Holistic remedies for narrow-minded communitarianism

I just finished reading a book by Lynda Gray, First Nations 101: Tons of stuff you need to know about First Nations people (2011), that seems to be quite popular in Canada (sixth printing in  2016). Gray is the executive director of the Urban Native Youth Association in Vancouver, British Columbia, and is also a member of the Tsimshian Nation (and the Orca clan), originally from the northwest coast of BC. For non-Canadian readers of my blog, I should point out that “First Nations” (or FN) is a term that refers to the indigenous peoples living in what is now called Canada. Which according to Gray includes not only all the “status Indians” living on officially recognized reserves, but also the more numerous, urban-based, native “Indians”, as well as the Inuit originally from the Canadian North, and the “mixed-blood” Métis.

A large part of the focus of this book is on the often horrible ways in which many non-First Nations people in Canada, particularly those of European origin who have dominated the ranks of the Canadian government, have treated indigenous people over the past several centuries. Although Gray in her book does not dwell that much on the specific dates of “first contact” (between indigenous peoples and Europeans), it took place a lot further back in history in the eastern part of Canada (and Quebec) than it did in many parts of the West, where some native peoples did not run into any Europeans until the nineteenth century. Ignoring the unsuccessful Viking incursion that occurred way back in the eleventh century, the first, permanent, European arrivals took place in 1497 (Newfoundland), almost 400 years before the most recent contact dates in the West. The examples that Gray uses to illustrate her points in the book are also heavily weighted on the western part of Canada, particularly BC, which has a significantly higher percentage of indigenous people living in it than do any of the other provinces. Nevertheless, only about four percent of the overall Canadian population seems to be of mostly indigenous origin (not counting people like myself with only one or two FN ancestors).

As for the horrible ways in which the indigenous peoples have most often been treated, this emphatically includes not only full-fledged genocide (as in the case of the former Beothuk population of Newfoundland), but also the frequent use of the food weapon to starve reluctant tribes into submission. Since Gray’s book was first published, James Daschuk’s book has come out (2013), on the genocidal treatment meted out to the Plains Indians by the government of Canada’s first prime minister, John A. MacDonald (in power from 1867 to 1873, and from 1878 to 1891). Which definitively proves, among other things, that about 30 000 Prairie “Indians” were effectively starved to death as part of their “pacification” by the Canadian government during that period. A significant “crime against humanity”, no doubt about that, but one that also belongs to the same colonial period during which, to give another example, the same British Empire in the real India also used the food weapon to a much more considerable extent, managing to eliminate (according to such scholars as Mike Davis) about fifteen million people overall. To which can be added several million other victims of the same food weapon elsewhere around the colonial world, during the same period.

Gray also focuses much of her book on the kind of social and cultural genocide that mainly took place in more recent times, from the MacDonald regime right up to the Harper decade of 2006-2015. Particularly on the century-old “residential schools” that separated “Indian” youth from their families and subjected them to several different kinds of horrific abuse, as well as on the “Indian” day schools and many other, similar programs. On almost every page of her 275-page book, she denounces the various colonial and neocolonial policies that devastated FN communities over the years. Resulting in a situation whereby even though Canada as a whole is considered to be quite a decent country by the United Nations, often scoring somewhere in the “top ten best” nations world-wide, the FN communities inside Canada end up being placed somewhere in the statistical equivalent of seventieth or eightieth place (out of about 190 countries).

My main criticism of her work does not come from any major disagreement about any of that abuse, but about the curious “golden age” of indigenous history, before the Europeans came, that she has naively conjured up. According to Gray, none of the FN peoples living inside the boundaries of today’s Canada way back then, ever did anything wrong. They all got along quite well, treated women, children, elders and “two-spirit” people (of uncertain gender) almost perfectly, lived off the land so successfully that they always had lots to eat, settled disputes through discussion, compromise and “mutual evolution”, always lived in the same places (“since time immemorial”) that they are now claiming as their original lands, held warm-hearted spiritual beliefs in natural, animal-based origins (as depicted on the BC totem poles), and all shared the same “Creator” concept that completely satisfied any curiosity that they may have had about their collective place in the universe.

Not only that, but any of the more recent, negative, characteristics that some FN people have adopted nowadays, such as using a lot of violence, male domination of society, and mistreatment of children, all came about as a result of the rotten, corrupting influence of the “outsiders” and the “foreigners”, mostly from Europe, who stole all their lands and betrayed all the terms of the treaties signed with the “Indians” over the years. From her point of view, FN people in those parts of North America that later became Canada and the USA, never went to war with each other before “first contact”, and only learned how to fight wars at all when  resisting the European invaders, sometimes taking opposite sides (for the first time) when temporarily allied with one European empire against another one. Their ultimate defeat in resisting Western imperialism then brought about the disgusting, racially inferior conditions in which most of the FN people are forced to be living nowadays.

In other words, as in many other parts of the world, what she has done is simply to have taken the worst possible kinds of “anti-native”, European racism, according to which only “Western civilization” (the European countries and their various North American and Australasian “extensions”) has ever done anything great or noble, throughout all of human history—and then turned this completely ridiculous idea on its head. In her, “reverse racist” version of human history, the Western world of European origin is not great and noble at all, in any of its nefarious manifestations, but is instead entirely reactionary and despicable.

While according to her upside-down interpretation of Western racism, it is the “First Nations” peoples of what is now called Canada and the USA, that used to be exclusively progressive and noble, before they were partly corrupted by the evil empires from Europe. From her point of view, all that is required to turn the situation around once again, and get back to the original, FN “golden age”, is to re-adopt all the (largely imagined) characteristics of traditional FN societies, and to “re-connect” with all the wonderful, pluperfect, features of that pre-European, indigenous culture, supposedly common to all the different FN peoples in North America.

Her vision of such a pre-contact golden age, which seems to be shared by at least some of the other authors whose written contributions are identified within the pages of her book, is in reality just a FN fantasy, similar to the “Garden of Eden” myth from the other side of the world,  or to the “virgin birth” scenario adopted by true believers in Christianity. Surpassing even the “noble savage” projection invented by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, back in the eighteenth century. It also resembles, in its pristine pureness, many of the other fables also concocted in dozens of other parts of the world throughout history, such as the concept of Allah’s will resulting in the original formation of the perfectly marvellous Islamic caliphate, its subsequent demise as a result of the European “crusader” invasions, as well as its supposedly “imminent” return in our own time.

Muslim fundamentalists nowadays seem to forget, just like today’s Christian fundamentalists and every other kind of religious (Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, etc.) true-believers seem to forget, that alongside the incredibly sophisticated achievements of every single “great” civilization in history, like the glorious Muslim empires of the past, are despicable examples of barbarism, obscurantism, repression and murderous mayhem. Just like the enduring achievements of the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods in Western history (among others) have also always been accompanied by equally disgusting barbarism, obscurantism, repression and murderous mayhem.

