Daniel Weinstock comments on the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, a.k.a. “reasonable accommodation” and “open secularism” in Quebec.
Prof. Weinstock is the Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political Philosophy at the University of Montreal, and was one of the 15 advisors to the commission. He spoke at Trinity College on Sept. 12 as part of the panel discussion “Cultural Difference and ‘Reasonable Accommodation.’” Here he defends laïcité ouvert as theory and practice.
What the commissioners found out in the very early days, before they even went out into public consultations, was that in those places where reasonable accommodation is a daily practice, in schools in Montreal—where 53 mother tongues are reported in the school registry, 38 religions—or hospitals, a variety of these institutions in and around Montreal, which is really where diversity happens in Quebec […] all these institutions had found ways of dealing with these problems in ways that are remarkably harmonious and smooth, and in fact, there was no problem of reasonable accommodation. There was no crisis.
Open secularism is a way of trying to give shape, articulation, and argument to a set of practices that have been bubbling up through the practice of Quebec public institutions in a sort of organic willy-nilly way over the course of the last 30 or 40 years. What I think is quite brilliant, and it fits in very clearly with Charles Taylor’s philosophical methodology is that you don’t prescribe from on-high to the people, you try to find a rationale in the real.
The basic idea in two minutes is that there are institutions and then there are people. It makes sense to say that institutions should be laïque in a diverse society. It makes no sense to heap that expectation upon citizens.
I’ve decided that at the end of the day, what is at the core of the idea of neutrality is a much more pragmatic requirement, that the overall effective institutions—not the scrupulously neutral when taken case by case—but the ones condusive to generating on the part of reasonable persons that they are part of those institutions. […] In France it’s certainly the case that sort of ‘hard’ laïcité has been a way of driving majority values in through the back door, and have marginalized a lot of people. It drives a lot of people out of the institutions where the overall social effect would have been much more positive, had the institutions bent a little bit and allowed them in in a way which would have made them sort of experience the kind of integrative pleasures of being in a public institution, especially schools. Quite paradoxically, the laïcité française is that while no Muslim girl with a veil need apply to a public school, religious Muslim schools exist and they’re fully funded. What has been gained in terms of effect?
Past Massey Lecturer Ronald Wright speaks at Innis College on Sept. 6 as part of the U of T Bookstore Reading Series, promoting his book What is America?
Here Wright responds to an audience member’s question, “Do you believe that the United States remains a democracy, and if so, on what basis?”
I think it is still a democracy as much as most of the western nations are democracies. As Churchill famously said, “Democracy’s a terrible system, but all the others are worse.” I think that the present electoral campaign, and the diverse and exciting field of candidates from both sides in the primaries, is a sign that this machine, democracy, that exists in America, that is very ponderous and somewhat archaic machine, and it’s one also that takes up more time than it should […] there are times that it may be capable of repairing itself. […] It is a democracy, and I mean, yes, there are terrible tyrannies in the world, and it is still a democracy, but the suspension of democratic freedoms, such as habeus corpus, and the running of a sort of extraterritorial concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay—and I mean ‘concentration camp’ in the historical sense: a place where you concentrate people, not necessarily exterminate them—these things are very few, these blots on the American record, and that’s why American prestige is so low. The saddest outcome of all this is that this gives a wonderful excuse for dictators around the world to scorn the ideals of democracy. Vladimir Putin can lead Russia back to autocracy and say, ‘Well, I’ve got terrorists.’ The Castro brothers must be savoring the irony that the United States is running its prison camp in Cuba. American democracy is under threat not so much from the terrorists, as from within. Those people exploited a terrible but relatively minor threat to American security. The terrorist attacks and the so-called world threat of extremist religious-based terrorism is nothing as serious as the Cold War, when there was another superpower who could blow everybody up. It’s nothing as serious as the two World Wars. And the lesson we should be learning from the two World Wars is that both of them started with overreactions to acts of terrorism, regardless of who committed the acts of terrorism. America needs to focus on its democracy, and unfortunately this fear of the outside has always been used as a means of taking political control in the United States, but I think at least half the country realizes that that has to stop.
