Religion and Identity at the Bouchard-Taylor Commission: A Psychoanalytic Assessment – Nick Dion

After years of litigation, Gurbaj Singh Multani, a Sikh student in a Montreal-area high school, wins his appeal before the Supreme Court of Canada and is allowed to wear his kirpan to school, provided it remains safely strapped to his body, beneath his clothing. Hérouxville, a small town in rural Quebec, passes a town charter that forbids, among other things, the stoning of women. A sugar shack closes its dance room temporarily so that Muslim patrons can pray. A YMCA in Montreal’s Rosemont neighbourhood frosts its windows after worshippers from the Orthodox Jewish synagogue across the street complain that the scantily clad women on the gym’s treadmills offend their religious sensibilities.

Charles Taylor and Gérard Bouchard identify these four events as key to producing the so-called ‘reasonable accommodations crisis’ in Quebec in 2007. Commissioned by Premier Jean Charest to look into the public outcry concerning the lack of integration of Quebec’s ethnic minorities, Bouchard and Taylor spent the next seven months touring the province and meeting with experts and citizens in a series of town hall-style meetings, only to produce a lengthy list of recommendations a year later. Their conclusion? That the ‘reasonable accommodations crisis’ was really a crisis of perception. There was no war brewing in Quebec between the Francophone majority and the ethnic minorities, only a few isolated incidents blown out of proportion by the media and misinterpreted by the population. What these events did betray, Bouchard and Taylor explained, was a sense of existential anxiety, a continuing feeling of discomfort with the Francophone population’s minority position in Canada.

As the commission report repeatedly emphasises, this sort of existential anxiety in the face of an increasingly pluralistic society is not unique to Quebec. All pluralistic societies are built on the political tension between representing diversity and propagating the traditions that provide the common symbolic and moral framework, a tension which is exacerbated in a globalised world, where the number and proximity of competing frameworks increases exponentially. ‘Nations of nations’, as Taylor calls them, countries like Canada that lack a founding majority population, have an easier time with this dilemma, since there is no majority Canadian identity seeking representation. Quebec, on the other hand, which has fought bitterly for decades to preserve its culture within Canada, finds the situation particularly threatening. The solution for the commissioners then, is for Quebec to stay the course, to continue with its unofficial policies of interculturalism and open secularism, and to resist the temptation to protect Quebec identity by defining it too narrowly. My goal today is to bring classical psychoanalytic theory to bear on this debate, to complicate the commission’s recommendations.

Taylor describes Quebec ‘interculturalism’ as a policy which guarantees the fundamental rights of minority populations and encourages mutual learning between different ethnic groups while actively working to create citizens who belong to the majority culture. Such a policy is grounded in the use of French as the common language of public life and the notion that all must contribute to democratic debate in the public sphere. This can be contrasted with Canadian multiculturalism, a policy which, according to Taylor, promotes ethnic diversity and strives to build a common culture on common political principles alone. At this point, it becomes clear why Premier Charest saw Taylor as ‘the right man for the job’ when it came to the reasonable accommodations debate. Not only has Taylor written extensively about Quebec politics and identity in the context of his larger philosophical projects, but he is one of the few liberal political theorists who has shown any sympathy for Quebec’s project of cultural preservation.

Taylor’s 1992 essay ‘The Politics of Recognition’ distinguishes between two models of liberalism, creatively designated as ‘liberalism 1’ and ‘liberalism 2’. Liberalism 1 grounds the equality of citizens in a notion of human dignity and a neutral public sphere; we are all equal because we all have the same rights. The government refrains from publicly endorsing any notion of ‘the good life’ and, in so doing, allows citizens to follow their own paths. This form of liberalism, Taylor argues, not only assumes a theoretically impossible neutrality of the public sphere, but it mistakenly creates a universal citizen identity; it neglects that people are unique and culture-bearing, and that these cultures are not an element that can be set aside in political life. In fact, to really treat people as equals, a government cannot ignore difference for the sake of similarity but must instead focus on difference, assuring the public representation of different cultures. Cultures must be treated differently to be treated equally. This is the founding basis of liberalism 2.

How does this relate to Quebec? The adoption of legislative measures that safeguard the survival of Quebecois culture only becomes possible under liberalism 2, a model that Taylor clearly endorses. Bill 101, Quebec’s sign laws, these are only possible if collective goals (here, the preservation of Quebecois culture) are allowed to trump individual rights in certain cases. Fundamental rights are non-negotiable, of course, but other rights can be curtailed in the name of a common societal good. In this sense, liberalism 2 includes liberalism 1. Rejecting a Kantian definition of autonomy, Taylor suggests that Quebeckers would not be in a state to make free choices if they were constantly concerned about the survival of their culture. The adoption of protectionist measures restores the conditions for free choice.

In the scenario at hand, the adoption of protectionist measures has done little to allay Quebeckers’ existential anxiety. The Othering of ethnic communities in Quebec, the commissioners fear, is due to the reservation of the Quebecois label for those Francophone families of Catholic descent who have lived in the province for generations, the so-called pure laine Quebeckers. The only ‘we’ is the pure laine ‘we’, to the exclusion of all others. The commission report argues for the elimination of this hierarchy and the opening up of Quebec identity. Anyone who lives in Quebec must be considered a Quebecker. For this to become possible in the future, the backward-looking identity of the pure laine must be replaced with a forward-looking collective identity forged on a new set of common symbols. While the pluralistic nature of society may complicate this task, making impossible the use of religion, for example, as such a common symbol system, the project need not be abandoned. A new, all-inclusive collective identity could just as easily be built on the use of French, on artistic creations, or on common values moving forward as it could have been built on religion in the past. While Quebec’s Catholic past is a legitimate source for identity creation, it cannot be allowed to be the only contributing source.

