The Meeting of Extremes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Conspiracy against Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Science of Psychotherapy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canada’s 1960s

I have just finished reading Bryan D. Palmer’s book, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era, published back in 2009. It is quite a long book, over 600 pages all told, but eminently readable and chock full of pertinent information and extensive end-notes. Over the years, I have found Palmer’s numerous contributions to Canadian history very useful. I used one of his earlier books to help me remember some of the events that I was personally involved in during the 1960s and the 1970s, in order to write part of my political and intellectual autobiography, “A life full of lies” (2013). A couple of his other works were also among the references that I used to write my doctoral thesis back in 1991, “The Doctrine of Economic Nationalism in Central Canada, 1846-1885”.

As the title of Palmer’s book suggests, most of his text about Canada during the 1960s is focused on the various kinds of rebellious movements that took place back then, such as the wave of wildcat strikes in various different industries across the country, the emergence of the New Left, the student movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, the rise of radical Quebec nationalism and the development of Red Power among Canada’s native peoples. Palmer did an impressive job bringing together material from a wide variety of sources on those events, including works like Myrna Kostach’s Long Way from Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada (1980). I am definitely going to have to read some of those other texts as well, many of which I did not even know existed.

To provide period background for his book, Palmer also decided to add quite a bit of material about such people as Gerda Munsinger, George Chuvalo, Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Trudeau. Personally, I thought that some of those references, while interesting, were not nearly as useful to his text as would have been his inclusion of the way that the Canadian justice system blundered through the wrongful condemnation of 14-year-old Steven Truscott for the rape and murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper, back in 1959. The horribly botched Truscott trial was thoroughly denounced not only in Isabel Lebourdais’s 1966 book on the subject, but also in hundreds of other articles published at the time. Since then, this has become the most important criminal case in Canadian history, going all the way to the Supreme Court, a saga that includes the original death sentence, the many years Truscott spent languishing in prison, several million dollars in government compensation for wrongful conviction, and hundreds more articles, books and television programs.

Why didn’t Palmer make any reference whatsoever to that incredible story? It seems to me that one of the best ways to show how truly unjust former justice minister Pierre Trudeau’s so-called “Just Society” really was back then would have been to underline how thoroughly disgusting the official Canadian response to that rural travesty turned out to be. Even nowadays, the justice system still refuses to declare Truscott officially innocent, probably to protect a number of VIPs involved at the time, such as the junior Ontario Provincial Police officer investigating the case, who later climbed up the ladder to become the head of the force.

But my main criticism of the Palmer book has nothing to do with his decision not to include anything about Truscott. What upsets me more is the utopian socialist approach adopted by Palmer towards “the people”, that is anyone who is not part of the upper-class establishment blamed by Palmer for almost everything rotten that happens in society. As a Trotskyist scholar, Palmer builds his case for rebellion by pointing out how the world’s most important investors and politicians are constantly conspiring to make sure that they always end up on top of everyone else. They are members of what Palmer calls the capitalist ruling class and he quite correctly holds them mainly responsible for the very poor working and living conditions that many poorer, less powerful people had to put up with back then, as well as more recently. Industrial workers across Canada during the 1950s, most of the francophone population of Quebec before the “Quiet Revolution”, an even larger percentage of the native peoples in every province, most Black people throughout North America, all of those groups suffered greatly, some more than others, prior to the rebellious era of the 1960s. (For many of those same people, not much has changed since that time.)

Palmer does quite a good job documenting all of that, as well as lambasting the global geopolitical conflict of the Cold War that lay behind the amassing of huge stockpiles of atomic, bacteriological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, as well as the incredibly violent proxy wars in places like Korea and Vietnam. Most of that analysis is certainly true, relevant and pertinent to his case that much of the rebelliousness of the 1960s was appropriately directed against the big shots whose overbearing egoism lay behind all of those situations. It is also true, though Palmer leaves this out, that though they ruled many fewer countries, the state capitalists of the so-called communist countries treated their populations at least as poorly as did the private capitalists and their own stables of compliant politicians.

