The Quebec government’s
latest initiative to keep Quebec safe will be called a Charter of Quebec
Values. It’ll be color-blind; it will only decide how you must appear in public
institutions. Preventing religion and its weird trappings from ever again contaminating
the state is its stated purpose. However, Sophie
Cousineau in the Globe and Mail offers an interesting twist:
“The
Parti Québécois campaigned heavily on identity issues during the last election,
which struck a chord with its traditional supporters. Ms. Marois promised to
establish a secular charter for the province’s public institutions. However,
her minority government stopped referring to the plan as a secular charter last
spring after it discovered that appealing to values would sound more positive
and would resonate with Quebeckers.”
This is progress, darkly.
With “Quebec values,” we have
a slogan to energize, hopefully, both the liberal and illiberal forces in
Quebec.
After all, the “secular
state” is a bloodless abstraction. Many in Quebec probably don’t know what it
means literally and, in their guts, its antagonism toward religion must seem a
tiny bit forced. In truth, the religion—in Quebec and elsewhere in the West—that does threaten rational, civil (liberal, right?) discourse is
nationalism.
People who connect the
nation-state of Quebec, or Canada, or Holland, Germany, America, and England, for
instance, to the word values are
slipping away from reason—from the political enlightenment they secured collectively
and, on tragic occasions, put aside.
They are being pulled, not by
a ravenous new religion but by that old winner: nationalism.
Quebec’s touchiness about
marginal religious practices and outside cultures is not fueled primarily by fear.
As elsewhere, it is born by a certainty that Quebec is better and already
worldly and sophisticated enough.
The Parti Québécois dreams of
a seat at the United Nations, amongst history’s greatest assembly of minor gods.
No comments:
Post a Comment