Thursday, November 28, 2013

Le mirage de la Charte - L'actualité

Le mirage de la Charte - L'actualité

Another article from L'Actualite, this time on a legislative matter apparently pending in Quebec.  The proposal would establish a Quebecois Charter of Values. A sort of legislative decree as to what it means to be a French Canadian in Quebec..  L'Actualite opposes it.   I'm not going to comment on that, as I'm not Quebecois (although I'm descended, in part, from some who were). Rather, I'm commenting here at this brings up the topic of what happens to a people when they cease to adhere to the things that made them who they were.

The only reasons that there are French Canadians is that the English allowed them to keep their Faith, to the horror of many American colonist to their south, and the Priests urged them to remain rural, stay on the land, and stay away from politics. This they did. And by doing that, they preserved, long after it should have expired, a French Norman culture rooted in the values of the original Norman colonist.  This has made them Quebecois, not French, and it's the reason that they have a cutlure they are proud of today (but which isn't the same one in France, which the French at least are well aware of.

Cultures do change, there can be no doubt, although they do not change as much as it might be imagined.  Cultures also can be amazingly resilient and evolve, adapt, or even reemerge.  They can, however, also become absorbed or even cease to really be.  An interesting question exists here on the nature of cultures that are defined, in part, by religious values.  

Once these cultures cease to have widespread participation in the Church, they can cease being themselves and begin to wonder why.  Ireland is one such nation. Still overwhelmingly Catholic, it's less Catholic than it once was as that situation develops it starts to be less Irish.  Quebec is very much that way.  Once overwhelmingly rural, overwhelmingly agrarian, and overwhelmingly Catholic, as the Quebecois have shed all of that they're now distressed to find that you really can't define the culture by the language it speaks.  Lots of Moslem Algerians speak French every bit as well as the Qeubecois.  

To give a counter example, however, the Russians managed to be Russian even after Communism murderously suppressed the Russian Orthodox Church.  The lesson there, however, might not quite be what it seems as it proved to be the case that the Russian Orthodox Church retained a stronger pull on Russian culture than would have been guessed. Virtually defining part of that culture prior to the fall of the Empire, it seems to have remained fairly strong in spite of Communist suppression and has enormously reemerged after Communism's fall. 

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in Quebec.  It's playing out in Ireland as well.  And in a lot of other cultures at the same time.  Not that this suggest things are hopeless by any means, as that simply wouldn't be true.  If the Quebecois are now pondering what makes them that, perhaps they ought to look at their Catholic, agrarian, past.  That doesn't necessarily mean a return to the past, and it doesn't even mean that everyone in Quebec must become a believer if they are not.  Rather, perhaps Quebec ought to acknowledge what the Russians seem to, in terms of culture, or what the Icelandic do, or what the Greeks do, which is that that certain influences, both agrarian and religious, defined them, and that without acknowledging that, they really aren't.

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