curriculum even when they are being highly subsidized with public money, and so on and so forth. In other words, so far as religion is concerned, should we have majority rule or minority rule?

Many of the government’s adversaries on the religious symbols debate are also upset because they think that many of those supporting the ban are racists. According to them, too many people assimilate all Muslims with religious fanatics currently terrorizing many of the world’s Muslim majorities. They say that it may be necessary to condemn fanaticism in those countries, but it is irrelevant to do so in secularized Christian countries where Muslims are as yet still in a small minority. Even in today’s globalized world, they refuse to admit that everything that Muslims do in any country necessarily affects other people’s attitudes towards them everywhere just as much as everything that Christians, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists do anywhere at all also affects everyone else’s attitudes towards them.

Unfortunately, the millions of people belonging to any one of the world’s major religions do not have all that much control over their fellow believers’ behavior. Most Muslims, like most other believers, tend to support anyone from their community who is being attacked by outsiders, just as anyone who believes in such “secular religions” as patriotism or libertarianism also tends to react in the same way. The world-wide reluctance among all believers to criticize anyone from within, even when those other believers are doing something that is not recommended by their religion, is in fact very similar to the patriotic maxim: “May my country always be right, but my country right or wrong.”

As a result, Muslim majorities often refuse to condemn Muslim terrorists even though the Koran apparently denounces terrorism quite specifically. At the same time, in the case of women wearing coverup clothing, moderate Muslims often refuse to criticize such garb even though it seems that the only relevant reference in the Koran is an admonition that women should strive for modesty when appearing in public. Do those Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab, along with tight-fitting clothes and a lot of makeup, really expect others to believe in their hypocritical attempts at modesty?

On the other hand, it is certainly true that many of those wearing such clothing are probably doing so for reasons of personal identity with their culture, as I pointed out in my previous article on the subject. However, it is insulting everyone’s intelligence to ask anyone to believe that those women are not aware that covering up like that is part and parcel of the message of all ultra-conservative religious factions, for which any kind of feminism is anathema. Even more laughable is the recent attempt by some Quebec feminists to claim that hijab wearers have somehow chosen to follow their own separate (but equal) path toward women’s liberation!

Many of the problems caused by this kind of cultural identity all over the world, including the much more serious problems already mentioned, are also greatly exacerbated by the incomplete conversion of many ethnic populations to most of the world’s official religions. As I pointed out in my autobiography, when various peoples previously holding to some animist or polytheist religion were converted to such religions as Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism, much of that conversion was incomplete. Often, cultural characteristics from the prior religious affiliations were not totally eradicated, with the result that millions of people nowadays in fact adhere to hybrid, or syncretic, beliefs.

The most commonly recognized example of such hybrids is in Haiti, where millions of people adhere simultaneously to two very different forms of religious belief, Catholicism and voodoo. But dozens of other such hybrids also exist in many other countries, with the result that hundreds of millions of people all over the world who are supposed to be Christians or Muslims or Buddhists, in fact simultaneously believe in pre-conversion deities, or magic, or some other practice that is not at all consistent with what is normally considered to be characteristic of those official religions. “Even” in the USA, “even” nowadays, millions of people officially call themselves Christians, while also believing in such totally un-Christian ideas as magic, sorcery, speaking in tongues or the use of amulets to ward off evil spirits.

As a result of this, many of the cultural practices referred to earlier in this article do not in fact exclusively belong to the religions with which they are often being associated. Everyone knows that head scarves, veils and total body coverings are not just worn by some Muslim women, but also by some women of other religious affiliations, such as the more traditionalist orders of Catholic nuns. However, in most Muslim societies, it seems that most women who choose to wear those garments do so mostly for cultural reasons that in fact predate the arrival of Islam, and were not originally imposed for strictly Islamic reasons. The same argument applies to excision in various parts of Africa and the Middle East, as well as to dozens of other cultural practices such as forced marriages, female infanticide and so on. It is quite possible that many of the founders of those religions would be horrified to find out how many such “tribal” practices are currently being identified as part of their faith, in today’s world.

