I’ve read a lot of political platforms in my life and helped write a few of them. However, I had never found a sentence like this: “We ‘agree to disagree’: our adversaries are not our enemies. »
Nor had I happened to come across a variation of the following statement: “We claim the right to offend, to displease, to shock, to think otherwise and we recognize everyone’s right to be offended , to displease us, to shock us and to think otherwise, without ever tolerating hate speech or incitement to hatred. »
These excerpts are taken from the text published this fall by the Bloc Québécois and which is destined to become the party’s credo. They are remarkable, because in other times it would have been incongruous to mention these common sense positions. But since it’s 2023, in a world of toxic polarization of public debate, those things that should go unsaid are decidedly better said.
I choose to read in it a double appeal which only seems paradoxical at first sight. We can offend and shock, the Bloc tells us, without considering that the person we are offending is an enemy. It is therefore a question of knowing how to debate and formulate opinions which may seem radical, but respecting one’s adversary and hoping that, if the latter shocks us, he respects us no less. This is the basic equation of political — and legal — debate from which we seem to be drifting in both directions.
First, by finding it unbearable to be offended by a contrary opinion. From this refusal to live among the asperities inherent in the debate were born the expressions “micro-aggression” and “ safe space “. Then, by declaring that the person who dares to deviate from the vision that one judges just is necessarily, personally, infrequent.
The main argumentative innovations of the century are aimed precisely at not engaging the discussion on the level of the ideas themselves. If you are criticized by a man, call it mecsplication. By a woman? A feminazi. By a white man? A supremacist. By a black or a native? One woke.
If you are presented with a comparative argument to relativize your position, say that it is ” whataboutism (you are trying to compare what should not be). If someone criticizes an aspect of a cause you support, say that it is ” dog whistle (you use a partial argument that seems reasonable, but it’s just a sham that refers to your real, hateful belief). If we want to put in context or bring a nuance to an argument that you support, say that it is ” gaslighting (a reference to a Hitchcock film where a husband wanted to drive his wife crazy by playing with the luminosity of gas lamps).
The toolbox of debating is overflowing. The certainty of being absolutely right is in vogue, like the readiness to pillory the adversary. Two postures also taken head-on by the Bloc authors. They claim “the right to make mistakes, to review our positions, to change our minds”. How refreshing! They then specifically oppose “censorship, cancel culture, intimidation, humiliation and people’s courts that substitute for the justice system, including on social media and under the guise of anonymity”.
It’s a good fight: respect for others, attachment to the principles of the benefit of the doubt and civil coexistence of divergent points of view. You have to learn (relearn?) to defend irreconcilable points of view — on abortion, the death penalty, end-of-life care — without cursing your opponent for thirteen generations.
Quebec is no exception. At the leaders’ debate, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois suggested to the conservative Éric Duhaime to run in Texas, and the latter responded by throwing Cuba in the face of the united MP. In the Assembly, Nadeau-Dubois and François Legault called each other “Duplessis” and ” woke “. Despite these rather rare counter-examples, Quebec seems to resist the spiral of polarization better than the rest of North America. We collectively have a reflex of refusing censorship, banned words. We refuse exclusion when it strikes members of minorities, yes, but also when it ostracizes white men.
It is without doubt that we come from a tradition of seeking consensus, stemming from our condition as a minority people. The former rector of McGill University Bernard Shapiro liked to say that if Quebeckers managed to agree so well on all sorts of subjects in their forums, their industrial clusters, their economic summits, it was because all the issues seemed trivial. in comparison with the existential debate that had occupied them for half a century: the independence of Quebec.
In other words, because federalists and separatists had survived, without violence, two referenda which challenged their very identity, they had acquired in these confrontations the tools of civility and could agree on all other subjects, by definition less thorny.
In the 1960s, in the face of the student revolt, the hippies who complained about the vacuity of a consumer society that their elders had nevertheless built on the rubble of the last world conflict, it happened to hear older French people let go of this comment: “It would take them a good war! Young people would thus learn, they thought, the real harshness of life.
We don’t wish war on anyone, that’s understood. But to follow the wise logic of Bernard Shapiro on the Quebec experience, one could conclude that to reinvigorate civility in the debate, “it would take them a good referendum”.
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