Wake up, Citizens! Ye have Slept Long Enough

Saul, John Ralston, The Unconscious Civilization. Concord: House of Anansi Press, 1995
 
“The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good. Corporatism is an ideology which claims rationality as its central quality. The overall effects on the individual are passivity and conformity in those areas which matter and non-conformism in those which don’t (2).”
 
John Ralston Saul’s book is a late-teenager by now, but his take on the roads that governance and corporatism are taking us down is probably more relevant now than it was in 1995. That road—according to Ralston Saul—is a garden path. At stake is no less than the gradual disenfranchisement of the citizens of Western democracies. For power to be acceptable, it must have behind it clear legitimacy; in a truly democratic country power is legitimized by the citizens. In Western democracies today, power is legitimized by groups operating outside the direct influence of the citizens, hence the contention that our society is becoming more and more corporatist, less and less democratic.
 
Corporatism: noun, the control of a state or organization by large interest groups. (Concise Oxford English Dictionary) An example of corporatism at work, in Ralston Saul’s view, is the failure by President Clinton to reform the health care system in the USA, a promise on which he was elected. It was corporatist interests and the technocrats negotiating with each other that put the kybosh on the citizens’ wish to have a better system. That’s how corporatism delegitimizes citizens. More recently, we’ve seen how Obama has struggled against vested interest to bring about reform in the same area, and at this writing, it’s not clear how far corporate interest groups will allow change to happen. 

We could find numerous examples closer to home. I give you one. The last election in Canada was precipitated by a clear decision by the speaker of the House of Commons and the opposition that the Harper government was guilty of contempt of parliament. Most recently, the same government—this time with a 39% majority—has rammed through a myriad of laws and amendments to laws via a massive omnibus bill, deliberately preventing a whole host of measures from being subjected to proper public scrutiny. Such contempt of parliament is tantamount to contempt for the electorate. Many of the laws and amendments clearly pander to multinational corporate interests: the relaxing of environmental standards, for instance. Decision making consists of an ideologically-based government negotiating with entrenched interest groups, particularly those that favour the political stripe of the day.
 
Ralston Saul is blunt: “The result has been a remarkable growth in the lobbying industry, which has as its sole purpose the conversion of elected representatives and senior civil servants to the particular interest of the lobbyist. That is, lobbyists are in the business of corrupting the people’s representatives and servants away from the public good (93).” The debacle of the F-38s is a current example: the ministry of defense was so badly bamboozled by the military establishment (interest group) and the aviation industry (interest groups) that poor Peter McKay simply had no coherent defense for his “corruption” by the lobbyists and technocrats! On another issue, we know which interest groups want a pipeline from the oil sands at Fort McMurray to Kitimat; we know what efforts the Harper government is making to smooth the way for that. They are clearly on the corporatist side here, the dramatic symbol of that being the shutting down of citizen opposition, this time as a “budgetary measure” embedded in the omnibus bill.
 
Ralston Saul quotes Scottish Philosopher David Hume writing way back in the mid-18th Century: “'It is easy for the rich, in an arbitrary government, to conspire against [the middle class], and to throw the whole burthen of the taxes on their shoulders (143).’” We have seen how easily the Canadian population accepted the incremental reduction in corporate taxes in the recent past. We have also seen how willingly Western governments have bailed out corporations that are failing, inevitably through their own folly and greed. Who will bear these costs in the end? (No need to answer; that was a rhetorical question.)
 
There’s a great deal more to consider in a book on such a broad subject. Citizens rendered passive by the domination of the elite in a society is not the whole story. Life consists of more than the economy: education, health, stimulation, shelter, food, employment, career, clean air and water, beauty and art, etc., etc. “The world is so full of a number of things/I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in A Child’s Garden of Verses.” With so much to experience and enjoy, a citizenry is easily lulled into giving up its rightful role in its governance. Most of the people I talk to on a regular basis see the Occupy Movement, the Montreal student demonstrations and other such street actions as either unjustified, stupid, or both. Few see such actions as citizens trying to claim back their legitimate say in how they are governed. That old saw—people inevitably get the government they deserve—is relevant here; I think Ralston Saul would agree.
 
How do we get back to the place where our government is again legitimized by the citizenry, where corporatist power is checked by the will of the people, where governments again hold us in the respect that we deserve? Ralston Saul suggests what to many of us has been obvious for years: education must again teach children and youth to be citizens before lulling them into becoming life-long functionaries in a corporate world. Beginning with the industrial revolution, corporatist interests have sought to mechanize humans, to make them pliable and compliant modules on production lines, in offices and oil fields, in factories and warehouses. Our great sin was to allow this to happen, to think of ourselves as mechanistic functionaries.
 
John Ralston Saul demonstrates the kind of balance he urges on society in his writing. His illustrations go back to Socrates and Plato, to the literature of Shakespeare, to the careful analysis of the work of Adam Smith (which current economists have bastardized to fit their particular, managerial interests). In this eclectic approach, the reader senses that the running of our national household is not just about the economy, but that ultimately we must be governed with a view to the broad scope of life on the planet, stretching back into our history and forward into the future.
 
