Theo-corporatism

One of the advantages of Western civilization has been that it has had competing centres of power. Church and state have been competing for power for centuries, so that neither has been able to impose its will on society. That gave Westerners the opportunity to develop a quality which is highly prized today – diversity. In particular, Western society developed diversity of thought and diversity of action, two types of diversity which encourage innovation, invention, and improvement.

These days, though, government and religion seem to be heading toward a reconciliation. Religious groups are being treated as if they have legitimate claims on society as a whole. The most striking example recently [Editor’s note: This article was first published in 2006.] has of course been the worldwide protests against the publication of caricatures of Mohammed by an obscure newspaper in Denmark. One government after another has said that it deplored the violence of the protests, but that it also deplored the offence which had been given to Islam by the cartoons. This approach neatly placed irreligious cartoonists on the same moral plane as religious arsonists, bombers, and murderers – You think the killing of all those Christians in Pakistan was bad? What about those awful cartoons!

The new Canadian government wants to hold a vote on whether to restore the traditional definition of marriage to replace the definition currently in effect which allows people of the same sex to marry. The so-called traditional definition of marriage, however, turns out to bear a strong resemblance to the predominant Christian one. The traditional views of the non-Christian members of our diverse society will not be presented as options. And for sure the Mormons needn't hold their breaths thinking their traditional definition is going to be legitimated.

The problem is that political parties have done so well in gutting the political philosophies they supposedly represent of any distinctive meaning that they can no longer count on voters inspired by the same principles as they to support them. In Canada the supposedly socialist party now devotes itself to proportional representation rather than to economics. The supposedly conservative party is still trying to patch together a compromise position on what conservative principles are that will satisfy both the factions which recently patched themselves together into a single party, and the supposedly liberal party tried to inspire the populace during the recent election campaign by claiming the leader of the conservatives was a secret American agent. Any comprehensive analysis of society that can withstand intelligent questioning for longer than ten seconds is beyond all of them.

So not for them any ringing declarations of the priority of freedom of expression over the violent propensities of the faithful. Not for them a declaration that the civil definition of marriage is something different from the religious one. Not for them a further change in the definition of marriage to assert the primacy of civil marriage over marriages performed by clerics.

Instead, political parties have started trying to co-opt the inspirational power of non-political ideologies – environmentalism, feminism, religion. Of these the most dangerous is religion. Environmentalism and feminism are, whether you agree with them or not, characteristically reasonable. Their tenets are expressed in ways which can be tested. Religion, however, brooks no testing. Its tenets are not descriptions of the world but arbitrary assertions about it which the religious refuse to modify. The religious deal with the resulting inadequacy of these tenets to account for what happens in the world by attributing their failure to the actions of enemies – Satan, liberals, Danish cartoonists.

The extent of the danger can be seen in the current plight of the Republican Party of the United States. From one point of view, the Republicans have done well from their courting of the religious. They have a stranglehold on the federal government.

From the point of view of the United States as a whole, though, the deal looks less desirable. The religious faction in the Republican Party tends to come from the Word Faith branch ofevangelicalism, a branch that holds views that are highly compatible with making unsubstantiated claims about the threat posed by Iraq – and with believing them. According to Word Faith theology, any assertion of yours that arises from your faith must be true. The next step is believing that whatever you believe was told you by God, and therefore inerrant. The step after that is acting on those beliefs.

The previous post, about neo-corporatism, points out that the traditional democratic view of society as composed of equal individuals is being replaced by a conception of society as composed of "communities" with unequal rights which need to be made equal. Labour is considered to be such a community, women are one, minorities are all communities, and religions are being seen more and more as communities.

The idea that any of these groups is a community or any other type of cohesive group doesn't stand up to scrutiny, of course. The idea that Christians are a community (and they are frequently discussed as if they are one) is belied by phenomena such as the detestation of many Roman Catholics and Protestants for each other. Evangelical Christians often find it necessary to send missionaries to Catholic countries to convert the benighted papists.

The idea that Muslims are a cohesive group is just as questionable. A civil war is going on in Iraq between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims, but we are expected to believe that there is a single entity called Islam. Once we believe that there is a single entity called Islam, then logically we believe that it can be offended. And if we're one of those religious people driven into paranoia by the futility and irrationality of the principles we accept as guides to life, we think something needs to be done to punish the offence, whether it's real or imagined. Whence abortionist-killers, embassy-burners, and Peter McKay's cowering before the might of Islam.

So we may be on the verge of a society in which we have freedom of religion but not freedom from religion. Nor will we have the freedom not to have a religion. If the religious get their way, every law of a once democratic society will be made to conform to the paranoid preferences of the religious. That idea might sound paranoid itself, but we need only consider the conformity of the Bush administration to the agenda of evangelical Christianity to see that it's not.

Unfortunately, Canadians seem to be falling for this idea. Most think it was wrong to publish the caricatures of Mohammed, and from there it is but a short step to believing that their publication should have been prevented.

There's only one thing for it, I'm afraid. Sane people must start their own religion, the key principle of which is that it is unafraid of criticism.

What kind of God is it, after all, who can't tolerate the publication of a few cartoons in Denmark? Not a very self-confident one, it would seem. And what kind of guidance are you going to get from a deity like that?

What kind of God is it that can give His people a Bible which no two of them understand to mean the same thing? Doesn't the multiplicity of Christian denominations and sects suggest that the Christian God is a pretty ineffective communicator? And what kind of guidance are you going to get from a deity who can't make his advice clear?