Another very important point in this whole debate is that the fundamentalist sects that promote those reactionary forms of behavior owe a lot of their current support to Western counter-insurgency. As far back as the nineteenth century, the British empire often promoted Islamic fundamentalism in particular as part of its attempt to take and to hold onto power in many different Muslim countries. This was all part of the empire’s “Negro king” strategy, incorporating militarily defeated kings or chieftains of indigenous populations, not only in Africa but also in many other parts of the colonial world, as local administrators of conquered ethnic groups under ultimate British rule. After the Second World War, the USA took over this counter-insurgency strategy to help control dozens of other countries, using local collaborators and religious traditionalists to help defeat world communism, as well as every nationalist economic strategy adopted at one point or another by practically every Third World country.

Islamic fundamentalism under various different disguises has also been actively promoted by well-heeled, ultra-conservative, comprador countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, whose enormous wealth usually comes from supplying industrial countries with natural resources and financial services. So the fact that Islamic fundamentalism has become almost as powerful in today’s world as Christian fundamentalism, is largely dependent on huge supplies of money rather than on its own intrinsic attraction to millions of ordinary Muslims. All over the Muslim world, it has become practically impossible for local dissent to support severely weakened nationalist or communist movements, leaving ultra-radical Islam as the only useful alternative to comprador (collaborator) governments.

Like the Tea Party movement in the USA, Islamic fundamentalism has become immensely powerful largely because of its “inherited” wealth from outside sources. Popular organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah also run large social-welfare schemes for their peoples because every local government is under some kind of foreign control, for which “socialism” or “government intervention” have become very dirty words. Christian fundamentalism, as well as Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalism, have also become popular for similar reasons in dozens of other countries.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that many immigrant Muslim women in Quebec, and many other countries, find identification with Islamic fundamentalism to be so intoxicating? The multicultural lobby in Canada is also egging on the more extremist factions of all the major religions as part of its ultra individualist strategy. At least in this country, multiculturalism has taken on a libertarian stance, encouraging the recent trend among religious believers to decide for themselves which sort of religion they want to support. Instead of expressing their religious faith in the original sense, through submission to a higher authority, today’s believers can themselves decide, individually, what constitutes appropriate behavior.

The Quebec government’s initiative is therefore being challenged by constant references to the universal charter of rights and freedoms (1948), as well as its more recent Quebec (1975) and Canadian (1982) versions. Freedom of religion is now being interpreted not as a choice among several collectively constituted, authoritarian religions, as was originally envisioned, but as a personal choice, in which each individual believer gets to choose whichever religious idea he or she considers to be most satisfying. Since religious beliefs are supposed to be much more deeply felt than non-religious beliefs like nationalism or socialism, everyone expressing sacred beliefs gets to be protected by the charters, even when such individualized beliefs have no particular grounding in any established religion.

Debates like the one in Quebec have now become a universal phenomenon, every country in the world being forced to adopt some particular attitude toward this kind of controversy. Curiously enough, in some countries, apostasy is still punishable by death, while in other parts of the world, people get to cherry-pick whatever kind of religious permutation or combination that satisfies their own personal egos.

The Science of Psychotherapy

Recently, I read a special issue of a French magazine that was mostly about the history of psychotherapy. Whether talking about history or psychology or any of the other human sciences, the professional journalists who work for that magazine always try to do a good job of presenting to the general public the gist of recent work from scientists all over the world. In this particular issue, they reported on on all the different ways that mental illness has been treated over the centuries, focusing on the various kinds of psychotherapy that have been developed since the scientific method began to be applied back in the nineteenth century.