Numerous other golden-age projections, all of them partly mythical and partly historical, have also been conjured up over the years, and used to “justify” other imperialist pretensions from the “Old World”, such as the “for their own good” colonization of hundreds of indigenous peoples shanghaied into the Russian Federation, or into the People’s Republic of China, or into dozens of other Asian “works in progress”, such as India, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Equivalent examples coming from every other region in the world, such as “Latin” America and Africa, as well as Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands. Including all the countries in Europe, that were also constructed as “imperial nations” within Europe, even before they began conquering most of the rest of the world, forcibly incorporating many different European populations into their compressed framework, some of those peoples having almost disappeared over time.

Each imperial nation of Western European origin (Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Denmark) has also invented dozens of different kinds of historical “justifications” for its own colonization adventures all over the world, along the same lines as the Russian (Eastern European) pretension of dominating various other peoples “for their own good”. To which ought to be added as well, the imperialist pretensions of the USA, which have usually been hidden behind some kind of absurd mumbo-jumbo of “freeing” such nations as Cuba from “undemocratic empires” like Spain. Right up to the most recent addition to such phantasmagoric interpretations of current events like Donald Trump’s “highly successful” (3000 dead people) efforts at “saving” Puerto Rico from destruction by a hurricane. 

Not to mention dozens of less destructive, but nevertheless largely invented stories, such as the ultra-conservative Quebec historian Lionel Groulx’s concoction, back in the early twentieth century, about the “great French-Canadian hero”, Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, in reality a drunken racist from the seventeenth century who lost his life fighting against the Iroquois. Not that the Iroquois were blameless “babes in the woods” themselves, as anyone can attest who has had the courage to read such works as historian Roland Viau’s 1997 book about their methods of making war, and eating certain selected prisoners of those selfsame wars.

Aside from such diverse imperialist constructions throughout history, many different peoples from all over the world claiming to be indigenous, not just in North America, have also adopted their own mythological versions of history. According to these, only slightly less self-centred interpretations of history, all those supposedly indigenous peoples, having been mistreated for centuries not only by the world-wide Western empires of the colonial period, but also by the previously established, regional empires that were set up on every continent over the past 6000 years, adopted their own post-colonial liberation myths, each people postulating its own original innocence (or lack of original sin).

This list includes the ideological constructions of many different, falsely “indigenous” movements in “Latin” America, some of them based on the “glorious” histories of such empires as the Aztec, Inca and Mayan peoples, as well as many different empires (such as the old Kongo empire) established in various parts of Africa, long before the Europeans showed up. In other words, many of the world’s so-called “indigenous” peoples, suffering in recent centuries from Western colonialism and neocolonialism, were themselves imperialist peoples, at one time or another, long before, or in some cases just before, the most recent (European-origin) colonial period began.

Which means that if we go back far enough in history, practically every separate ethnocultural people in world history has suffered under some kind of foreign imperialism at some point, as well as themselves dominating many other peoples during other parts of their extremely long history. Gray refers in her book to the arrival of the Inuit in northern Canada several hundred years ago, but says nothing about the presence of the Dorset people in the same regions, whose lands were gradually taken over by the Inuit. Did the Dorset people just die out by themselves before the Inuit showed up, or were they pushed out? In today’s Africa, the Khoi-San and the Pygmy peoples lost most of their original lands when the dominant Bantu peoples began their own expansion from their origins in northwestern Africa towards the southern and eastern parts of that continent, in some cases long before the Europeans arrived, and in other cases just prior to the formation of the “Western world”. Much of North Africa, as well as many countries in western Asia, were also colonized during the Muslim Arab imperial expansion, beginning in the seventh century, the Arabs being indigenous only to the area covered by the Arabian peninsula.

Almost all of Asia was also colonized by dozens of different, Asian-origin empires when Europe was still in its ultra-weak, medieval period, the British in India for example only gradually taking over the Indian sub-continent from the previously established Mughal empire, of Turco-Mongol origin. Back in North America, the Iroquois, originally from the southeastern part of today’s USA, migrated towards the north long before any European colonization. Which put their “neolithic” culture, living off of extensive agriculture as well as wild game, into conflict with the “palaeolithic” (non-agricultural) Algonquian peoples originally living in what is now called Canada. Not all the FN peoples back then were as fortunate as the “riparian” cultures in the northwestern part of North America, living next to millions of annually spawning salmon.

I should also point out that the term “First Nations” is itself ambiguous. The nations that were originally set up in some parts of Europe during the early-modern period were not just confined to one specific tribe, such as the Tsimshian people in BC to which Gray belongs. Instead, they were gradually stitched together by the absolute monarchies from one small region, successively conquering surrounding peoples and officially incorporating them into one, more or less culturally unified, linguistic community. Western empires then “exported” that idea to their far-away Asian, African, American, Austro-asian and Pacific colonies, most of which adopted the nationalist form of government during the post-colonial period, also incorporating various “inferior” peoples dominated by politically “superior” ethnocultural populations.

Presumably, if the FN peoples in North America had been able to adopt the nationalist method of governance themselves before the European invasions, it could have resulted in the establishment, for example, of an even more unified Iroquois Confederacy than the one that briefly existed during the modern colonial period, before being forcibly dissolved. In other words, all the peoples in the Iroquoian linguistic community under the control of one large nation, ruling a contiguous territory covering parts of what is now southern Ontario, southern Quebec and several neighbouring states of the northeastern USA, between the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River region.

If the Europeans had not conquered North America when they did, similar indigenous nations could eventually have been set up in various other parts of the continent, uniting many other related tribes into considerably larger entities. Each nation is supposed to include several smaller ethnic groupings, or “tribes”, more or less in the same way that the tribe is supposed to include several different clans, and the clan is supposed to include several extended families. At least theoretically, the reality of the situation in every area often differing from the overall historical concept.

This is not to exclude the possibility that one or another of the very numerous identity movements, from today’s world, could ever intersect with progressive political viewpoints, promoting advanced forms of political, economic, social and cultural democracy. Thereby becoming firmly opposed to the kind of upper-class domination that characterizes both private and state capitalism all over the world, and, simultaneously, just as firmly opposed to gender domination (sexism) and to ethnocultural domination (racism). The trend today is, however, decidedly in the opposite direction, with the world’s two most powerful current ideologies, neoliberalism and neofascism, moving hand-in-hand toward ever greater divisions between the social classes (extreme income and control-of-power cleavages), between the sexes (particularly focused on the rotten treatment of women), and between the world’s currently dominant, and currently dominated, ethnicities and cultures.