A real god would be unafraid to state his or her principles clearly. A real god would pity unbelievers instead of craving their painful and eternal punishment. A real god would not be offended by the actions of people he or she created.

Theo-Corporatism © John FitzGerald, 2006, 2009

Neo-corporatism

Corporatism has come a long way since Benito Mussolini first devised it. Mussolini organized business and trade unions into 22 corporations and associations which administered different sectors of the economy. By giving business more power in this arrangement, Mussolini maintained control of the economy while weakening socialism and trade unionism. Since Mussolini's downfall, arrangements in other countries in which associations of employers and employees play a formal role in government have also been referred to as varieties of corporatism.

Today, however, a new version of corporatism has sneaked its way into the counsels of government, and particularly Canadian government, where it tries to combat or at least modify the traditional principles of representative democracy. This is a liberal/left version of corporatism, which is founded on the idea that a citizen in a democracy derives rights not just from his status as an equal in a society of equals, but also from his status as a member of particular groups or communities. Society is conceived of as an organization of communities rather than of individuals, and furthermore as an organization which dispenses unequal benefits to these communities. It is therefore concluded that the goal of social reform is to eliminate any differences between groups in the benefits they receive from society.

For example, we have for many years been debating the best ways to provide equity for women, members of visible minorities, francophones, and so on. The idea is always that equity will have been achieved when women receive the same benefits as men, members of visible minorities receive the same benefits as members of majorities and of non-visible minorities, francophones receive the same benefits as anglophones, and so on. The commonest examples of this type of thinking are pay equity laws, and the purest example of this type of thinking in Canada was the employment equity law of the Rae government in Ontario in the early 1990s.

The Rae government divided society into five groups: women, members of racial minorities, people with disabilities, aboriginal people, and everyone else (that is, white men). The act mandated that every employer's work force was to "reflect the representation of aboriginal people, people with disabilities, members of racial minorities and women in the community" in every job category. If fewer than half the physicians at a hospital were women, for example, the hospital was to develop an employment equity plan to recruit more women physicians.

But is equal representation the same thing as equity? The school system is considered by many to provide fewer benefits to members of certain groups, and this opinion is probably true. Nevertheless, the most successful groups in the educational system have usually been oppressed groups – Jews, Chinese, Irish, Italians, and so on. Are we to conclude that these groups were actually privileged groups masquerading as disadvantaged ones?

Well, some people do. In the United States, standardized tests of academic achievement and aptitude are now often said to be biased in favour of students of Chinese origin. The idea that the Midwest ministers' sons who created the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) were out to further the interests of Chinese students seems more than a bit comical, although the proponents of the new corporatism seem to have no problem in asserting that the SAT is the result of a pro-Chinese conspiracy instead of simply saying that Chinese students tend to receive higher scores on the SAT.

Alternatively, you could say that the effects of oppression are not general, and that a group may still be oppressed even though in some ways it appears privileged, but that is contrary to one of the fundamental principles of corporatist thinking – the idea of community.

The groups into which the new corporatists divide society are commonly described as communities. In fact, the new corporatism must assume that the groups into which new corporatists divide society are communities of interest. The new corporatism assumes that all members of a group have the same interests, so Chinese students must have the same interests as all other students from visible minorities. However, the broadly defined groups of the new corporatism rarely share interests to any great extent.

Furthermore, when they do, they usually do because the members of the group share interests which are common to all groups. Within any group the interests of individual members will differ and will even often be in opposition to each other. Within groups as broadly defined as those of the new corporatism, heterogeneity of interest is inevitable.

Let's consider aboriginal people. The relationships of the three main Canadian aboriginal groups – First Nations, Métis, and Inuit – to government are different. Their needs cannot even be dealt with in the same way. First Nations deal with the government either through the Indian Act or, if they are not on the Indian Register, not at all. The western Métis have treaties with the government which they consider the government to have breached. The Métis in the North and East have no treaties. Some Inuit have treaties, while others don't. Among First Nations, the interests of band councils are different from the interests of other band members, a fact which the Canadian government has exploited effectively for many years.

In other words, aboriginal people consist of several groups whose interests are quite different. If you want to improve, for example, the schooling received by aboriginal people, you will have to address different problems in each group. While this observation does not invalidate the idea of aboriginal people as a community, it does suggest that considering them to be a community is of no help in addressing their problems.

The new corporatism is an attempt to get us to abandon the idea that democratic rights are individual rights. It wants us to think of discrimination as a denial of rights to a group, when we have usually thought of it as a denial of rights to an individual. A further danger of this idea is that the groups in which rights are thought to inhere exist only as abstractions.

Under the traditional conception of democracy, individual citizens could form communities of interest called political parties. Under the new corporatism, individuals are arbitrarily assigned to "communities" based on arbitrary characteristics such as skin colour, type of genital organs, inheritance, or physical capacity. Instead of being represented by elected public officials they are represented by members of community groups, representatives they have most likely not chosen and with whom they may have few interests in common. These representatives will usually be activists, and the new corporatism is the result of the corruption of the ideal of activism.

Political activism started out as an attempt to get individuals to obtain and exercise democratic rights, but it has degenerated into an elitist exercise in which government negotiates with pressure groups. I am not arguing against pressure groups – without them we would not have seen the enormous progress in civil rights which has been taking place for over a hundred years. What I am arguing against is the idea that society is nothing more than competition and negotiation between pressure groups, and the replacement of the ideals of equality, dignity, and freedom with the ideal of getting one's piece of the pie.

Neo-Corporatism © John FitzGerald, 2005