To the Marrow

In their 1991 groundbreaking work The Good Society, authors and researchers led by Robert Bellah concluded that without institutions modern society might as well padlock the door and wait for the end. Regardless of how diligent, generous or capable an individual may be, without the ability to strengthen and enhance our institutions all historic societal gains will be lost and people will become adrift from one another.The writers made a case for our institutions being the “patterned way we live together,” and concluded with what should have been obvious to all of us: “We live through institutions.” Granted those things that have held us together in the past – places of worship, governments, media organizations, educational institutions, and even democracy itself – can, like us, lose their way and contribute to an overall dulling of the senses. Yet since life without such essentials is impossible, our only real alternative is to reform or reinvigorate those institutions to make them work practically for us again as a citizenry.What, then, happens to a society where one institution – perhaps the most powerful of them all – conjures to destroy other foundations it once created or, indeed, even depended upon?  We live in such an age. As democracy slowly loses traction to politics, everything becomes a target or an obstacle to a sense of absolute power.In a national context this has been happening each and every day for the past number of years. While media – itself an estate gifted by democracy – has primarily opted for the play-by-play description, large swaths of democratic interplay, and even human rights, are being swept away by the very government selected by the people in what is becoming an increasingly unsound method of choosing representation.Placed together, the list of things we have counted upon, occasionally cursed, but all benefitted by, is under attack, eliminated altogether, or perhaps just plain ignored.  A clear case of the latter occurred this week as the federal government opted to keep out of celebrating the anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Why no applause from both the PM and official opposition leader? That’s easy. It was a Liberal accomplishment in their mind and so they swept it under the rug.A Conservative MP friend of mine said once to me that Stephen Harper isn’t an ideologue but instead an “incremental pragmatist.” He smiled even as he said it, quietly acknowledging the fallacy of what had just escaped his mouth. The PM has one great ideal beyond retaining power at all costs – to destroy the Liberals completely. But when that comes to killing Katimavik, ignoring the Charter, killing the CBC by a thousand financial cuts, undermining our international diplomacy, gutting international environmental accords, taking Elections Canada to court, or blowing up the historic balancing act of Middle East diplomatic efforts, he undermines not only Liberal, Conservative, Bloc, and NDP foundations, but the very institutions of Canada themselves.Because, as stated earlier, democracy itself is the most potent institution of all for the incredible power it can wield, Parliament – House and Senate – becomes the most important channel of all for curbing incessant and autocratic power. But Stephen Harper has assisted in denuding the former and buying out the latter. In the end, he successfully negotiated the transition of definition from the “Government of Canada” to the “Harper Government.” If Parliament were a religion (it is to some), the last act alone would be termed as the “desecration of the Holy of Holies.” No matter, he got away with it – even surviving being found in contempt of Parliament by the Speaker of the House.This might all sound like typical political trickery, but in effect it is a brazenly open attempt to haul down the institutions of democracy so that its ability to recover could well prove impossible, thereby leaving the present Conservative construct in place. It is one thing to use sleight of hand to baffle the voter, but another altogether to, in the light of day, tear down the very edifices that make us who we are as a people and provide us tensile strength to adapt in times of change.The Good Society was a clear and chronicled attempt to warn America that if they permitted their institutions to atrophy or be wiped out, then it was only a matter of time until they lost not only their way, but their place in the world. Given what we have seen in the last number of years, it was a prescient utterance.Canadian author and professor Mark Kingwell has been attempting to serve a similar purpose for the Canadian context. He worries about institutions too – Canadian ones – as when he notes:Human communities … are discursive achievements, processes of seeking and finding conversational partners and forging with them, painfully and by increments, the shared public institutions that will work for us. We are what we make of ourselves.We fail to realize or comprehend in alarm that when the government talks about “cuts,” it isn’t so much speaking of finances as the severing of the very sinews of our common life. We are in danger of no longer being ourselves or even becoming our own tomorrows. We have been cut to the marrow and we are existing increasingly apart. If we live through our institutions, what happens when they are gone, severed not by war but through autocracy?