What I do not like about Palmer’s analysis, along with that of many of his sources, is his attempt to explain or justify every negative aspect of those rebellious movements by referring back to the ruling class. It is not a good idea, for example, to exclusively blame large anglophone companies and their political cronies for the mostly innocent people killed by the FLQ during their ten years of violent activity in Quebec. (Unless of course the rumors are true and the entire FLQ was under the complete control of the RCMP, or some other secret service, at the time.) Nor do rotten living and working conditions completely explain or justify such crimes as arson, drug trafficking, sexual exploitation, and so on, not only when they are carried out by rich white men, but also when they are carried out by people from within the more oppressed communities (poorly-paid workers, most women, Blacks, natives, etc.). Just belonging to a group of oppressed people does not give any individual the right to mistreat those around him. The fact that the world’s richest and most powerful people do all of those things on a much more massive scale, all the time, does not exonerate any of the poorer and less powerful people from trying to copy them.

Religious identity crises

I started my blog in August 2012 by writing up a preliminary version of my political and intellectual autobiography, “A life full of lies”, that I then replaced in April 2013 with a more complete version. That text was essentially an account of all the different controversies that I was involved in during the past several decades, beginning as far back as 1965. Now I would like to add occasional commentaries based on the more recent evolution of many of those same controversies, whenever I feel that I have something to contribute to those ongoing debates, that no one else seems to have thought about.

One such debate that resurfaced in August 2013 is the Quebec government’s newest attempt at trying to impose a more secular approach toward religion, notably by getting public sector employees to refrain from wearing religious insignia when dealing with the public. The minority Parti Quebecois government, re-elected several months ago after a long hiatus, is profiting from the popularity of such a move among francophone Quebecers to force all the other political parties into re-aligning their competing stances on this issue. It looks as if the main focus of the debate is about whether or not to confine this move to only persons in legal authority, such as judges, or to all public sector employees including hospital staff and teachers. Should provincial or municipal personnel be banned from wearing crosses, skull caps, head scarfs and so on, because in so doing they seem to be proselytizing for some particular religion when they ought to be proclaiming ideological neutrality?

I was involved in a similar debate several years ago, in 2007, when I managed to get an article published in a francophone daily denouncing the masochistic attitude of the multicultural experts, trying so hard to “reasonably accommodate” every ultra-conservative religious group’s attempt at imposing its own ideological agenda on the more moderate majority. Unfortunately, then as now the whole controversy about how society is supposed to react in these situations has been sullied by the tendency among most English Canadians to use all-inclusive multiculturalism as a weapon against Quebec separatism, and the opposing tendency to use provincial government neutrality toward religion as a fundamental characteristic of what currently makes French-speaking Quebec different from the rest of Canada.

This time around, however, it suddenly occurred to me that this whole debate ostensibly focused on minority rights and freedom of religion is not really about those things at all. Nor should it be considered as just another part of the ongoing constitutional conundrum. In fact, as I implied in several of my past writings, this religious insignia phenomenon is just a special case of ego identification, all over the world, of people trying to solve their own personal identity crises at everyone else’s expense. Throughout history, the people who become religious fanatics, or ideological fanatics, are constantly attempting to convert everyone else to their own very particular world-view. They really want to turn the world upside down, to get the tail to wag the dog so to speak, thereby enabling the extremist minorities to dictate overall political and social behavior to the moderate majority.

People who ostentatiously attach religious insignia to their person do so for the very same reasons that other attention seekers insist on wearing their nation’s flag on their clothing and their property all the time, even when traveling in a foreign country. Their behavior is also quite similar to that of the Maoists I was involved with back in the 1960s, who always wore their Mao buttons whenever they went out, not to mention waving their copies of the Little Red Book in the faces of everyone they met. Many of today’s religious fanatics insist on showing off their colors even when they are supposed to be dealing with the general public as elected representatives or as appointed officials of government. Then they insult other people’s intelligence by claiming that their religious ostentation has no effect whatsoever on their own professional neutrality.

These toxic personalities are particularly interested in bolstering their over-weaning egos by forcing everyone else to adapt to their way of thinking, rather than the other way around. They are part and parcel of the currently dominant wave of libertarian individualism, as in the Tea Party movement in the USA, claiming blatant proselytism as a fundamental human right rather than the more obvious right of normal people to be left alone. Women sporting head scarves, face masks or even overall body armor, are also insulting others by trying to pretend that the very sight of their unadorned beauty would automatically turn every nearby male into a significant threat to their own security.