The commission report is, understandably, a practical document designed for government use. As such, it ignores the affective dimension of interpersonal relations; how does the Quebecker feel when faced with the foreigner, or vice versa? These are, to a large extent, the emotions that must be understood if a collective identity is to be forged successfully. For Freud, the new immigrant could legitimately be described as being in a state of mourning, having lost an object with which he or she had an affective bond. Admittedly, this does not occur in every case. In his clinical work with immigrants, psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar lists age, depth of attachment to the original place, degree of choice in leaving, extent of planning, intrapsychic ability to tolerate separation, and the magnitude of difference between the two places of residence as factors that influence the trauma associated with immigration. Similar feelings, albeit on a different scale, could conceivably originate in moving out of one’s house, or in leaving town for one’s studies. Essentially, though, Freud’s comment and Akhtar’s research both validate the existence of an affective bond to specific places, resulting in a degree of trauma associated with immigration.

If the immigrant, in many cases, is looking to belong, to replace the lost love object, the Quebecker’s anxiety is grounded in a feeling of Unheimlichkeit, of the uncanny. Translated literally as a feeling of ‘not being at home’ or of ‘unhomeliness’, Unheimlichkeit might be used to describe the Quebecker’s feeling of alienation from his own homeland. Freud links the term etymologically to the Greek xenos, a clear reference between the emotion in question and the foreigner. Nor would this have to be a general cultural malaise; individuals vary in their sensitivity to this feeling. Perhaps most importantly, for Freud, it is the similarity between the foreigner and oneself that causes the affective reaction; I likely fear an immigrant because she is too much like me not to be me. He is eerily familiar, yet different in some ways perceived as key. Feelings of Unheimlichkeit originate in the infantile elements of the unconscious; the uncanny is nothing new, but is a ‘return of the repressed’ of sorts. In the Quebec case, the very excluded Other upon which identity is founded returns to disrupt the cohesion of the group.

How, then, does one move beyond this to include the excluded Other? Freud himself is interested in the origins of the affect itself; the context of his research does not require a solution. French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, however, takes Freud’s research a step further and suggests that the cause of xenophobia lies in the very unconsciousness of the unconscious. To live with the Other is to face the possibility of being Other, and to recognise one’s own Otherness requires knowledge of the ways in which the unconscious disrupts one’s conscious thoughts and behaviour. The Other stands before me as the foreigner, but is also within me as the unconscious mind. The theory of the unconscious exposes the illusion of the unified subject just as the foreigner reveals the impossibility of a monolithic national identity. The key to accepting the foreigner in his ‘Real’ expression, rather than simply in his neutered form, lies in recognising the influence of the unconscious mind or, as Žižek puts it, in unveiling the “nationalist discourse of purity” supporting any possibility of a monolithic identity.

In Freudian terms, affective bonds hold groups, even large groups such as nations, together. Groups stick together because the members have libido invested in each other, or ‘love’ each other. The key to integrating new members into the group lies in the creation of these affective bonds. Ultimately, then, the solidarity of a political group depends on something that cannot be enforced by law, something that state resources cannot even create; it relies on a basic human cognitive ability which, for reasons largely beyond the state’s control, some citizens are more capable of than others. A completely cohesive society, then, seems an impossible ideal, though progress can be made. Freud argues that these libidinal ties are created through identification, “any new perception of a common quality shared with some other person”. We thus come full-circle to Taylor’s suggestion; the best way to integrate new members is to find a common value or quality that all share in common. And how do we do this without reducing difference to similarity? By finding the Otherness within ourselves, as Kristeva suggests, which will make us more accepting of difference.

Questions of identity, even in Quebec, often appear as social and political blind spots. We rarely ask ourselves who we are until we have to, until our identity is challenged. As a conscious posing of this question, “who are we?” and as an exercise in democracy, the Bouchard-Taylor commission was, I would argue, a beneficial social undertaking. There can be no doubt that the commissioners’ recommendation of opening up Quebec identity is a helpful one; but how do we do this? Quebec identity is not Swiss cheese, whose holes can be plugged with other stand-alone cultures. At the same time, psychoanalytic theory presents the notion of an all-embracing society as a utopian vision that cannot stand the test of daily life. There is room for improvement, of course, and psychoanalysis theorises these possibilities as well; but we need to be realistic about where we hope the commission to lead us.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ (1921). In CW 18. Ed. James     Strachey. London: Vintage, 2001.

Freud, Sigmund. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1915). In CW 14. Ed. James Strachey. London: Vintage, 2001.< Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Uncanny’ (1919). In CW 17. Ed. James Strachey. London: Vintage, 2001.

Hooke, Maria Teresa Savio and Salman Akhtar, eds. The Geography of Meanings: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Place, Space, Land, and Dislocation. London: International Psychoanalytic Association, 2007.

Kristeva, Julia. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.

Taylor, Charles & Gerard Bouchard. Fonder l’avenir: Le temps de la reconciliation. Quebec, QC: Quebec National Library and Archives, 2008.

Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Taylor, Charles. The Malaise of Modernity. Toronto: Anansi, 1991.

Taylor, Charles. ‘The Politics of Recognition’. In Amy Gutmann’s (ed.) Multiculturalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Taylor, Charles. Varieties of Religion Today. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism’. New Left Review. 1/225 (Sept.-Oct. 1997).