The Drama of an Unfinished Life
I recall sitting in the House of Commons during the 2008 budget debate wondering, “What happens if the recovery finally arrives and we end up with less?” Sadly, that appears to be what has happened. We are no further ahead and we have a massive debt for all our trouble.Somehow we never got to maybe. Another recession has passed - the worst since the Depression - a we remain on the mat, diminished. An economy that was supposed to work for us has instead undercut our potential, cast the jobless in the netherworld, and created a generation of Canadians more worried than at any time in recent memory. We can blame the political parties, but that’s just the easy way out. Our problems lay much deeper within the sinews of our economic system that flushes massive amounts of money away from the average citizen and struggling community.We are learning the hard collective truth that our decisions of the past have become the architects of our present. All this has transpired because of our own lack of attentiveness during what appeared to be the good times. Well, now is the time for a national examination, picking up on the observation of the old philosopher Socrates, on “the worthlessness of the unexamined life.” It is astounding to think that during more productive economic times we permitted that “public” part of our lives to lie idle as we pursued our individual dimensions of prosperity. What we could have accomplished together in those decades! Now, as we discover the precariousness of our situation, those resources are gone, replaced by a dizzying array of debts and deficits.It seems to me that Canadians are actually arriving at the place of introspection only to discover upon a closer look that our future appears to be something of a bust. Our dollar doesn’t stretch as far. Employment is fraught with the sense of the temporary. Many of our communities lie in disrepair. And we face that most disheartening of all predicaments, where we discover that our children and grandchildren might never rise to our previous affluence or opportunity.Perhaps we’re finally getting serious, not only with the ominous tasks before us, but with those in the financial and political elites who not only failed to caution us as we headed down this path but who actually so politicized the process that it remains difficult to trust them to lead us into the future. We arrive at the same point as sociologist and philosopher Erich Fromm, who once taught a class titled, “The Struggle Against Pointlessness”. How do we fight a system that appears, on the surface at least, to be so arrayed against us? How do we wrestle public control away from private interests? How might we put meaning back into a politics of mendacity? These are some of the fundamental questions of our age.How does one struggle against “pointlessness”? In a column for the Huffington Post on Canada’s Senate yesterday I quoted a reasoned observation by author Saul Bellow that bears repeating here: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” We permitted ourselves to be duped into living the illusion that all was well. We have been told repeatedly that we’re getting a handle on climate change. That’s a fabrication. We are informed we can no longer afford governments. That’s an outright lie. And we are instructed that this party or that party has the true answers to our challenges. That is a fantasy. Our illusions have fueled us into impotence, feeling that we cannot change our circumstances and neither can our leaders. Mountains of punditry, editorial heft, partisanship, and economic ignorance prepared us for this moment - we believed because we needed to and it permitted us to lead lives with ever-lessening financial accountability.Not anymore. Against all this pointlessness and futility citizens are displaying a measure of angst and concern - a hopeful moment. Yet they continue to account themselves as victims of the elites as opposed to joint participants in the previous illusions. That will have to change, but for the moment concerns over the vacuity of politics and the sheer impersonality of the financial order are bringing more Canadians out of the doldrums and seeking other options than the status quo. They are displaying a propensity to steer by the brighter stars of their intelligence rather than the mere consumer mindsets of their illusions.After many seasons of permitting ourselves to be divided into classes, political parties, and regional champions, a certain breaking down of silos is emerging. In his book Dangling Man, the Bellow speaks of one man refusing to speak to another over a paltry offense. How the man entreats the other back to dialogue is an example of what we need to understand if we are to renew the country.
No, really, listen to me. Forbid one man to talk to another, forbid him to communicate with someone else, and you’ve forbidden him to think, because thought is a kind of communication. And his party doesn’t want him to think, but to follow its discipline. So there you are ... When a man obeys an order like that he’s helping to abolish freedom and begin tyranny.”
We remained apart and distracted too long, permitting ourselves to be muzzled in the process. The ultimate question remains, however: will we permit our collective story to end here, unfinished, or push on to pen the next chapter of our democratic potential?