| February 7, 2010 | Diversity and its Discontents Paul Bramadat |
Good morning, everyone. I’m really pleased to be here. I’ve not been able to join you much since I arrived here in 2008, but some of you may recognize me from previous Sundays during my mother’s reign of terror. If you remember me you may recall that when I gave those sermons I was actually a professor in the department of religious studies at the University of Winnipeg, where I lived for ten ridiculously cold and ridiculously hot and buggy years. The visits were enjoyable, and I decided I liked the place so much that when the opportunity came to actually move here, I jumped on it like an environmentalist on a petition (or like a “fat kid on a Smartie”).
My visits to this pulpit as the guest speaker often began with some gentle teasing between me and my mother, but alas, she was so worried about what I might say now that she actually boarded a plane and flew to New Zealand.
This wistful talk about my mother in her absence may seem to be a digression, but it’s not, because I want to begin my sermon this morning by observing that diversity is as Unitarian, or as Canadian, as mom and apple pie, or since I’m at a Unitarian congregation, I might say mom and potluck humus, or mom and Nanaimo bars.
Diversity is the Golden Retriever puppy of liberal Canada – even those people who don’t like dogs find themselves wanting to pet Golden Retriever puppies. Even those who find themselves hostile to the government find it hard to reject out of hand the government’s trumpeting of diversity (and here I am referring to virtually all Canadian governments, provincial and federal, for the past many decades).
What could be sweeter than a Golden Retriever, and what could be sweeter than diversity?
This morning I want to open up a conversation around diversity that seeks, as they say in the academy, to “trouble” or to “problematize” diversity.
I should begin by saying that many discussions in the media and in the government about diversity take a strange turn very early on because they gather too many meanings into one word. In fact, the term diversity – at least diversity as it should be used – is a rather empirical, objective term, referring to the sheer complexity of a human population. In this case, we see diversity everywhere, since everywhere you look you’ll find people who are women, men, straight, gay, bisexual, children, adults, left-handed, right-handed, wealthy, poor, and so on. So, virtually every human community is diverse in this sense in which there is some kind of many-ness everywhere.
In fact when most people wax poetic about diversity what they normally have in mind is what I would call pluralism. In my view, whenever you see an “ism,” you’re looking at an ideology, a way of describing the way the world is and ought to be. There is a moral component of pluralism that is not really implied in diversity.
In other words, diversity refers to a factual portrait of the political reality. Pluralism, on the other hand, refers to a morally or as we say, normatively oriented portrait according to which the fact of diversity is framed as a decidedly good thing about the world, a thing we should embrace, protect and perhaps enhance. Again, in the word pluralism – and especially in the even more Canadian term multiculturalism – we come closer to what Canadians actually mean when they speak in such glowing terms about diversity.
Okay, so much for terminology. Now we can move to the sweeping generalization section of the sermon, and to begin this section I would like to say that Canadians have some good reasons to feel we have developed a very productive and peaceful approach to diversity. It’s rare for me to be so chirpy about this topic, but I think I can say with some confidence that with the rather conspicuous exception of the way we have treated First Nations, the last several decades of Canadian history suggests there are some good reasons that we have one of the best records in the world when it comes to fostering societies in which diverse populations can co-exist peacefully.
However, the situation is complicated, and sometimes even a Golden Retriever puppy will bite. I would like to describe two scenarios – the first is hypothetical and soon to be real, the second is real – that reflect some of the tensions within Canadian society regarding what we might call the limits of Canadian style pluralism.
Muslims in schools
Take, for example, Canadian school systems. I won’t bore you with the administrative details, but many of you know that education is a provincial matter in Canada, so there is no such thing as a “Canadian” school system. There are provincial systems, and some significant national family resemblances between them, which is why we talk, somewhat sensibly, as though there was a single Canadian system. In fact, even within the provincial school systems, there are variations between school boards. And even within a single school board, there are differences between the way particular schools might want to or be able to respond to provincial curriculum.
Each school is subject to pressures from what we might call above and below: from above, meaning from the provincial and school board policies; and from below, meaning from the neighbourhood, teachers and teachers’ unions, parents, and students. The way pressures from above and below are negotiated is a delicate matter involving lots of give and take, and the end result is not necessarily predictable.
