It wasn’t called the “Weinstock affair” yet, but all the ingredients were in place for it to become one very quickly. On February 20, 2020, leaving a morning meeting, the philosopher saw his world crumble. A columnist was dragging him through the mud, for no reason. The government repudiated him, without further verification. It was perfectly surreal. Absolutely absurd.
Daniel Weinstock spent the morning on the phone, trying to extricate himself from this waking nightmare. He didn’t have time to prepare for the ethics course he was giving at 1:30 p.m. at McGill University. He showed up in class, stunned, when a student threw at him: “Hey, Prof Weinstock, you’re trending on Twitter! »
Three years later, Daniel Weinstock has turned the page. He confides to me all the same that the affair has left its marks. “Me, I did not do a doctorate in philosophy to trending on Twitter. My natural place is not in the media. It was quite a traumatic event…”
Enough, in fact, for the Montreal philosopher of international reputation to retire, for a time. After the shock, he had less desire to debate secularism, pluralism or language and identity politics. His favorite subjects, which have become hot in Quebec for a few years. Daniel Weinstock needed a break.
But here he is back. Because the state of public debate in Quebec worries him.
Daniel Weinstock gave me an appointment at the Café de Mercanti, in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce district of Montreal. He arrived in a cold rain, a hat on his head, a full beard on his chin. The philosophy teacher has the physique for the job. We sat near the window.
“The vision of Quebec, in government policies and in the major media, has become somewhat consensual,” he laments from the outset.
With his colleague Jocelyn Maclure, he has just launched “Le Québec autre”, a forum of thinkers concerned about the decline in pluralism and the erosion of democratic institutions.
These intellectuals consider that they have a duty to reply to the prevailing discourse. They undertake to do so in a constructive way, respecting the facts, refusing to caricature or overstate.
Vast program, in these times when invective and personal attacks too often seem to have become the norm.
The world of Daniel Weinstock rocked a few days before the whole world rocked in turn.
On February 20, 2020, in THE Montreal JournalRichard Martineau accused this “disturbing specialist” of having “proposed that Quebec doctors carry out ‘symbolic excisions’ on young girls”.
A truncated quotation made the philosopher say the opposite of what he thought. In reality, Daniel Weinstock objected to this unreasonable accommodation.
Never mind: the Ministry of Education had rushed to withdraw its invitation to a forum on the reform of the course of ethics and religious culture…
The affair had provoked an outcry; the philosopher had quickly obtained an apology.
“A few days later, the world changed we were in lockdown, he recalls. I have been concerned about how society is responding to trauma like the pandemic. I thought about it a lot. I turned away a little from the issues on which I had always intervened in the public sphere. »
But it wasn’t only because of the pandemic. In the wake of the case that bears his name, Daniel Weinstock had received “pretty disturbing emails”, to the point of wondering if he should call the police. “We don’t necessarily want to go through this repeatedly. Has there been some setback? Probably yes. For me, personally, this initiative, Quebec Otherwise, is a way soft to try to regain a place in the debate. »
A debate that he sometimes feels he has lost.
Daniel Weinstock has been in all the debates since the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accommodation in 2007. He had never had this impression of defeat.
“Among the things that concern me: the extremely light way in which the government uses the notwithstanding clause, which for me is a legitimate mechanism of the Canadian Constitution, but a mechanism of last resort. »
This provision (the “notwithstanding clause”) should be invoked when all other solutions have failed, he believes. It should have been proven that restricting individual rights is the only way to achieve a collective end.
“When the Government of Quebec invoked the derogatory clause for Bill 21 and then for Bill 96, agree disagree with the content, I would have hoped for a greater reaction, like: ‘heille, c’ what you are doing is serious, these are fundamental rights”.
But no. No one reacted, or else, limply. “That’s when I said to myself: we may have lost the debate. Perhaps we have reached a societal consensus around a conservative nationalist vision of Quebec.