Moderate practitioners of the various religions that these extremists profess are particularly targeted by such blatant ostentation. They are required to constantly defend their religions by pointing out to non-believers that it is really quite possible, after all, to be a good Christian, or a good Jew, or a good Muslim, etc., without putting on a ceremonial costume in public, particularly when they find themselves in a position of authority.

Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely that the Quebec government, or any other secular administration, will ever be able to prevail in this debate. In a world chock full of unabashed super-egos, including multi-billion-dollar vulture capitalists, arrogant big-time polluters and mass-murdering dictators, any attempt at controlling such a relatively insignificant form of social bullying is probably doomed to fail.

A life full of lies, an autobiographical blog by Kevin Henley

Introduction

I have been teaching history to university and college students in Montreal, Canada, for over thirty years. My goal here is to present, as concisely as possible, the main events of my very active political and intellectual life, while simultaneously underlining how those events correspond quite well with the overall history of the baby boom generation. What I want to do is to attract readers genuinely interested in studying anti establishment ideas and politics. Once they have read my text, or at least the parts of it that they find relevant, I would like them to react to what they have read by offering their own take on those relatively recent events, and on how all that has influenced what is taking place nowadays.

Some people might want to react to this account of what happened in my public life because they were also involved in the same historical events. For example, hundreds of thousands of people participated like I did in the very distressing new left movements in North America during the 1960s and the 1970s. Hundreds of thousands more were active in the equally distressing union movement in Canada, not to mention the Quebec independence movement, over the past fifty years.

Still other lives were directly affected by the often acerbic debates within the teaching profession in which I also participated for many years. Others may be intrigued by the same bitter controversies in political, economic, social or cultural history for which I made my own contributions. This last group could include some of those who read one of the books that I published on skepticism during the first few years of this century, when I lambasted the various spiritual and secular ideologies in the world for having led so many people down the garden path. Like millions of other victims, I became extremely bitter over the years about the different ways in which many political and religious leaders have succeeded in ruining their followers lives, not only a long time ago but also very recently.

After five decades of study and activism, I have come to the conclusion that most people have been unable to make much progress in their lives, because of the extremely toxic behavior of the small handful of egotistical monsters who control the purse strings of the most important public and private organizations in this world. Unfortunately, human society seems to function as a kakistocracy, which is to say a world in which the worst people tend to rise to the top. As a result, humanity as a whole has become divided into two very unequal groups, a smaller gang of sadistic social climbers and a much larger group of long suffering masochists who end up doing most of the work and trying to pull up the slack created by the first group.

In fact, this fundamental division started to develop even before human beings began living in large urban based civilizations about 6000 years ago and seems to be getting worse nowadays rather than getting better. For a short time after the Second World War, it looked as if some of us had figured out how we could finally escape from the different varieties of official corruption. However, since the outbreak of the neoliberal counter revolution in the 1980s, the masters of the universe (money managers and traders), have ratcheted the entire world downward, back into a sort of infantile regression. They consciously ignore all the warning signals about economic, environmental or social collapse, deliberately doing exactly the opposite of whatever needs to be done.

Doing evil has become the official ideology of most of the people wielding real power, rather than being seen as an unfortunate consequence of the dark side of human nature, as it used to be treated in days gone by. Like criminals or juvenile delinquents, our self proclaimed masters have decided not to take an adult attitude toward anything at all. They are relying on belief in magic, old time religion and libertarianism to provide them with some sort of ideological justification for their toxic behavior. Those who behave in this perverse fashion are knowingly irresponsible, trying to do as much harm as possible, to everyone but themselves, in the shortest possible time, just to prove that they are the “baddest bad asses” who ever existed. Unfortunately, if this kind of atavism continues on for several more years, it will soon become impossible to avoid major relapses in the overall level of human development.

