Dear Yvon,
To rule out any possibility of misunderstanding, I must first express all the esteem in which I hold you. I have an immense respect as much for the depth of your thought as for the elevation of your ideals. In fact, I hold you to be one of our most lucid, of our most honest intellectuals. So I feel honored by this exchange.
Here is what inspires and motivates the comments that follow: my thought, I confess to you very humbly, does not fly at the same altitudes as yours. I have less ease than you in discovering a deeper reality behind reality. This is what leads you, for example, to perceive wealth in poverty, a possible springboard to true wealth. Or to see in weakness the conditions of a humanity.
There is another reason why my reflection is held back from taking flight on the example of yours. I have remained too deeply marked by the family and social environment in which I grew up. The adult I have become has been unable to distance myself from them to shed new light on these harsh realities. On this point, I stuck to a knowledge and a memory that struggle to fully access the second culture as you understand it.
A failure ?
It is all this that prevents me from sharing your vision of the Quiet Revolution, which you call a failure because it failed to rise beyond genuine enrichment and power. The perception that I have of it stops on more primary observations. You believe that the Quiet Revolution was a failure, because it was the search for money and knowledge to counter poverty and ignorance. It was, in fact, to get a people out of its condition: illiterate, proletarian and colonized. It was also a question of pulling him out of the poor idea and even the shame he had of himself in order to inspire him with self-respect and, if possible, pride.
You write: we should have fought poverty without turning away from the spirit of poverty. Is this an ideal within reach of individuals whose material poverty and intellectual unpreparedness were the daily lot? You would also have liked them to fight alienation without reproducing the culture of the dominant. Is that really what they did, strike a dominant pose? Above all, I see a society which, despite many efforts, has not yet succeeded in freeing itself completely. Is this the bourgeoisie? Are we really swimming, as Vadeboncoeur said, in an unreal world, without problem and, consequently, without solution?
You also write: the refusal to assume our culture has prevented us from developing it. It’s a happy phrase, but our culture, as you know, was the product of a few centuries of colonialism, submission and humiliation. Have Quebecers, in extricating themselves from this condition, diminished themselves at the same time? Personally, I would say that we were able to combine a legitimate ambition and the confidence we lacked with a hard-won self-respect.
I quote you again (where you rely on Simone Weil): we would have opted for money, for the desire to win which destroys the roots. For money or for material security and a modest comfort that is not even the lot of the majority of Quebecers yet?
Finally, you take up another idea from Vadeboncoeur to suggest that we are inhabited by a desire for power that inevitably leads to a form of violence. I have observed our society for half a century; I haven’t seen anything like it.
A fund of complicity
I believe that your reflection is addressed to elite souls (of which you are obviously a part). It reminds me of that — infinitely respectable — of Fernand Dumont, Pierre Vadeboncoeur, Jacques Grand’Maison. They too were disenchanted with the Quiet Revolution, which they criticized very severely despite what it had brought, in particular the democratization of education without which we would perhaps not exercise the noble profession which is ours.
But their disappointment was inevitable, they would have liked it to give birth to a virtuous society, a model society of which no example is known. Is it fair to judge us by this yardstick? Why demand of us what no one has achieved? This kind of call is likely to produce not the desired effect, but its opposite.
After reading the above, don’t think I’m a jovialist. I am a harsh critic of our society. I am often saddened by his weaknesses, his compromises, his softness. But I keep a fund of complicity, friendship, fraternity — I won’t add “indulgence”, that would be giving me a magisterium that I don’t deserve.
So here we are. Very close, but not on the same level. You will have understood that I concede the upper hand to you. But don’t set the bar too high: players like me might fall short.