With hindsight, Daniel Weinstock thinks that his camp adopted a bad communication strategy to denounce the use of the notwithstanding provision by Quebec for its bills 21 and 96. “We presented the importance of protecting individual rights as a legalistic and technical question, a question of judges. So we are a little on the defensive when, on the other side, there is a more exciting vision of what a good, French-speaking society should be – an objective that I share 100% – which defends its cultural specificity” in a Anglo-Saxon Sea.
But a society that defends individual rights is also a good society, he argues.
It is the idea of a society in which we stand together in defense of our differences. We meet each other out of curiosity, rather than suspicion of a potential threat. This is a vision that has already been that of Quebec.
Daniel Weinstock
And who could, he hopes, become so again.
His parents, Jews, were born in Warsaw and Budapest. They met in Montreal. “They sent me to French school when they weren’t required to do so at the time. My children went to school [publique du quartier]. For them, Warsaw and Budapest are halfway around the world. They are French-speaking Quebecers. »
He does not believe in the catastrophic talk about the waves of immigration that will engulf Quebec society.
The story of my family is that of hundreds of thousands of families. It is a story of the success of the assimilating force of Quebec. […] Quebec institutions have succeeded in creating a pluralistic French-speaking society. Those who fear immigration tend to overlook their integrating force.
Daniel Weinstock
These things are studied. They measure up. The members of the forum intend to tackle it. “In our counter-narrative, it is important that there is supporting evidence, not just abstract philosophical principles. »
It is still necessary to be able to discuss it calmly.
On April 2, 388 intellectuals co-signed in The duty a “call for vigilance in the face of hatred and violence in the media and online”. Among them, several forum members, including Daniel Weinstock.
The letter denounced the personal attacks, the sentences diverted from their meaning and the tweets collected on Twitter and spat out with contempt to fuel the discontent and create a pack effect against their authors.
She attributed this behavior to some columnists and hosts and urged their bosses to call them to order. Some saw it as a call for censorship.
Daniel Weinstock sees it rather as a call for openness.
In our echo chambers, we are comforted by being reunited with people like us. We have less and less contact with people with different points of view, which gives rise to a kind of demonization of the other. Inevitably, we tend to caricature it, to give a false representation.
Daniel Weinstock
Coincidence: the day we met, a chronicle of the Montreal Journal come to the same conclusions. She speaks of a truth that “social media and echo chambers have succeeded in burying under a ton of prejudices and ready-made ideas: people are always richer and more complex than their political opinions”.
The chronicle is signed… Richard Martineau.
When I point out this coincidence to him, Daniel Weinstock is delighted that we have – perhaps – come to this. To realize, on both sides of the political spectrum, that we no longer speak to each other, or almost. And to wish to resume the dialogue, finally, with respect. “I am ready to debate with everyone. »
Questionnaire without filter
1. Coffee and me: I drink a lot of coffee, probably too much. In Montreal, I have favorite cafés for writing and meeting people. I like to work in places where there is a kind of general noise. I am not a solitary philosopher.
2. The people I would like to meet at the table, dead or alive : I’m a big music lover, so… Bob Dylan. The novelist Hubert Aquin, a fascinating personality. And my favorite writer, short story writer Alice Munro, 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.
3. On my bedside table: My wife would tell you that it is no longer a bedside table, it is rather a bedside mountain! I’m overwhelmed with books, it’s almost structurally dangerous for our house… I’ve just finished night crawling, by the young African-American novelist Leila Mottley.
Who is Daniel Weinstock?
- Born in Montreal on May 23, 1963
- Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford. He had done his master’s degree at McGill University, under the supervision of Charles Taylor.
- Professor at the University of Montreal from 1992 to 2012, where he notably directed the Ethics Research Center of the University of Montreal.
- Since 2012, professor at McGill University, where he holds the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy.
- His research focuses on moral philosophy and contemporary politics. Over the years, he has been particularly interested in language and identity politics, democracy, citizenship and pluralism.