The Rights Revolution (16 page)

The real issue is that we do not share the same vision of our country’s history. The problem is not one of rights or powers, but one of truth. We do not inhabit the same historical reality. And it is time we did. For two generations, English Canada has asked, with earnest respect, “What does Quebec want?” It is time for English Canada to say who
we
are and what
our
country is. The answer is: we are a partnership of nations, a community of peoples united in common citizenship and rights. We do possess a common history, and like it or not, we had better begin sharing a common truth.

Here, for example, is the truth as most of English Canada sees it. The British Conquest of 1763, far from extinguishing the French fact in North America, actually brought the Québécois their first experience of self-government. This has been the case since the Quebec Act of 1774, when the British Crown recognized the rights of those of the Catholic religion, the distinctiveness of French law, and the right of
les habitants
to use French as an official language. The result is that for more than two centuries, Quebec has shared the same democratic institutions as the rest of the country, as well as enjoying
recognition of its distinctive national character. Indeed, one essential element of Quebec’s distinctiveness, in comparison with the American republic to the south, is that its National Assembly follows the norms and traditions of British parliamentary democracy.

The point I am making is that rights will not keep us together if competing visions of historical truth continue to divide us. In the Canadian case, the truths each side holds to be self-evident are the truths that divide us. So how are we to proceed? One way is simply to lay the two truths side by side, acknowledge their incompatibility, and then seek, in so far as it is possible, to put these disagreements to one side. Few societies ever achieve genuinely shared truth between majorities and minorities, however, so let us shed our illusions about securing a unity based on consensus. Yet agreeing to disagree is not enough. We need to narrow the gap between our versions of the truth, always accepting that a gap of some kind will remain. The Conquest will always be the Conquest for Québécois, but we may in time persuade them that this was a conquest like no other, for it ultimately laid the basis for the survival of a democratic Quebec in North America.

Conceding special status for Quebec in constitutional negotiations is probably inevitable, but it does nothing by itself to alter each side’s view of the historical truth of Quebec’s place in the Canadian confederation. Special status will not redress the Conquest. Nor will it necessarily make. Quebecers more willing to accept the English version of the historical record. This means we should
cease believing that constitutional settlements can end historical arguments. In reality, they can only produce a new basis for ongoing and unending dialogue.

Truth is truth and rights are rights, and the debate about the proper extent of both will go on. Indeed, it is only when dialogue becomes frozen, when there is no movement, that rupture becomes likely. To commit ourselves to the idea that the search for national unity has no end is not to despair, but merely to acknowledge that it is the very essence of nation-states that they harbour within them incompatible visions of the national story. Holding a nation together does not require us to force these incompatible stories into one, but simply to keep them in dialogue with each other and, if possible, learning from each other. And we have learned. No one in an English-Canadian school today learns the history I did as a child, a history that excluded Native peoples and the Québécois experience of being hewers of wood and drawers of water in their own land.

We need to understand recognition between peoples as something more than a process of concession and negotiation alone. Properly considered, recognition is an act of enlargement that enables both sides to envisage new possibilities of living together. We don’t simply recognize each other for what we are; we recognize what we could become together. To do that, we have to recognize what we already are: a peaceable kingdom, a place where languages, cultures, and peoples shelter together under the arch of justice. This is our raison d’être, our example to the world, our never-quite-realized possibility.

These lectures have tried to point out exactly where this Canadian possibility lies. But the lectures have also tried to situate the Canadian experience in a larger context. The revolution has been global, and the challenge it has posed has been to all democratic societies trying to cohere and live justly in an age of rights. The challenge has been to reconcile community with diversity in an age of entitlements. The rights revolution has made us all aware of how different we are, both as individuals and as peoples. Our differences, small as they may seem, are the basis of our identity. Call it the narcissism of minor difference.
²²
We don’t dwell on what we share; our every fashion statement declares that we are singular.

This doesn’t mean we share nothing at all. Isaiah Berlin used to say that our moral language inscribes us within a “human horizon.”
²³
We disagree about the ultimate ends and purposes of human life, but in the end, we do so within that horizon. Values — to call them human at all — must be within the human horizon. That is why a rights culture is not relativistic: murder, violence, theft, betrayal, and lying are recognizably the same in any culture or historical epoch. But this common human horizon is far away; it is the outer boundary. Closer to home, within this shared horizon, we can have profound disagreements: murder is murder, but is abortion, for example, murder? Irreconcilable moral conflict occurs constantly because even when we start from the same principles, we disagree as to their meaning or application in specific cases. So if we really are that different, how do
we ever manage to generate enough agreement to live together in peace?

This is where empathy — the human capacity to enter other people’s minds — plays such a constitutive role. We enter other minds not merely because we can, but because we need to. We need other people’s approval; our very selves depend on knowing what others think of us. We need others because we are blind to ourselves. As Virginia Woolf said, there is a shilling-sized circle in the middle of the back of our heads that, try as we might, we can never manage to see. Only others can see it for us and tell us what it looks like. Our very individualism is social.

The precondition for order in a liberal society is an act of the imagination:
not
a moral consensus or shared values, but the capacity to understand moral worlds different from our own. We may be different, but we can imagine what it would be like to
be each other.