Getting back to our analysis of the Lynda Gray book on Canada’s FN peoples, another important weakness in her work is the fact that she does not make any specific reference to the cultural division between English Canada and French Canada, nor to the recent political dispute between Canadian federalism and Quebec “separatism” (independent nationalism). She even managed to introduce her readers to the brief, nineteenth-century existence of the Métis rebellions, allied at one point with “Indian” military resistance to colonialism, in the territories that later became the “Prairie provinces” of Canada, fighting against both the British Empire and the Dominion of Canada. But without mentioning either Métis leader Louis Riel’s intimate connections with Quebec, nor the existence of any Métis people in eastern Canada, nor even of any French-speaking FN people in Quebec.

She did, however, make a brief reference to the armed Mohawk conflict with the Quebec provincial police in 1990 (the Oka crisis), that resulted in the intervention of the Canadian army, but once again without specifically relating any of that to the constitutional dispute between Canada and Quebec. It is as if she believes that the political conflict between English Canada and French Quebec, in the nineteenth century as well as more recently, does not intersect in any way with the political conflict between all the Canadian governments (federal and provincial) taken together, on the one hand, and all the FN peoples on the other.

To be fair, it is true that Gray occasionally tries to argue, here and there in her book, for some kind of reconciliation with non-FN people who, if they are kind enough and smart enough to adopt her point of view about everything, could be brought around to some sort of “consensus”. She posits re-educating the non-FN population into accepting the kind of “holistic” interpretations of reality that “have always prevailed” in traditional FN societies, and to dump their anti-FN racism into the garbage. Proving their new-found honesty by signing treaties with all the First Nations not yet covered by such treaties, and applying (for the first time) all the provisions of the treaties already signed by fully funding all the programs originally promised to each treaty nation (in exchange for land already stolen). Also by overcoming the ridiculous situation in which Canadian governments have consistently ignored the demands of the urban-based majority of the FN population, often with the collusion of corrupt chiefs and band councils from the (mostly rural) official reserves.

In a few places in her book, she has even gone one step further, and talked a little bit about uniting with progressive-minded people from the non-FN population to help all the “disenfranchised” people in Canada, from both FN and non-FN origins. At one point, she even considered the possibility of helping develop a world-wide movement of progressive-minded people, before abandoning that idea and falling back into her much more frequent denunciations of deliberately degrading, settler colonization. An approach that was probably exacerbated by the fact that her book was mostly written, and published, during the especially reactionary, anti-FN, Harper Conservative period of Canadian government. Not that the Trudeau Liberals of today, who spend a lot of time talking about abandoning the old, regressive attitudes toward FN people, really seem to be acting all that differently.

Very few Canadian governments, federal, provincial or municipal, have ever acted in genuinely progressive ways, toward FN people or toward any other disenfranchised population. With the possible exception of the Quebec government in 1975, when it signed the first autonomy agreement with the Cree population living in the James Bay area of that province (as well as with the Naskapi and the Inuit, in neighbouring regions), or the 1999 British Columbia treaty with the Nisga’a people in one part of that province. Neither of those agreements, however, were designed to prevent the dominant FN community in each region from mistreating even smaller minorities within its boundaries, be they other FN, or non-FN, “minorities within a minority”.

In order to be described as being truly “holistic”, however, the approach Gray adopts would have to move beyond the strictly “us versus them”, ethnic dichotomy of indigenous peoples versus more recent settlers (since 1497), to take a much broader interpretation of events. In the first place, she would have to drop her often repeated opposition to any kind of historical research being conducted concerning the pre-contact period. While it is true that professional historians and anthropologists should include oral memories of FN people among their useful sources, such oral memories have to be professionally treated (such as being compared with other sources of information), just like any other source (archeological digs, etc.). No professional historian could ever accept such orally transmitted, traditional knowledge (limited even by Gray as going back a mere seven generations), at face value, in her view constituting the only politically-correct source of information possible.

The often contradictory oral histories coming from hundreds of FN peoples spread out all over North America, would first have to be professionally compared and contrasted. Even then, accepting all those (often largely imagined) oral histories at face value, as the be-all and end-all of politically-correct interpretations of pre-contact reality, is just as absurd and ridiculous as accepting some ultra-conservative British historian’s claim that the British Empire, all over the world, just happened to fall together completely by accident, without any genuinely imperialist design ever having been adopted.

Gray seems to be totally opposed to any “foreign” (non-FN) scientists using FN ancient artefacts and human remains in order to discover what really happened anywhere north of Mexico in the pre-Colombian period (before 1492). From her point of view, those people are just treating FN people like “any other object” of scientific study, as if that was somehow objectionable. According to her, all the artefacts ever discovered should be turned over to the FN from which they came, to be disposed of as they see fit, and all such human remains should be returned to the ground forthwith, since they were after all discovered by someone “desecrating” a “sacred burial ground”.

She seems to be deathly afraid, like the US “Indians” who got upset after preliminary tests were done on a 9000-year old skeleton found (in 1996) near Kennewick, in the state of Washington, that some “outsider” might indeed discover something about people living in North America back then, that could possibly upset her own preconceived theories about the past. As for the artefacts, she asserts that even totem poles from long ago should not be preserved for a long time, since FN people used to just make new ones whenever the old ones gave out. The artistic value of any existing objects having no importance whatsoever, since the authenticity of the new ones being made would presumably be guaranteed by the orally transmitted memories of the FN people carving them.

Given the fact that our species has been around for at least 200 000 years, and started spreading out from its apparently African origins a very long time ago, it is highly doubtful, if not impossible, that every single FN tribe, or indigenous linguistic grouping, in North America, or anywhere else in the world, was occupying exactly the same territory now being claimed as “eternally theirs” from the very beginning. Even if we exclude any territorial changes imposed by “outsiders” since 1497. Unfortunately, if the whole world continues on its current downward trajectory toward ever more reactionary, ultra-right-wing, ultra-racist points of view, the entire profession of history as we know it, may not exist any more, anyway, after a couple more decades of this kind of cultural devolution.

Any genuinely holistic approach to reality, however, would also have to include a number of other, equally important, considerations. “Disenfranchised” populations did not just come into being because of the division of human beings over time into thousands of competing, ethnocultural communities, they also arose (as Gray herself sometimes seems to recognize) because of huge gender differences, as well as enormous differences of income and standing between the various social classes. It is unconscionable to blame every non-indigenous person in the world with having contributed to imposing ethnocultural discrimination on every indigenous person in the world equally, without any reference whatsoever to gender differences and/or class differences. This is particularly obvious from the point of view of social classes, the poor and the powerless people in the world, from whatever cultural origin, not ever possessing the influence and the clout necessary to impose world-wide ethnocultural domination on any other cultural community whatsoever.