So, given this situation of give and take, imagine, if you will, a school in an urban centre such as Toronto or Vancouver. And imagine that in such a school, the orthodox or conservative Muslim population was substantial, but just to use a number, let’s imagine the population was greater than 50%.
So, one might plausibly imagine a situation in which the students, teachers, or parents might well approach the principal or school board to request some accommodation in the school’s policies. They might ask, for example: a) to segregate gym classes according to gender, or b) to take down advertizing posters that might be deemed to be sexually provocative, or c) to alter school schedules to suit the statistical majority of students in the school who need to break in the middle of the day to pray or who might benefit from a lighter load when they are fasting during the month of Ramadan.
Since co-ed physical activity is a cornerstone of the high school experience for many, and since virtually all advertizing aimed at teenagers is sexually provocative (otherwise why would teenagers pay attention), and since the school day is already crammed with activities, granting these three accommodations would certainly be noticed by non-Muslim students and parents.
What might, or what should happen in such hypothetical cases? What rights do Muslim students and families have to make a request for accommodation?
On the one hand, one could say that making these changes would appear to run counter to certain formal expectations of gender equality and inter-gender mixing and the supposed secularism found in most provincial policies and principles. On the other hand, one could also say that these parents and students are citizens of Canada and residents of Toronto or Vancouver, and since the school system is supposed to welcome all students, it is, de facto, supposed to welcome orthodox Muslims, and yet they find certain features of the school system to be patently unwelcoming of members of their community.
Shariah-based tribunals for settling family law disputes
Let me paint another picture, this one based on a true story. The Government of Ontario passed an Arbitration Act in 1991 which allowed people to take their family law troubles to so-called “faith-based” arbitrators whose binding decisions would be based on religious assumptions and regulations. For about a decade a few religious communities made use of this Arbitration Act in order to expedite the settlement of their members’ personal problems through reference to religious principles.
Then, in 2003 a Muslim group (the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice) made it known that it would like to use this 1991 Act to set up its own arbitration panel, based on Shariah law. To put it mildly, the government was terrified by the public backlash against this proposal, and so it hired Marion Boyd, the former NDP Attorney General of the province and a woman whose intelligence, feminist credentials and progressive leanings were not in dispute.
Marion Boyd then dutifully went around talking with lots of people, studying the law, etc., etc., and in December 2004 made a recommendation to the government that in her view it is acceptable for Muslims to set up these tribunals as long as 46 – forty-six!— recommendations or amendments are accepted and as long as it is made clear that all arbitrations must comply with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The lead lawyer for the Islamic Institute was delighted with Boyd’s report and said that some of her recommendations actually came from him.
Anyway, to make a long story short, after about a year of protests in Canada and abroad – and some of these protests came from Muslim groups opposed to this idea – in September of 2005 – September 11th, actually – the Ontario government threw the baby out with the bathwater and decided that all arbitration from then on would unfold according to secular provincial laws, and all involvement of religious groups would amount to non-binding advice only.
I could go on and list some other incidents in which we have bumped up against what some have called the limits of diversity, and what I’d rather call the limits of Canadian pluralism. However, these two scenarios – one set, based on a school setting, is hypothetical whereas the other scenario is real – demonstrate that far from being sweet and lovely like mom and apple pie and Golden Retrievers, diversity is very often extremely problematic and fractious because grappling with it can often highlight some of the most deeply embedded and practically invisible features of the status quo.
In these situations, it’s not quite enough to give diversity a warm cuddly hug – one needs to treat it with great care. Here are situations where diversity costs something. But what are the costs, exactly?
Well, the costs in the case of the school scenario relate to letting go of a particular notion of public education – but a closer look at the way we’ve tended to think of education reveals that it is a product of a particular kind of the European Protestantism that, at least in English Canada, gave our society its shape. From the emphasis on the individual, to the emphasis on liberalism, from the Christmas and Easter holiday breaks to (until recently) Christmas concerts and Christian prayers at the beginning of classes, from the language of O Canada to the picture of the Queen, the school system is a product of the people and the communities that have left their mark on Canadian society. This is not at all problematic – or at least it’s completely predictable and not inherently wicked. We’ll return to this in a moment.