When I started my adult life fifty years ago, however, I had no idea that I would be making that kind of pessimistic observation half a century later. Back in those days, I was under the naive impression that even though the world was far from being perfect, things did seem to be moving in the right direction. Like millions of others, I thought that with a lot of effort progressive minded people could succeed in making our planet a considerably better place in which to live. After awhile, I found out that one of the reasons why idealists like me were thinking that way back then was because my childhood and the early part of my adult life took place during a period known as the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975.

This was an expression that was originally used by diplomats at the United Nations, who thought that those years were glorious because that was when most of the countries in Asia and Africa became independent nations instead of European colonies. Several economic historians agreed with the diplomats that those were glorious years because they constituted the most important period of economic development in world history, before or since that time. Many social historians also agreed with this positive assessment because the income gap between the social classes actually diminished during those years. Before that period, that gap had always had a tendency to increase, as it has been doing again even more drastically since the neoliberal movement started taking over.

The thirty glorious years were also a period in which governments tried to play a much more positive role than most of them do now. Following the numerous crises of the first half of the twentieth century, especially the world wars and the great depression, most countries gave up on the laissez faire attitudes introduced back in the nineteenth century and embarked instead on a long series of programs designed to encourage economic growth, as well as social and cultural development. The libertarian counter revolution that started in the 1980s, however, means that most positive government interventions have gradually been abandoned.

To be sure, as with any other period of history those same glorious years just before the advent of neoliberalism were not really a golden age. For one thing, we were then living during the most dangerous part of the cold war, when many people thought that they would be soon vaporized in a world wide nuclear exchange. Back then, however, a lot of us were under the illusion that if we humans could just avoid blowing ourselves up, things could turn out to be a lot better than they always had been in the past. So millions of us got involved in all sorts of progressive movements, trying desperately to figure out which was the best method for moving forward.

Several decades later, unfortunately, we are all living in a very different world from the one that baby boomers like me happened to land in when we were much younger. This makes me feel that everything in which I was involved over those two consecutive periods in fact fits very neatly into that larger pattern of recent historical evolution, from that more hopeful world to this less hopeful one. So in this text I want to move continually back and forth from my own public life to the general history of the past several decades.

Almost everything important seems to have changed drastically during my own lifetime. For starters, instead of a nuclear catastrophe, nowadays most people tend to think that if they are going to be wiped out before their time, it will probably happen as the result of a massive ecological breakdown instead. That is definitely not something that would have occurred to most people during the three decades following the Second World War, no doubt because some of the incredible economic growth during that period was based on environmental blindness. Although in reality the threat of a nuclear war has not declined as much nowadays as a lot of observers seem to think, recent financial crises have also revived the very real possibility of another great depression like the one that took place during the 1930s. As a result, even though some things are better than they were before, it is hard to find anyone who is as optimistic as people like me were fifty years ago.

In other words, much of what happened during the first several decades of my life took place because a lot of us got involved in movements that fitted in very well with the overall spirit, or zeitgeist, of that earlier period. However, even then we were still living in a world that was under the domination of extremely powerful egomaniacs, which means that many of our naive hopes for the future did not really have that much chance of success.

So let me get started on this double assignment, showing in a conceptual way how my own political and intellectual life intersected with the topsy turvy nature of recent ideological history. I first started thinking about the zigzag world I was living in several years ago, when I originally got the idea to begin writing about my own life. Quite a few things were happening to me back then that induced this kind of socially based self reflection. For one thing, after many decades of bouncing around from one unsatisfying job to another, I had finally started teaching history full time, a profession that I found more pleasing than anything I had done before that. Teaching history over and over again to thousands of younger people soon provided me with most of the insights that I needed in order to understand how my own life has been fashioned by the paradigm change from the thirty glorious years to the libertarian counter revolution.

I was able to gradually leave behind manual labor and only part time teaching, in the early part of my adult life, by following up my bachelor of arts degree with a master of arts and a doctorate. Both of my theses, for the MA as well as for the PhD, were focused on a nineteenth century battle that was fought between two rival doctrines, economic nationalism and economic liberalism. During my research, I soon found out that everyone involved was only too eager to defend his (or her) own particular point of view and to denounce his enemies point of view. Typically, each side chose to ignore information that did not lead them in what they thought was the appropriate direction. In other words, my research was pushing me toward an ever more skeptical interpretation of reality, just like in my political and professional life.