All the different kinds of political, economic, social and cultural domination in this world are always imposed by a tiny minority of rich and powerful people, in every country and in every region. The “poor white trash” in the southern USA, for example, may indeed have adopted racist attitudes toward the various ethnocultural minorities in the USA (Afro-Americans, indigenous people, people of Asian origin, etc.), in an opportunistic (and unsuccessful) attempt to curry favour from Big Business and Big Government (which are almost always united against the interests of “lesser” beings). That has never prevented poor whites, however, from quite often suffering degrees of poverty and helplessness reasonably close to what many of the people in the above mentioned minorities have also suffered. Helping out culturally or sexually disadvantaged people, without also helping out the socially disadvantaged, is a lot like a domestic version of foreign aid, described by one humorous wag as “poor people in rich countries helping rich people in poor countries”.

This kind of thinking on Gray’s part also brings to mind the recent controversies in Quebec, when playwright Robert Lepage and his collaborators attempted to present a play (or musical) called “Slav” about the slavery issue in the USA, and another one called “Kanata” about the historical relationship between the European-origin majority and the indigenous minority in Canada. Although both of those plays apparently condemned European-origin racism in no uncertain terms, the fact that they were presented using mostly white actors and singers was thoroughly denounced by several people from both the Black and the FN communities in Quebec. This may indicate that the crimes committed in the past, as well as ongoing discrimination in the present, toward both of those communities, by people of mostly European origin everywhere in the Western world, may have eliminated forever any possible attempts at reconciliation nowadays.

This in spite of the fact that nowhere in the world do poor and powerless people, nor even the much-maligned “middle” classes, have the “capability” (following the approach toward power developed in India by Amartya Sen) to impose racial discrimination, or any other form of domination, on any group of people larger than a nuclear family. Only the world’s richest and most powerful people have the capability, or clout, to impose any kind of systematic discrimination on anyone at all. Opportunism and complicity are not the same as power and control on a large scale. It is also particularly disgusting to include progressive-minded people belonging to any ethnically dominant population as belonging to “the enemy”, for the same reason that the major decisions being made every day by a very small number of immensely rich and powerful people in the world do indeed justify their being categorized as such by everyone else.

Which does not mean, however, that anyone actively engaged in sexist or racist activities, or even in propagating such opinions via the social media should not be properly denounced for engaging in such disgusting activity. Millions of “deplorable people”, as Hillary Clinton likes to call them, do indeed exist outside the ranks of the ruling classes, all over the world. But the private and state capitalist systems that dominate every country nowadays were not set up, nor are they being maintained, primarily by the “poor white trash” and similar groups of socially, but not ethnically, disenfranchised people all over the world.

It is also quite wrong to let some people in some racially discriminated community get off the hook when they commit various different crimes, completely or partly, simply because of their membership in that group. Men from racially-discriminated populations, for example, who murder their cousins, or beat their wives, or rape their daughters, or whatever other deplorable acts they commit, should not be systematically getting off with much lighter sentences for those acts than do men from racially dominant populations. (The concept of “race”, of course, being a totally unscientific concept that is nevertheless being used in everyday society over and over again, by “polymorphous perverts” who do not give a fig about science, or anything else outside their extremely narrow way of looking at things.)

Not to forget that women, too, are quite capable of adopting extremely poor behaviour toward people they consider to be weaker than themselves, such as other women, as in the case of millions of mothers in many different countries forcing their daughters to endure sexual excision. Women are also quite capable of “scabbing” on each other, as in the example of those Muslim women who choose to wear cover-up clothing in public, symbolizing their own voluntary inferiority, just like those working-class people who engage in strikebreaking (also known as “scabbing”) against other working-class people. Gray herself also states in her book that modern feminism is not compatible with traditional FN culture, which seems to indicate that she wants to have her cake and eat it too, since she simultaneously condemns male domination of women as a “foreign import” into FN culture.

Hundreds of millions of people all over the world have recently fallen even more under the control of ultra-right-wing populist ideas than they were in the past. In the USA and various other countries, extremely popular “reality shows” are not about political, economic, social and cultural realities at all, but are only about people in public acting as vulgarly and as loathsomely as possible, displaying the kinds of disgusting behaviour that official censorship used to keep off the air in the old days. The popularization of such behaviour on the social media, including television, has helped spawn tremendously powerful political movements, such as the one that has coalesced around billionaire showman Donald Trump, all over the world. The movement behind Victor Orban, the current prime minister of Hungary, being another prime example. People in those movements believe that “democracy” means bringing all of society down to the “lowest common denominator” of behaviour, which is extremely low-down indeed.

Promoting pristine origin myths, such as the one that Gray has developed in her book, unfortunately fits in quite well with this world-wide race to the bottom. Although Gray in her everyday work seems to be opposed to this kind of bottoming out, her propagation of “culture as therapy” for FN people, using a reverse racist, “virgin birth” definition of that culture, cannot possibly lead to anything good. Her flat-out opposition to any kind of professional, historical research concerning the true nature of the pre-European period of FN history, follows the same kind of “fake-news” logic as the Trump movement or the Orban movement. In other words, making as if reality outside of one’s own head has to be exclusively defined by the self-righteous projection of one individual’s inner feelings onto the outside universe.

Populist definitions of “honesty”, like populist definitions of “reality”, are therefore mere projections of one or several individual persons’ inner mental turmoil onto the outside world, resulting in the invention of all kinds of unscientific “fake news”. The perpetrator always disseminates such fake news at an astonishing rate of delivery, all the while pretending that it is the “traditional media” who are the “real” liars. Education, science and fact-checking are thereby transformed from honest inquiry about the real world, into deliberate dissemination of false information, turning reality upside-down. Just like Lynda Gray turned white racism upside-down in order to develop her own “reverse-racist” theories. Innocence, just like guilt, has to be proven after all, and cannot just be automatically assumed for strictly personal, psychological or ideological reasons.

Denouncing information about reality as being exclusively “upper-class” and “anti-democratic” turns out to be the most powerful weapon ever invented by Svengali-like magicians practising elitist versions of “artificial intelligence”, in order to preclude any attempt at doing away with elitism itself. Dividing the working-class all over the world into ethnically dominant and ethnically dominated groups, or mutual enemies, the “whites”, along with the Chinese and the Japanese, on the one side, versus every other ethnocultural group on the other side, is the most diabolical method ever devised for ensuring that those who are rich and powerful nowadays will remain so forever.