Only we as citizens can legitimize the choices that are made for our benefit; we must not abrogate this responsibility.

Richler, Noah, What We Talk About When We Talk About War. Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2012

Let’s get the down sides of Richler’s book out of the way first. They aren’t many.
   First, I can’t help wishing that Richler had had an editor who—and Goose Lane Editions should find such fine tuning routine—could visualize how long sentences (and there are many) with too many parenthetical insertions—like this one—are unnecessary, confusing and impediments to the message—which, in this case, is an important one. 
   Secondly, Richler seems to feel that an argument is strengthened by its length and the number of times it’s repeated. This is a 100-page book bulked up quite unnecessarily to 362 pages.
So much for the down side.  
   Richler effectively argues that there’s a serious dichotomy between dominant Canadian values and the current language, priorities and directions in the Harper government, particularly as they relate to the military establishment. His metaphor for this schism compares the epic in literature with the novel. Epics have heroes, rely on good vs. evil distinctions and picture the world as black and white. Novels develop more liberally; they see good and evil as present in all humanity and don’t insist that the ending be a clear victory of good over evil, with us being good and them evil. 
   More understandable to many readers will be his characterization of Canada as a humanist, peacemaking culture with compassion for all the world’s people and a desire to be helpful and giving. Through the period of the war in Afghanistan, however, our government has worked hard at remolding us as a “war-making country,” able to be a formidable combat force alongside the big boys.
   Richler traces the government, military and media push in the direction of war-fighting at length. Beginning with Harper’s contention that Canada would be unrecognizable when he was done, he endlessly quotes right wing commentary by Jack Granatstein (author of Who Killed the Canadian Military); Gen. Rick Hillier (former Chief of Land Staff), and Christie Blatchford (National Post columnist and author of Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army). By the time you’re done with War, you might well think of these three as Richler’s Antichrists! Their denigration of peacekeeping along with their eulogizing of Canada’s combat work in Afghanistan supports well the contention that the Harper government and its supporters have been working hard to cast the country in a more “epic” vision of itself and the world. 

Policies of “war-fighting” rather than peace operations; of smaller alliances with like-minded states rather than entangling ones under the aegis of the UN oriented toward some vague, quasi-utopian future; of tighter immigration and greater demands made of newcomers seeking Canadian citizenship than those made by the gatekeepers of the previous, more open society in which merely alighting in Canada was enough, became in less than a decade the underpinnings of a more monolithic version of the country (p. 256). [Readers may have to read that run-on sentence a few times to comprehend it.]

    Little of this comes as news to anyone who’s been paying attention. The ceremony around fallen combat soldiers (while muting the deaths of peacekeepers), the grandiose projections of 400 billion + to be spent on the military over the next 20 years (that’s roughly $800 per year for every man, woman and child in Canada), the fighter jet issue, the Royal put back into the forces’ names, these are only a few of the signs along the way.
   Richler spends some ink on the subject of goals in Afghanistan and how they’ve shifted over the last decade from being a good ally to our friend, post 9/11 USA, to saving Afghanistan from the Taliban, to bringing democracy, to building schools for girls, all meant to support the contention that what we were up to in that country was a kind of “peace-making, nation-building” exercise. The goals have been wishy-washy in the extreme; the groping for palatable purposes difficult under the circumstances. The result has been disheartening for the war makers; as a war it cannot be won since the Taliban are Afghans and will be Afghans even after all NATO forces are gone. In the official language, it began as a “mission” when that was convenient, became a “war” in the middle and now again has become a “mission,” precisely because as a war, pulling out makes no sense when the situation on the ground is as unresolved as it is.
    Richler ends with a chapter called, “What is to be Done?” In it, he proposes that the military must again reflect the values of the people, which in Canada are predominantly humanistic, compassionate and only mildly nationalistic compared to the current vision. He suggests that we go back to being the best peacemakers and peacekeepers in the world and that we establish an institution dedicated to training peacekeeping, peacemaking young Canadians fora new branch of the military to this end. It’s an intriguing thought, that we would be the providers of corps of Canadians expert in the field of negotiation, human rights and all those other skills that a helping and open people rely on when at their best.
    I am an admirer of Stephen Lewis and the work in which he engages, and so his endorsement on the cover of What We Talk About When We Talk About War carries weight for me: “A book of enormous erudition. I am stunned by Richler’s courage and insight.”
    The subject is pertinent. Almost accidentally, we’ve given majority government to a party that is out of step with its citizens, that has goals in mind for the military, industry and the natural world that are anathema to a growing number of citizens. We all need to read and discuss Richler’s take on this phenomenon reflected in military language; there are changes going on that will take a great deal of effort and courage to undo when we finally turf the right wing ideologues out of office.

George Epp
07/06/2012