At the same time, I was also involved in several ideological debates within the teaching profession, most notably over the competency based approach, both sides in those debates also choosing to ignore any inconvenient or contradictory information that they might happen to come across. Over time, I found out that even the content of the history courses that we were teaching was often based on deliberate misinformation, each teacher endlessly repeating long established versions of historical events that were originally pre fabricated for political reasons.

Another major change taking place in my life had to do with my own political activity. After several decades of actively supporting such major ideologies as socialism and nationalism, in various different disguises, I became extremely frustrated and disgusted by the tremendous gap that always existed between what those movements were supposed to be doing, and what they actually ended up doing. So I finally decided to turn my back on all that and instead, I embarked on the publication of the books about skepticism that I mentioned earlier. For each book, I used a variety of references, as well as my own experience, to debunk the world’s major belief systems, focusing on the most important religions and secular ideologies. I published those books, one after the other, during the first decade of the current century.

This time out, I have decided to make my socially grounded, personal history directly available to anyone consulting the web rather than try to publish it in book form. Doing it this way gives me an opportunity to update and improve my earlier insights, as well as backing up my ideas with quite a few new sources, including hundreds of internet searches. Some of this research has to do with the various historical debates and controversies in which I got involved over the years, as well as the events and movements in which I myself participated.

Nothing in this world is more intriguing than the stultifying effect of ideology on the evolution of different people’s lives, whether they were themselves aware of that influence or not, at the time. Unfortunately, human thought seems totally dependent on metaphor and structural context, with the result that no one has ever been able to avoid ideological barriers to understanding. As Daniel Gilbert pointed out in his book, Stumbling on Happiness, human brains are constantly imagining future outcomes in highly imperfect ways, including things that should not have been included and failing to include other things that should have been included. People are constantly assuming sequences of events based on ideological projections that are more wish fulfillment than reality.

So we are always setting up blinders around our thought, constructing not only such ideologies as socialism and nationalism, that have become much more marginal nowadays, but also currently dominant ideologies such as liberalism and conservatism, not to mention the world’s most popular religions and sects. Most of the things that I tried to do during my life, and that other people around me were also trying to achieve, were therefore based on mythical interpretations of reality, in other words competing forms of collective hysteria. The lies that people are constantly telling each other lay behind the various errors that we made before we became older and (sometimes) wiser.

Childhood and adolescence

My goal in presenting this text to other people is not to dwell on my private life. Instead, I want to refer to my own political and professional experience, as well as my research and my earlier writings, to show why I arrived at the general historical conclusions that I was mentioning earlier. Which means that in this opening chapter, about my first nineteen years, I only intend to write about events that had a real influence on some aspect of my public or intellectual life since that time.

For example, in one of the little Canadian towns in which we were living, I had a hard time accepting the ultraconservative views of two of our young friends there, who tried to conscript us into an evangelical Protestant religion by teaching us a bunch of religious songs. My opinion of the place was not helped either when I watched the annual Orange Lodge parades going down main street, commemorating the Protestant (“Macs”) victory in Great Britain, over the Catholics (“Mics”), back in 1690. They were always singing their true-blue Orange songs, which included lines like the following ones: “Oh, Mic hit Mac and Mac hit Mic, and Mac hit Mic thereafter; ten thousand Mics lay down their sticks, in the Battle of the Boyne in water.”

At about the same time, during the second Berlin crisis, all the children in my school had to go through various drills, like the one where we had to get under our desks and bend over with our hands over our heads, in case of a nuclear strike. To say the least, it was not a very realistic response. In the event of a nuclear war, as various radicals pointed out at the time, the only thing for ordinary people to do was to bend over real far and “kiss your ass goodbye”. Because of my critical reaction to incidents like those, I began my intellectual life already very much opposed to both religion and militarism.

To find out why the world was set up the way that it was, I started reading a lot, taking out subscriptions to geography and news magazines, as well as making the most of the educational toys that I received from my parents, such as a microscope, a telescope and a chemistry set. I also started actually reading the daily newspaper that I was delivering to the people on my paper route. During those same years, I met quite a few teachers who helped me get interested in history and English literature, as well.