But what about the costs associated with the case of the Ontario arbitration scenario? Well, those are complicated, but similarly, accepting Marion Boyd’s report would have required us to take a leap of faith as a society, a leap of faith into a multi-religious world in which we would have to walk our pluralist talk.
I would imagine that this opinion will not win me any friends in this church, nor with my friends in the Canadian Council of Muslim Women (which also rejected the notion of Shariah-based tribunals), but in my view, Boyd’s report and her 46 recommendations intelligently and creatively addressed the concerns of many of those who were so worried about the consequences of the Shariah tribunals – especially the consequences for newcomer women.
The concerns about the way Shariah-inspired law has been used in other places in the Muslim world is a legitimate concern, of course, although the debate was so polarized and so noisy that people didn’t pay very close attention to the fact that Shariah is not a monolithic thing, and is itself the source of intense debate throughout the Muslim world; moreover, Canada is not like “other places.”
While the implementation of these tribunals would not have been simple, the 46 changes Boyd recommended would have made it extremely difficult to abuse the system or women; or at least it seems to me that women will fare much more poorly now that – as before – there are no public and transparent mechanisms involved in what you might call the back-alley Shariah tribunals that no doubt continue to rule on the appropriate way to divorce and divide assets and so forth.
It’s worthwhile to reflect on why it was that so many people had never heard of the 1991 Arbitration Act until Muslims opted to make use of it. All of a sudden, people became incensed that there was a law that allowed religious groups to govern themselves according to their own conscience and traditions.
The subtext of the protests in Ontario was clear: many people felt they could not trust one particular group – Muslims – to use this Act to govern themselves in an acceptable manner. What we saw was the classic, and very problematic, division of Muslims into good Muslims and bad Muslims, moderates and fundamentalists; and the so-called fundamentalists behind the pitch to use the existing arbitration act to support their tribunals were the “wrong” kind of Muslims. No one observed out loud that the same kinds of complaints were not made about whether we could trust Christians – even “bad” or “fundamentalist” Christians – to use the “faith-based” system. No one pointed out (or the pointing out didn’t calm the debate) that Canadian governments have for some time enabled First Nations communities to settle some of their disputes and determine sentencing according to a distinctive legal and moral system.
The general, abstract, notion that there should be one law for all people in a given province or country makes a certain kind of formal, logical sense, but it’s notable that in many respects this is not the way things actually work – but this reality didn’t lead to massive protests in Canada or around the world until Muslims entered the debate and sought some accommodation.
The double standards so evident in the debate about the Shariah tribunals in Ontario were appalling.
My own perspective was that since Shariah-based arbitration was already happening informally but without any transparency, without any standardized training or supervision of arbitrators, without any reference to the Charter, and without any external oversight or review, Boyd’s recommendations would actually be better for the people involved largely because it specifically addressed these concerns and would have brought the whole process into the light of day.
Moreover, and more relevant to a sermon on diversity: it would have given the province (and the society) a chance to indicate that they trusted Muslims to act in accord with Canadian standards; it would have, at the very least, forced the state to articulate what was meant by the notion of Canadian standards, and it would have created a situation in which the arbitrators would have been held to account.
That said, I think it’s quite possible that Shariah-based tribunals might have failed miserably – perhaps, indeed, some of the fears of Muslim and non-Muslim feminists might have been realized, but at least the tribunals would have failed publicly (whereas now they may well be, arguably, failing privately). Even that failure would have represented a learning opportunity for the people involved in the arbitration panels. And for the rest of us.
What actually happened – in my humble opinion – is that the public debate devolved very quickly into irrationality, rumour, and xenophobia. In fact, many people who support all manner of sexual, moral, class, political and racial diversities all of a sudden found themselves propounding arguments that, at their heart, excluded orthodox Muslims from the circle of trust; that said that even with 46 improvements to the current Act, Muslims cannot live within this circle of trust; that said we believe that Muslims can’t be trusted to adapt Shariah principles to a Canadian context, even though (to the best of my knowledge), Shariah-inspired principles and practices necessarily exist to a certain degree in dialogue with the societies in which Muslims live.