At least until the enormous pollution and climate change caused by today’s rulers’ short-term pursuits of power and wealth (state capitalism and private capitalism), combine to do away with the human race once and for all, by thoroughly poisoning the air, the water and the soil under everyone’s feet. Not so much if, but rather when, the next major financial crisis brings about a total collapse in everyone’s best efforts to finally do something real about environmental issues, as well as about all the geopolitical, social and cultural divisions that separate human beings into opposing groups, we will in fact have run out of time to save everyone’s bacon.

The people devising all these pristine origin myths, of whatever variety, seem to prefer seeing human beings perish altogether rather than admit that their particular constituencies, “Western civilization”, the “Chinese path toward socialism”, or the indigenous peoples of the world, are not after all the world’s “chosen people”. Following the teachings of scholars like Shlomo Sand, it appears that even the original chosen people, the Jews from the ancient world, or at least many of them, may have abandoned Yahveh over the past few centuries and massively converted, first to belief in a Christian God, and then to belief in Allah instead. Thereby becoming the majority constituency inside the current “Palestinian Arab” population, itself under the military control of an Israeli “second coming”, some of today’s Israeli Jews lacking any biological connection with the Jews of the ancient world. One never knows what might happen whenever people are allowed to carry out original scholarship, independent of any narrow-minded communitarian fantasies about what really happened way back when.

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.

Regress report

This is the opposite of a progress report on the human condition, in other words it’s a regress report. Which fits in quite nicely with the overall zeitgeist of many of my other blogposts. I was originally going to call this particular posting, “Billions of big babies”, the same title that I used for the last book that I published back in 2006. Because a large part of the cause for regression nowadays comes from the extreme childishness of a great deal of recent human behaviour. But that title can be misleading, since it seems to imply that most of the overall population has an equal share in the genesis of the current disastrous situation, which is not true at all. The richest and the most powerful people among us are certainly much more responsible than are most of those at the bottom of the pecking order. Their capacity to do harm to others is much greater than most people’s capacity, in the same way that richer and more powerful countries also have much more capacity to do harm than do other countries. Unfortunately, the capacity to do harm generally results in real harm being done every time, since few people seem to be capable of resisting their aggressive urges.

If we look at all the different ways by which human society has been evolving backwards (devolving) since the 1970s, neoliberalism is still the number one cause. Which can be summed up as the tendency among dominant people, no matter what their official ideology or religion, to work together (in spite of everything that divides them), in order to ensure that the enormous gap between the social classes keeps on getting bigger and bigger all over the world. Not only so far as income is concerned but also vis-à-vis all the different ways of accessing knowledge and basic intelligence. With the result that even basic IQs, in the countries that measure such things, seem to be going down these days for hundreds of millions of abandoned “ordinary people”, the austerity process of the past several decades having considerably downgraded basic education. A process that is constantly being reinforced by the increased (often socially malignant) intelligence of the tiny elite from big business and big government that controls all the world’s big data.

The anti-humanist attitude of the ultra elitists in every country also lies behind the current, neofascist reaction to neoliberal austerity. It turns out that the ultra-right-wing populist movement began gathering steam right alongside the earliest forms of neoliberalism, when the “Chicago boys” first established their symbiotic relationship with the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile (back in 1973), and has never stopped gathering momentum. This world-wide revival of ultra-conservatism is directly related to the equally symbiotic revival of dozens of different varieties of old-time, fundamentalist religion, in every one of the world’s most important cultural centres. Atavistic religion having become a potent and necessary component of each neofascist movement currently dominating large parts of today’s world.

Although extremist tendencies are common to all the world’s established religions these days, it is still important to emphasize the particularly virulent, salafist trend that exists within the Islamic community. All over the Muslim world, radical islam has become a genuine scourge, increasingly replacing the prior cohabitation between moderate islam and modernism with simple, literal, fundamentalist (but fake) answers to everything. As such, it is another excellent example of childish regression, covering every kind of reactionary behaviour, including terrorist aggression against rival ideologies, most of their victims being only “moderate” Muslim believers. Salafist women are also playing an important propaganda role, among other things by showing off their hijab, and other more extreme varieties of cover-up clothing, as if they were wearing signs around their necks proclaiming their sincere belief in male domination of women.

The deliberate dumbing-down of the political discourse of the true-believer, brought on by the ostensible (fake) refusal of elitism, only succeeds in even more fully reinforcing that same elitism. As several ultra-conservative observers have pointed out, most denunciations of ultra-right-wing populism are probably not that dangerous, at least from their point of view, since most adversaries of those movements use a lot of big words, and unpopular concepts, in their writings. Which means that any criticism of their message is probably lost on the most important audiences targeted by neofascist organizers. Dumbing down also includes another recent decline in the already abysmal intellectual levels of popular television programs (“Say yes to the dress”), the pre-programmed hype of social media, the political manipulation of whole countries through controlled algorithms, and an ever-increasing dependence on pets, and inanimate objects (hoarding), as a substitute for human contact.

Not to forget the very important observation according to which all news are fake news, since all facts are necessarily social (ideological) constructions. The human brain is quite simply incapable of describing things the way that they really are, although modern science, with its primary emphasis on verification of each contributing observation and experiment, comes the closest. Every time someone thinks about some phenomenon globally, the brain is constantly “filling in the blanks” in our inevitably limited knowledge of the world, based on some particular interpretation imposed on reality. So even though constant fact-checking has become increasingly necessary in today’s world, no one can really pretend to have established any specific fact whatsoever, once and for all. This is, however, in no way an excuse for particularly reactionary people to make up deliberately stupid stories about everything, based on no real information at all, as they are always doing nowadays. Thereby giving such intense delight to the infantile-regressive people in the ultraconservative movements, who always prefer “spiritual excitation” to any of the more rational ways of thinking.

One of the more interesting observations that I read about recently was the ongoing convergence that some thinkers have postulated between the current tendency among many scientists to acknowledge that many different species of animals are a lot smarter than was previously believed, and the current tendency among many groups of people to follow the existing trend toward reduced human intelligence! Recent human regression seems to have gotten to the point that it has encouraged those same observers to believe that something akin to blind instinct among human beings (“thinking animals”) is almost as potent a force as the ordinary instinct that is still considered by most scientists to be a major influence on the behaviour of what used to be called “dumb animals”.

The worship of extreme narcissism, fulfilling the hippy agenda of the 1960s and the 1970s, certainly seems to be the main underlying cause of recent human regression, since it is by far the most common behavioural tendency favoured by both of the world’s leading ideologies (neoliberalism and neofascism). Hundreds of millions of people wallow around nowadays in more or less extreme personal indulgence, combining such devastating diseases as the various different kinds of drug addiction (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, opioids, etc.), taken separately or all together. That are often also combined with addiction to pornography (heterosexual and homosexual) and to unprotected sexual activity. Not to mention increasingly popular forms of legal and illegal gambling, including government-sponsored lotteries and sports-related wagers. “Must have fun” (anything goes) is all the rage these days.