As a result, I paid attention to those songs on the hit parade that had a certain amount of historical content in them, such as the one about “The Battle of New Orleans” in 1815, sung by Johnny Horton. I remember one of the local disk jockeys getting upset about that song since it referred to how the Americans beat “the bloody British”. In those days, most English-speaking people in Canada were still recalling their origins as United Empire Loyalists, counter revolutionaries who were driven out of the Thirteen Colonies immediately after the war of independence. However, such songs are not nearly as well remembered by most people as some of the much less political tunes that are still being played over and over again today.

In high school, I came in second in a public speaking contest, in which I tried to defend the United Nations. Unfortunately, back then that school still practiced compulsory military training for boys. This meant that we all had to get dressed up in army uniforms and parade up and down in the football field, carrying fake rifles while being watched by the girls, the teachers and our parents. During one particularly hot day in June, I remember holding my breath in such a way that I genuinely lost consciousness, upon which I was promptly pulled off the parade square and got to sit under the shade trees instead, with all the other weak boys. Another time, I managed to emphasize to my classmates just how much of a weirdo I was by insisting on standing outside in the hallway every morning while everyone else was reciting the Lord’s prayer inside the classroom.

My interest in literature was developing quite well during those years. It was then that I attempted to read all the great books of western civilization, such as the Bible, which after an exciting start soon became a boring account of Israeli tribal heroics, under the watchful eye of a rather parochial god who was always picking on Israel’s unfortunate neighbors. Some of the other parts of the Bible, however, such as “Ecclesiastes” and the “Song of Solomon”, were far more interesting. In any case, I got more enjoyment out of reading English romantic poetry, as well as various novels from the nineteenth century, particularly some of the Russian ones. Other times, I went with friends to a local bookstore, where we would read and discuss science fiction stories. My particular favorite was the Daniel Keyes story, Flowers for Algernon, with its emphasis on how different life can be for people with very different capacities for learning.

One interesting event that took place was my participation in a local radio show. As high school students, we were all supposed to think up some amusing skit to deliver on the air. On November 22, 1963, I was therefore scheduled to go on the local radio broadcast with my imitation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, featuring such typical lines as “We shall pursue this policy with vigor and force and direction.” I was cut off, however, by the high school principal who came running up to inform me that I could not do that skit since the president had been shot. Several years later, I remember underlining an account of Malcolm X’s own reaction to the Kennedy assassination, when he muttered that “the chickens have come home to roost”, presumably meaning that Kennedy had been killed as a result of his own actions.

All in all, my years of high school were quite useful, particularly in giving me a certain cultural heritage. For one thing, I managed to accumulate a whole slew of remembered verses, which I still recite to myself nowadays. Unfortunately, young people are no longer obliged to commit anything to memory, a fact that limits their cultural horizons for the rest of their lives. The ability to remember several reasonably long passages from the soliloquies found in Hamlet or Macbeth, a dozen quatrains from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Edward Fitzgerald), or even a few lines from poems written by people like Shelley, Poe or Swinburne, makes life a lot more interesting down the road.

By this time, I was getting more and more interested in unorthodox ways of thinking, so I started subscribing to the bulletin of the Canadian Humanist Association for awhile. At one point, I also campaigned for the mildly socialist New Democratic Party (NDP) during  the 1965 federal election. Canvassing the entire town for the party, I soon discovered that it was clearly divided between a rich section, with very large houses and lawns, and a much poorer section, especially around the trailer park. Another time, I went to Toronto by bus to meet some humanist friends and on the way back I started talking to a young NDP supporter who had just been to a meeting of the Buckley caucus in another nearby town. The so called Buckley caucus was a small group of rightwing social democrats opposed to the leftwing “Waffle” faction inside the NDP. They used the name Buckley for fun, since William F. Buckley, Junior, the American journalist and ultraconservative, in fact hated all socialists pretty much equally.

During one of my visits to the big city, I met several people who were not only involved in atheist organizations but also in various anarchist and left-wing groups. One local anarchist put me in touch with the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) in Toronto, which interested me a lot even though I did not become a university student until much later.