The government realized that it couldn’t simply insert a clause into the 1991 Arbitration Act saying that “Well, geez, sorry about the ambiguity, folks, but just to make it clear, the “faith-based” arbitrators we have in mind do not include Muslim arbitrators.”
Even though the sentiment in such an amendment would have captured quite well the tone of much of the public debate on this matter, obviously, the government knew such an amendment would not have gone over well, and would have been correctly interpreted as utterly anti-diversity. So as I mentioned, it simply rendered the act meaningless by underlining that there is really only one way to arbitrate these kinds of issues, and while people were still welcome to consult “faith-based” arbitrators, their rulings would be considered as advice and not binding.
What’s really happening here?
Well, it strikes me that when we’re confronted with these challenges, many of us missed the opportunity to step back and see the bigger picture. We often forget that these public systems – in this case, the education system and the legal system – were designed to celebrate and nurture a very particular kind of public: a white, Christian, English-speaking, loosely monarchist, liberal democratic, European kind of public. (One is reminded of this design whenever one hosts a visitor from another country who asks why on earth we still have pictures of the Queen – of England and Canada! – in our schools and on our money.)
Again, this is a very fine public, and worthy of celebration: it has given the world, and us, many advantages.
But – and here’s maybe where I’m going to get preachy – that world, that comfortable Canadian world in which so many of us have grown up, that world of maps with the broad swath of commonwealth countries coloured pink, that world of deference and unilingual Anglophones, that world of a so-called “secular” but implicitly Protestant school system, that world of so-called “secular” but implicitly Christian legal and political discourse – that world, my friends, is dying.
That is hard to say and hear, but it is the truth. That world is dying partly because it was based on a system of power in which for so long religious, political, and economic forces conspired to keep our world safely insulated from the troubles that plagued other places, and that used the resources and the people from those other places in a manner that suited us well. But this is no longer the way things are, for so many reasons.
I won’t belabour the reasons, though you know them, probably – we’re seeing now the consequences of environmental over-consumption; the end of what appeared to be entrenched political rivalries; the dawn of other political patterns; the rise of large sections of the developing world whose people are hungry and thirsty and no longer willing to be ruled and consumed by others; the end of certain kinds of religion and the flowering of other kinds; the porousness of international borders.
The list of harbingers of this new world is long, but the point is that the positions people adopt to the kinds of scenarios I have sketched out this morning – the imagined and the real ones – reflect a quite deep anxiety about the tectonic shifts that are happening in the world at the moment.
It’s easy to look in shock and revulsion at some of the xenophobic policies or public utterances emanating from Europe – especially France and Switzerland – or even those we heard coming out of Quebec during that province’s public consultations on the accommodation of minority claims, but we would do well to search our own minds and hearts for signs of our own anxieties about our own place in the new world.
And it is a new world because the old world, the old safe world, is dying. That is a mixed blessing, really, since that world is dying because it served so few people, because the earth can no longer sustain it, and because it was based on a view of ourselves and our “others” that is no longer sustainable in a period in which we understand ourselves so much better and in which we have more and more contact with our “others.” This business of knowing the other is not a simple matter, and while it makes sense to celebrate diversity, it is a wise community that takes advantage of every opportunity to reflect deeply on the way it defines the limits of diversity, pluralism, and accommodation, and the reasons it advances for these limits.
These quandaries will only increase with time, and some may well be more complex than the two I have used as case studies. As far as I’m concerned, the question Canadians and Unitarians will need to answer in the coming decades, is whether we will face this coming world with courage and integrity or whether we will strengthen our fortress and nurture our anxieties.
Personally, I am by nature politically optimistic, and I sense that during the long life of the old world in Canada, we built a political and social system, and cultivated a broad culture of pluralism that will, or at least could, equip us well to enter the new world. I am by nature religiously optimistic, too, and I sense that although Unitarianism in North America has reflected the privilege of the old world, the governing ethos and the spiritual vitality of this tradition are actually rooted in, and might therefore give to the world, a far more encompassing, far more holistic and far more richly pluralistic vision of the future than we have seen so far.
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