Even the widespread opposition to toxic masculinity, such as in the “me-too” movement, does not seem to have brought about any kind of decline in alpha male aggression toward women, which still seems to be predicated on doing as much harm as possible to anyone perceived to be physically weaker than oneself. Just for the sheer pleasure of acting badly, particularly but by no means exclusively among men in high places. Curiously, millions of women also participate in this same syndrome, usually through atavistic identification with the aggressors (“stand by your man”). To which can also be added millions of victims of professional sport (the concussion epidemic) and various other kinds of disguised suicide, the most important of which seems to be “workaholism”, among those hundreds of millions of people who are constantly refusing to take vacations (“voluntarily” or not so voluntarily after all).

At the same time, hundreds of millions of other people also continue to indulge, apparently more than ever before, in the kind of barbarian cultural practices that were at one time supposed to have been declining all over the place. The incredibly long list of those kinds of practices includes such thoroughly disgusting abominations as honour killings, female excision, forced marriages (especially targeting underage girls), the death penalty for apostasy, religious terrorism and so on and so forth. Practices that not only affect the original host populations in various different parts of the “third world” (Asia, Africa and Latin America), but also minority immigrant populations in Europe and North America. Slavery is yet another cultural tradition from the past that is also being revived all over the world, particularly but by no means exclusively, for sexual reasons.

The former third world is also much more poverty-stricken in reality than it is officially considered to be by United Nations bureaucrats. For them, only about a billion people, less than 15% of the world population, are still living in extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than two dollars a day per person. By Western middle-class standards (which are constantly attracting millions of actual and potential migrants), it would be more accurate to say that 90% of the world’s people are poor, with about 75% living in extreme poverty. In dozens of countries, of which India is one of the worst examples, 97% of the total population is living outside what is called “the formal economy”. Living and working conditions in all those places are so abysmally bad that it seems difficult to know where to start in order to describe them properly. This truly horrible, world-wide income distribution being caused by the combination of neocolonial foreign investment (from several Eastern as well as from most Western countries), with ultra-egotistical attitudes toward their poorer compatriots on the part of most of the local elites.

For their part, the countries hosting most of the Western world’s “Caucasian” populations are still actively indulging in their own barbarian cultural practices, notably through military repression (aerial bombardment) of dissent in the third world and mistreatment of immigrants coming from those same dissenting countries. Not that any of the “Eastern” governments and peoples treat ethnic and religious minorities any better than do the Western ones, whether they are classed as “traditional” minorities, or as more recent arrivals. Every country in the world has also fallen victim to an unprecedented increase in every possible kind of corruption, as well as a major increase in the power, including the military power, of organized crime. Not to mention increasingly violent, religiously inspired, attacks on such nonconformist social practices as abortion, female adultery and homosexuality.

At the same time, the traditional, extractive industries (fuels, metals and other raw materials) continue to be as popular now as they ever were among leading investors, which contributes enormously to ever higher levels of industrial pollution in general, and induced climate change (the Anthropocene hypothesis). Apparently, even the 1987 Montreal Protocol on eliminating the CFCs causing the massive hole in the ozone layer, once touted as the one truly successful, international treaty on the environment, has been thoroughly undermined by illegal production of the offending chemicals, notably in China. The lip-service being given all over the world to doing something about the environmental crisis just makes everything worse by providing people with false hope. The influence of uncontrolled, harmful chemicals on the environment has also apparently had a disastrous effect on levels of human intelligence, not to mention having greatly contributed to a debilitating decline in male fertility. Fake, neofascist solutions to neoliberalism in every part of the world, such as that being provided by the Trump regime in the USA, also contribute massively to regression, considerably amplifying the false-hope syndrome.

Neoliberal counter-attacks on neofascism, such as that provided by leaders like Emmanuel Macron (France) and Justin Trudeau (Canada), are just as counter-productive. Just because theoretically progressive, collectivist solutions to neoliberalism (and neofascism), such as totalitarian communism and democratic socialism, failed to give results several decades ago is no reason to conclude that either neoliberalism, or neofascism, is somehow a good system by comparison. Those ideologically progressive, collectivist solutions failed not only because of their own internal demons (either extreme conformism or extreme opportunism), but also because of the massive opposition organized against them by the combined forces of private (neoliberal) and state (neofascist) capitalism. Exceptions to the rule, that is state capitalist countries that also practice genuine political democracy, social democracy and successful absorption of immigrant populations, are almost non-existent.

Instead, neoliberalism has exhibited a distinct tendency to encourage the rise of neofascism, rather than to discourage it for real. Another recent example was provided in some of the poorer districts of Montreal recently, when primary school teachers noticed that they were receiving more and more recent immigrants every year, from some of the world’s most devastated countries, such as Syria. Apparently, new pupils in those districts, with no appropriate language skills at all (some of them never having held a pencil in their lives), just show up on any particular morning, with no advance notice being given to the teachers. Who are then expected to integrate those children into their regular classes, with no additional training or resources (professional help), no planning, no preparation, no coordination between the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government, not to mention with the independent school-board level of bureaucracy. Which would seem to be the best possible way to foster negative attitudes toward officially illegal immigrants. The insanely arrogant people at the top do not seem to give a damn about any of this, they just make decisions for legal or electoral reasons, and expect all the people below them to do whatever is being demanded of them, regardless of the situation in which they find themselves. “Doing more for less”, over and over again, in the usual laissez-faire fashion.

If we put all those negative situations together as part of a coherent analysis, this means that humanity is collectively going downhill at an increasingly rapid rate, and there does not seem to be any limit as to how incredibly monstrous some people can become. Every kind of leadership in society is pointing in the same downward direction, daring everyone to go even farther than they have ever gone before. It is a race to the bottom of the ocean, even if everyone knows that the bottom is a very long way down indeed. Things are bad enough right now, but they seem to be constantly getting worse, at a pace that could easily speed up quite rapidly. Particularly in the wake of the next worldwide financial crisis, which promises to be a lot more devastating than the one that took place back in 2008. Add on a major geopolitical crisis, in a world chock full of nuclear weapons, and we could end up accelerating already dangerous climate change in a truly major way. Given the kind of people who are running the world nowadays, who is ready to bet that no one will ever be stupid enough to go too far? Or have we already gone too far for anyone to realistically expect us to be able to adopt a more sustainable human condition?

All of which seems to be nothing more than an ordinary consequence of all of us just turning out to be insufficiently evolved animals, sinking into an enormous quagmire of our own fabrication. So, make humanity great again? Good luck with that. Unfortunately, there do not seem to be any genuinely hopeful signs around anywhere.