Our capacity for empathy is limited. In
Shoah,
Claude Lanzmann’s film about the Holocaust in Poland, you will remember the Polish farmer whose fields abutted a death camp. Ash rained down on his fields. He was asked what he felt when he saw fellow human beings going up in smoke. He replied, “I cut my finger, I feel it; when someone else cuts his finger, I only see it.”

Imagination carries us only so far; our own sensations are invariably more real to us than the experience of others. We live at the centre of concentric circles of decreasing impingement: first ourselves, then those we love, and only much later, and much more imperfectly, our fellow creatures. But the imperfect moral impingemerit
that others make upon us is as much a fact about us as our selfishness. It is on these facts — and our capacity to imagine them — that we build such community as we can.

How do we generate a world in common? We take actual human individuals — rich, poor, young, old, homosexual, heterosexual, white, black, in between, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew (i.e., human beings in all their embodied difference) — and we imagine them as equal bearers of rights. Go into any courtroom, police station, or welfare office, and you will find real individuals ignoring the different surfaces of each person they deal with and addressing the juridical equal beneath. They are addressing a moral fiction. Yet it is this fiction, and our devotion to it, that enables us to be just. The entire legitimacy of public institutions depends on our being attentive to difference while treating all as equal. This is the gamble, the unique act of the imagination on which our society rests.

It is a new gamble, conceived in the seventeenth century by the founding fathers of liberal political philosophy, men like John Locke. It could be argued that they never thought a rights community could be composed of literally anyone. Their original thought experiment was confined exclusively to white propertied males. But once this ideal was imagined, the die was cast. No sooner had white propertied males begun to imagine themselves as rights-bearing equals than the propertyless began to ask why they were excluded … then women … then non-white peoples. Once this type of liberal
imagination takes root in a society, it becomes logically untenable to withhold its promise from all humankind.

The political and social history of Western society is the story of the struggle of all human groups to gain inclusion. This vast historical process, which began in the European wars of religion in the sixteenth century, has been brought to a successful conclusion only now, in the rights revolution of the past forty years.

All of this is so much a part of our lived history that we barely notice its enormous historical significance. We are living in the first human society that has actually attempted to create a political community on the assumption that everyone — literally
everyone
— has the right to belong. We are all on the same perilous adventure, whether we live with our differences or die because of them.

From Bosnia to Afghanistan, from Rwanda to Kosovo, ethnic warriors seem bent on proving that rights equality among human beings of different races is a sentimental fiction. In place of societies built on rights, they are hacking out societies whose unity is based in blood and fantasies of common origin. What we are trying to prove, in societies that incorporate all human beings into the same political community, is that the ethnic cleansers are wrong, and that their vision of the future need not come to pass, for us or for the people they tyrannize.

We have reason to be hopeful, and not just because places like Canada are rich and have capacities to conciliate conflict that are denied poorer societies. We are lucky too because, as colonial peoples, we were schooled in the
life of liberty. Today, in our multi-ethnic, multicultural cities, we are trying to vindicate a new experiment in ethnic peace, and we have learned that the preconditions of order are simple: equal protection under the law, coupled with the capacity for different peoples to behave towards each other not as members of tribes or clans, but as citizens. We do not require very much in the way of shared values, or even shared lives. People should live where they want, and with whom they want. The key precondition is equality of rights; it all depends whether our differences can shelter under the protecting arch of a legitimate legal order.

So the unity and coherence of a liberal society are not threatened because we come from a thousand different traditions, worship different gods, eat different foods, live in different sections of town, and speak different languages. What is required of us is recognition, empathy, and if possible, reconciliation. To use, once again, the words chosen by a wise French-Canadian judge when he delivered a judgment that brought long-delayed justice to fellow citizens of aboriginal origin, “Let’s face it, we’re all here to stay.”

1
. Tom Wicker,
A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt
(New York: Times Books, 1975).

2
. On New Zealand aboriginal claims law and traditions, see F. M. Brookfield,
Waitangi and Indigenous Rights: Revolution Law and Legitimation
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999).

3
. Peter H. Russell,
Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians Be a Sovereign People?
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).

4
. “In the Matter of Section 53 of the Supreme Court Act (Reference Re Secession of Quebec), [1998],” S.C.R. 217. See also Diane F. Orentlicher, “Separation Anxiety: International Responses to Ethno-Separatist Claims,”
Yale Journal of International Law
23, no. 1 (1998).

5
. J. P. Humphrey,
Human Rights and the United Nations: A Great Adventure
(New York: Transnational, 1984); see also Johannes Morsink,
The Universal Declaration of Human
Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

6
. John Packer, “Making International Law Matter in Preventing Ethnic Conflict: A Practitioner’s Perspective,”
New York University Journal of International Law and Politics
32 (Spring 2000): 3, 715–24.

7
. I discussed the work of Louise Arbour in Kosovo in
Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond
(Toronto: Penguin, 2000).

8
. Will Kymlicka,
Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

9
. James Tully,
Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in
Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition,
ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Russell,
Constitutional Odyssey.

10
. Canada, “Equality Rights,” in
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms: A Guide for Canadians
(Ottawa: Publications Canada, 1984): “Subsection 1 does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups, including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”