Liberalism - To Have and Not To Hold

It’s likely that much of the difficulty facing mature democracies in today’s world stems from our desire to hold on to those things that make us feel secure and which have provided us with the prosperous lives most of us enjoy.  But we forgot that the entire structure of democracy itself is a process, not an ideal.  This is hard for us to accept, for there is a natural inclination to “possess” that which brings us benefit.  But that’s like “possessing” our children, our spouse, or even God.  Those great things in life that have motivated us to higher acts of learning, self-sacrifice, patriotism or compassion only empowered us to such capacities because they were bigger than us: in effect, they “possessed” us.  Yet as highly as we have come to regard our Canadian democracy, it eventually loses its ability to inspire and motivate us as citizens when it becomes so small we believe we can wrap it up and place it in our back pocket.It’s an eternal democratic responsibility to protect our democratic institutions, whether at home or abroad, but only after an ongoing process or pursuit of refinement.  It is greater than all of us and we incarcerate it at our peril.  This was a distinct problem of earlier centuries, where if we suddenly lost a king with no successors, or a church with no divine priestly sanction, we were a people lost.  In the end, such reasoning kept us imprisoned as individuals and societies, unwilling to seek change to improve our lot.  Until we became oppressed by these very elites, that is.  Then we hankered for different paradigms and power structures.Into that breach came liberalism, reminding all that we ourselves had great unused capacities, abilities to learn and to organize ourselves together in new structures that would better service our ultimate pursuits.  Education and science were keys to that grand opening of human possibility and by restructuring our societies around them, the world changed, and we along with it.The problem was that no progress comes without alterations of the power base, and there were many in those earlier centuries that refused to release their firm grip on society.  They punished, purged and peddled propaganda in an effort to retain loyalties.  But it was too late.  Once power moved not to other institutions but to individuals directly, it could never be reigned in or “kept” again.What actually requires protection is not democracy itself but those “windows” that actually enlighten it – science, research, the vote, education centres, and the media.  These are instruments meant to objectively assess the state of our collective and individual being, keeping it not so much patriotic but open.  Certainty is a wonderful thing, but when it succeeds in excluding vital information from society, it places the democratic order in jeopardy.This is the particular challenge facing Canadians today.  When political parties or regions of individuals band together to protect their way of life, that is only natural.  But when they seek to use fear and half-truths to do it, they have demeaned democracy itself.  This is what makes the present government’s decision to do away with the long census so troubling.  Researchers, economists, statisticians – all these, and more, say the long form is what actually provided the new and evolving information about how this country is functioning.  But the Conservative ideological and unbending belief that we need smaller government and therefore don’t require more detailed information leads us backwards.  The long census provides us the tools as citizens for the making of policies that are adept and incisive; in taking it away from us, you’ve demeaned us and underestimated our ability to build a better and evolving society with that information.It is this penchant for ideological blinders, for only some truths but not others, that has caused a powerful minority to seek “possession” of a way of life that really belongs to all of us.  The liberal (small “l”) way that has so prepared our society for changes in the world has served us well, and whenever the Liberal Party itself aligned itself with that process, it too has brought progress to this great land.  In moving among the grassroots as it has been in the last year, it is offering itself up once again to the “self-organizing” people of Canada and asking for assistance to reform itself for better service in the future.  That is the opposite of elitism.  The other opposition parties have expressed that same openness.  But when the one party that is in power seeks to “possess” our collective franchise or “dumb down” our intellectual right, we have no choice but to pull together, as people of all political stripes, to thrust open the windows of enlightenment and the doors of opportunity.  It is our right; it is our responsibility.  Democracy is ours to have, but never to hold, lest it turn to stone.  And its never ours to darken.