Bad policy drives out good: updating Gresham’s Law

The G-7 conference of world leaders that took place here in Quebec last week inspired me to apply Gresham’s Law in economics (“bad money drives out good”) to the way that most countries are being run these days. However, my idea that bad policy drives out good policy is not at all a reference to the abundant tears that various people in the Canadian media have been shedding, to the effect that six of those G-7 countries (Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Japan) were so badly bullied by the barbarian president of the great American empire to the south. In the first place, it is not obvious that every one of those six unfortunate countries are as opposed to Donald Trump’s protectionist and anti-immigrant ideas as Canada purports to be. For example, Italy’s delegate, representing that country’s newly-elected coalition of populist parties (one of which is decidedly neofascist), had to be talked out of agreeing with Trump that several mistreated countries in the West, especially his own, have recently been accepting way too many non-European immigrants. The latest information coming out of that country being Italy’s intention to also refuse to ratify the new Canada/European Union free trade deal.

More to the point, however, is the observation that each one of the professional politicians present at that meeting are constantly having to deal with their own, homegrown billionaires, many of whom are every bit as reactionary and disgusting as Donald Trump. For the moment, the USA is the only country in that group to have elected a billionaire as president, thereby “cutting out the middleman”, by letting one of the private investors who dominate the anything-but-free market economy also run the political side of the elitist equation. So it is quite amusing, as well as genuinely frightening, to see several well-known leaders of the political class trying their damnedest to convince one of their worst nightmares to support the official set of policies that was designed to hide the completely unequal nature of power, even among some of the world’s most important, officially democratic countries. Having guys like Trump running international politics as well as the world economy, at the same time, makes it increasingly difficult to convince some of the more intelligent “ordinary people” that there really is a place for popular influence anywhere near the centres of power.

Not to mention the fact that the Charlevoix region of Quebec, where the conference was held, was turned into an armed camp, with thousands of police officers, soldiers, armoured vehicles and helicopters vastly outnumbering the only medium-size horde of journalists and the very small number of protesters who were eventually allowed within a few kilometres of the official site. A situation that also neatly underlines how obvious it has now become that the entire world is entirely run by private money (private capitalism) and/or state power (state capitalism). The Canadian organizers of that (at least) 600 million dollar conference tried their best to make everyone believe that all that security was absolutely necessary to ward off the potential threat (that never materialized) of hundreds of anarchist, “Black block” revolutionaries wanting to disrupt the conference with their own ultra-violent, neofascist methods of protesting against everything in the world not specifically organized by them. Given the way that they do things, it looks as if at least some of those anarchist organizations may have actually been set up as what British general Frank Kitson used to call “counter gangs”, which is to say police-controlled protest movements. Just like some of the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) cells were apparently controlled fifty years ago.

All this brings to mind Bertrand Russell’s comment to the effect that in a democracy, people only have their rights until they really need them. Every time officially democratic countries go through some type of crisis, such as the Great Depression, the Second World War, or even the much smaller October (1970) crisis in Quebec, all the rights that everyone previously thought were guaranteed suddenly disappear. In this day and age, for example, people have the right to say almost whatever they want to say on the Internet, unless of course someone rich and powerful decides to feel hurt by whatever it was that was said about them. As everyone now knows, however, the Internet is also being used to promote totalitarianism by algorithm, such as during the 2016 presidential election in the USA and the Brexit vote in the UK. With the result that nowadays no ordinary person ever has the faintest idea what may or may not happen in the future to his or her own life and/or personal interests.

Recent scandals all over the world, such as the thousands of hurricane victims that were deliberately kept out of the official statistics in Puerto Rico, show exactly what has happened to the democratic pretensions that some countries tried to project in the decades following the Second World War. The fact that the treasonous Donald Trump prefers “strong, authoritarian” leaders like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un to “weak, ineffectual” leaders like Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau, is not so much a cause of the recent trend toward ultra-right-wing domination as it is a symptom of the increasingly popular regression of most countries toward more openly barbarian methods of rule.

Neoliberalism and neofascism, which are jointly practised to some degree in practically every country in the world nowadays, have joined hands to promote the race to the bottom, each country trying to be more “competitive” than the other one by lowering taxes on rich people much more than on the poor, or on whatever is left of the middle class. In that context, the protectionism adopted in countries like the USA has nothing whatever to do with the “infant-industry” argument of times past. It is also completely incapable of reversing history in order to bring back the “good old days” of US industrial domination over the whole world during the 1950s. Any more than anything that the oligarch-ridden Russian Federation does nowadays will ever be capable of bringing back the levels of industrial development achieved by the former Soviet Union. For the obvious reason that in both cases it is entirely useless to close the barn door after the horse has already fled. Tax “reform” of this kind only makes the overall situation in the whole world a thousand times worse than it was before.

As for Gresham’s Law as such, it was initially proposed back in 1858 by British economist Henry Dinning Macleod and attributed to Elizabethan court financier Thomas Gresham. In economics, this idea simply means that any currency that is not backed up by any real value, but is still allowed to circulate anyway, always drive out any other currency that does represent real value. As an economic concept, that same kind of observation also seems to apply quite well to what took place when good and bad receivables were fraudulently mixed together during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, in the USA as well as in many other countries.

According to Wikipedia, former US vice-president Spiro Agnew reworded Gresham’s Law, which became “bad news drives out good news”, to describe (from his jaundiced point of view) the somewhat similar race to the bottom among American news media during the Nixon era. And British anthropologist Gregory Bateson also used that same general concept to describe cultural evolution, saying that “the oversimplified ideas will always displace the sophisticated and the vulgar and hateful will always displace the beautiful.” Both of those observations concerning the race to the bottom certainly seem to apply again today, both to news media and to cultural evolution, in most parts of today’s world. So my idea of using the basic concept underlining Gresham’s Law, to describe the decline and fall of modern democracy as an ideology, certainly seems appropriate as well.

But we still have to figure out what is it that makes the positive evolution of human societies, toward greater cooperation between different countries and cultures, so difficult to achieve, as opposed to negative evolution (or devolution) toward greater division (commercial and geopolitical warfare). The answer would seem to lie in the tendency possessed by the vast majority of human beings, even among some of the world’s most progressive people, to let their own personal demons (excessive narcissism, or egotistical mania) bring them down. To the extent that, over time, they let bad policy drive out good policy, even when they themselves were largely responsible for the adoption of good policy in the first place.