Their survey confirmed many of the suspicions that I had already gleaned from reading dozens of other articles and books on the subject in the past. The coordinated efforts of hundreds of researchers and clinical practitioners in the field of mental illness have not produced anything like the kind of progress that has taken place in most of the physical sciences, or in treating most physical diseases. Although some progress has been made in treating some kinds of mental illness, using various branches of psychotherapy and quite a few useful drugs, the advances made so far have been quite disappointing.

Unfortunately, it seems that more than a few people in that field have reacted to that relative lack of progress by themselves regressing like some of their patients often do.

Many of them have gone so far as to abandon the scientific method itself, and have let themselves be influenced by ancient religions, particularly the buddhist religion, and even in some cases by shamanism and other prehistoric methods of “treatment”.

Those influenced by buddhism seem mostly to be concentrated within one of the more recent branches of therapy, sometimes described as the third generation of the combined cognitive-behavioral approach. Many of those people are using meditation techniques to treat their patients, particularly  a method called mindfulness, which appears to be an attempt to induce patients to concentrate all their efforts on their own immediate problems and not to let themselves be influenced any more by anything going on in the larger world that surrounds them. Cutting oneself off mentally from the rest of humanity, however, looks quite similar to ancient monastic attempts to get away from the corrupting effects of urban-based civilization by living in self-sufficient agricultural settlements (monasteries) far away from normal society.

It is difficult to see how those professional therapists can reconcile such an approach with the scientific training that many of them received during their university education in modern psychology or clinical psychiatry. Even more dumbfounding is how the university faculties or hospitals to which those people are still often administratively attached could possibly condone such obvious atavism. After having spent the past few centuries since the Enlightenment trying to free human thought from religious and ideological prejudices, it is hard to imagine why the people who are supposed to be running those programs allow this kind of regression to continue moving farther and farther away from more obviously evidence-based methods of intervention.

Even more disturbing are some of the more recent trends within what is sometimes called ethnic psychiatry. One of the articles in the French magazine I was referring to earlier was a polemic in favor of treating people under the influence of shamans from animist religions, in a different way than those used when treating people coming from a Western-oriented, post-Christian, secular tradition. The idea being promoted in that article was that psychologists and psychiatrists trying to treat people from an animist culture should temporarily pretend to support the use of magic and incantations in order to help mentally unbalanced people from those cultures overcome their psychological problems. This was seen as a method of gaining such people’s trust, who would presumably never accept advice from anyone openly promoting any kind of scientifically based approach. The author of that article also felt that people living within an animist culture were simply not capable of identifying with any rational approach, or being helped by it in any way.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that this sort of thing is just a special case of the negative influence of politically correct ways of thinking. What is implied in articles like this one is that anyone trying to use scientifically based methods with people from animist cultures is necessarily a racist. To fight this racism, a culturally accommodating therapist must therefore be someone who accepts the “fact” that science is just another competing method of human communication, not any more nor less effective against mental illness than trying to drive away evil spirits with magic incantations.

Clinical practitioners under the influence of such cultural relativism seem to believe that modern science is not a universal method that all cultures have been adopting, at least recently, but is instead an exclusively Western-based anomaly that must necessarily produce racist attitudes when used outside post-Christian, secular societies. The cultural relativists seem to have entirely forgotten that all the Western countries themselves left behind firmly established belief in ancient religions and/or animist beliefs only very recently. Most of those countries also include large populations of true believers even nowadays, not only because of recent immigration from various parts of the Third World, but also because they all harbor their own home-grown animist populations. Not to mention millions of fundamentalists, combining forms of Christian literalism with magical beliefs of prehistoric origin such as speaking in tongues.

Instead of trying to accommodate themselves to pre-scientific modes of thought, the ethnic psychiatrists would be better off trying to gradually integrate their patients into a more up-to-date way of ascertaining reality. Taking the cultural relativist short-cut is nothing but a dead-end. The very definition of mental illness, after all, lies in losing touch with human society as it is currently constituted. Neither mindfulness nor cultural relativism are capable of helping someone connect properly with today’s world, but instead lead people in quite the opposite direction.