A fascinating example of this sort of thing was quite nicely described in a seven-part series, “Montreal’s longest-running real estate fiasco”, that journalist Linda Gyulai wrote for the Montreal Gazette earlier this month, about completely disastrous municipal attempts since the 1960s to develop the originally pristine Rivière-des-Prairies suburb on the eastern tip of the island of Montreal. Each successive city administration, from the Drapeau era (1960-1986) right up to the present day, was (believe it or not) initially elected as a reformist movement in order to clean up the disgusting corruption left behind by each and every previous administration, not only in that particular suburb but also in most of the other parts of the city. Each one of those several succeeding “reform movements”, however, after having quite correctly denounced while in opposition all the horrible machinations of their corrupt opponents in power, turned into corrupt politicians themselves a short time after they managed to come to power. Thereby once again upholding British historian Lord Acton’s famous nineteenth-century maxim according to which, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

So far as I can tell, the same kind of thing seems to have happened over and over again, all over the world, in thousands of other similar cases, from the beginnings of urban-based government 6000 years ago right up to our own time. Well-intended, progressive-minded reform movements have constantly turned into their opposites whenever they were eventually confronted for more than a few months with the reality of political power. In most of the more recent cases, those governing movements were corrupted by the much more realistic folks from what is euphemistically known as “free enterprise”. In other words, guys (as well as more than a few gals) like Donald Trump for whom no particular ideals are ever allowed to get in the way of recognizing, in the immortal words of W. C. Fields, that one should “never give a sucker an even break”. This observation also applies with even greater effect to revolutionary leaders, every more or less bourgeois (England, France, the USA), proletarian (the USSR, China) or anti-colonial revolution (Mexico, Myanmar, South Africa) in the world, over the past several centuries, having always been betrayed almost at the outset.

This is why it soon becomes obvious to anyone who wants to really think about it at all, that gun lobbyists in the USA who pretend that the only decent way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to send in a good guy with a gun, are so completely off the mark. The way that violent interventions function most of the time in the real world, is that the good guy with a gun soon becomes thoroughly corrupted by the superior power of his own weapon, and we are left at the end with two bad guys carrying guns. Who will then be tempted to shoot it out in order to figure out which one has the bigger weapon (or nuclear button).

Once the “superior” people at the top of every society become thoroughly corrupt, the somewhat “less superior” people at every level of the pecking order will then transmit that same characteristic all the way down to those at the very bottom of every class-based society. Leading shareholders will pass on what they have learned about the real world to upper management, who will pass it on to middle management, then lower management (“outhouse bosses”), then workers (also divided between “superior” and “inferior” races, religions and genders), then stay-at-home spouses (or the occasional male housekeeper), then the children, and on down to the family dog. Each level of society successively mistreating the next lowest level. Except that these days, the worst-off people, those in extremely poor countries with no sewage or garbage disposal systems, will also imitate their “superiors” by treating the natural environment as being even lower than the family dog, sending every discarded object into the river and on downstream into the world’s increasingly polluted oceans.

While all this is going on, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “deplorable people” from every social class and every culture will seize every available opportunity to differentiate between themselves and other even “less worthy” groups of people. In the same way that the “poor white trash” in the southern USA have always insisted on the “obvious inferiority” of black people so that they would not end up being considered “the lowest of the low” in their own particular region. This kind of projected discrimination also, unfortunately, has often been adopted by all sorts of groups previously mistreated by everyone else, whose attempts at climbing out of their designated roles often induce them to adopt what is now being called “reverse racism” (or even “reverse sexism” or “reverse elitism”).

One such example that I came across recently was in the Spring 2018 issue of the left-wing Canadian Dimension magazine, published in Winnipeg. Several of the photos published by that magazine show people in Canada protesting in favour of indigenous rights, carrying signs that sometimes read “White people scare me”. The racism of that message is obvious, even though it is directed against the dominant “race” in Canadian society, rather than against any of the dominated “races”. Assuming that all white people are necessarily reactionary is every bit as racist as assuming that all indigenous people, or “visible minorities” in general, are necessarily inferior. Fortunately, the same issue of the magazine also published an article (“Does ‘anti-racism’ contribute to racism?”) by Samir Gandesha, that clearly establishes that the misuse of certain slogans, and messages, can indeed contribute to racism even when the presumed intent of the message was mistakenly believed to be anti-racist.

This leads to the kind of systematic error that often crops up these days in the messages being propagated by all sorts of theoretically liberal and progressive-minded governments and organizations. Anyone who sets out to defend only women (or transgender people) from alpha male domination, without any attempt to also discover how most (non-alpha) men might also be victims of the same domination, is making that kind of error. As are those who defend only the rights of “obviously” handicapped people, without showing that people not displaying any obvious, mental or physical handicap might also be suffering in some way from that same type of discrimination. As are those who refuse to have anything whatever to do with the problems of white working-class people, or white immigrants, because of their “obvious whiteness”.

In reality, “racial” and cultural discrimination, as well as gender discrimination, are only “special” cases of elitist discrimination. All forms of discrimination among human beings, as well as inhuman treatment of animals, are basically elitist, “elitism” being a general category that subsumes class-based oppression as well as gender-based oppression, species-based oppression and cultural-based oppression (which is often transcribed as “race”-based, even though races are not scientifically-founded categories).

Which means that anyone supporting self-determination for indigenous peoples should also be supporting self-determination for Québec, as well as for Scotland, Catalonia, Corsica and so on. Anyone supporting Israel’s right to exist as a functioning society also has to support Palestine’s right to exist as a functioning society. Or Tibet’s right to exist as a self-determined, functioning society, as well as any of the other minority peoples within China, or Russia, or any other imperial nation. (Most nations in the world are imperial nations, in the sense that almost every country possesses at least a few oppressed peoples within its self-imposed borders.)

No one should have to choose between national entities like Israel and Palestine, all such nations should all have equal rights, just like all the genders and all the social classes. Why do the vast majority of countries give way more advantages to employer associations than they do to trade unions? Why do we put up with today’s enormous, thirty-million-dollars-a-day versus one-dollar-a-day, income gap between the world’s richest people and the world’s poorest people? Why does practically every country in the world condone the kinds of legal and illegal tax evasion that support that ultra-discriminatory system of income distribution?

The same sort of rational humanist logic should also apply to the resolution of any other kind of human problem, even those not seemingly related to a known form of elitism. For example, what should we be doing about problems like excessive drug use or gaming addictions? In the case of drug abuse, why do we have to exclusively choose between “the war on drugs”, which does not seem to have resulted in any decline in the abuse of illegal drugs but only in sending millions of people to jail, and total legalization of every obviously harmful substance known to humanity? Why do so many different companies and governments end up profiting from some people’s addictions to drugs (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, opioids), or profiting from some other people’s addictions to gambling? Why not try to find a solution that includes neither of those extremes?

Otherwise, the continued application of Gresham’s Law to official policy all over the world will guarantee that our only choices for the future will be even more of the same corruption as before, or the total eradication of multicellular life on this planet altogether. Is it too late, or is a much more positive “third way” still possible?