Something happened, I am not sure what, but suddenly talk filled the airwaves a while ago with regard to the latest census in Canada, the result of which apparently revealed that half of Toronto is made of visible minorities. And the commentators were almost unanimous in wondering if we should not be teaching somebody - I am not sure who but probably the minorities - something about our history and system of governance. But none of the commentators revealed why they were prompted to say this.
As someone who spent most of my life teaching, I have a few observations to make in this regard. I believe that in the same way we need to learn how to think in order to produce useful thoughts, we need to learn how and what to learn in order to make our endeavor a useful one. So let me begin from the beginning.
Teachers exist to teach but the students are so varied and they can be so single minded in their approaches to learning that no teacher may go through the experience without learning a thing or two from them. In this regard, the one thing that impressed me most about some of the students was the way that they believed they could learn. Even though some were in their twenties, they believed they could learn just by listening to the lecture in class and by owning the books without ever opening them.
I remember having a comparable attitude myself but with a difference since I was around three years of age when it happened to me. I asked my mother to teach me to read and write; she said I must learn the alphabet first which she set out to teach me. I do not know how long it took me to learn the thing but one day I discovered I had memorized all twenty eight letters that make up the Arabic Alphabet.
The moment I succeeded in reciting the whole thing I pounced on the pen and tried to write something but could not. Disappointed, I turned to my mother and asked why. To my chagrin and to her amused astonishment she replied that I have yet to learn how to write the letters I just recited. Well, I suppose I displayed no more naïveté than the students who believed they could learn the content of a book they never opened.
Now that I am not three years old and not even young enough to return to my old profession, I see something comparable happening all around me. We have in this culture several levels of legislatures that churn out new laws and regulations almost everyday. We also have several levels of courts that churn out new precedents every hour of the day. And yet we never encounter someone thinking aloud or talking about the best way to comply with the laws and regulations, be that on the air or off the air.
On the contrary, we are exposed at every turn to the news and to advertisements that tell how the lawyers and the accountants of this country navigate their clients around the law to get away with murder and to save on taxes. In a climate where the example is the thing, you cannot blame ordinary people, including some members of the visible minorities, for taking the attitude of who needs to open the law books when the officers of the court and the chartered accountants are thrashing them left and right!
What come out of this are two lessons. First, we do not go through life knowing all there is to know about the things on which we base our decisions; therefore most of the decisions are imperfect. Second, more often than not we tend to build a system of beliefs based on false premises, a reality that determines how we live our lives and how we interact with each other. This happens not because we lack access to knowledge but because we are too lazy to access that knowledge.
Looking at our current human condition - which is probably what the commentators were trying to tackle on the air - we profess to cherish the notion that we have a system of laws and not a system of men in this country. But the fact is that we are as illiterate about the system by which we govern ourselves as a three year old who has yet to learn how to write the letters of the alphabet.
And the reality we refuse to acknowledge is that a book of laws written by special interest in the middle of the night, now sitting on the shelf of a lawyer or an accountant, does not make a system of laws. And since democracy is supposed to flow out of this system, democracy itself has ceased to flow despite the fact that it is the religion to which we must all adhere, being the common language that is supposed to bind us together.
Having pulled down the curtain on the real thing, we find ourselves compelled to put on a make-believe show to give the impression we have a functioning democracy. But when something is created for a purpose and the purpose is forgotten yet the people act out the thing, we call this a ritual. Therefore, what we now have is the ritual of a democracy through which we make the correct moves but seldom practice what we pretend to be.
Rituals have existed for a long time. They were invented to replace the religious demands that were beyond the ability of some people to perform. And because there is a resemblance between religious beliefs and political beliefs, a few things were equated between the two and transferred from one to the other. This being the case, we can do a test on the religious side of the equation to see how it might apply to political governance.
For example, if we need to measure how strong someone’s belief is, we may ask how far that someone would go to invoke or to affirm their belief. And the best real-life example to illustrate this point is the legend surrounding the American actor John Wayne who was the quintessential blue-blooded all-American shoot-them-up swaggering extreme right wing cowboy on the screen.
The story is that contrary to the character he played, John Wayne was never certain he was doing the right thing. He was concerned that he might have sinned all his life being so extreme in his views, and he was afraid to die and go to Hell. So he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed and asked to be baptized right there and then. He did this because he heard that in Catholicism all sins are wiped clean when someone submits to the ritual of the baptism. Thus, to force God to take him in Heaven, John Wayne did what he thought would fool God for eternity in the same way that he fooled his fans and audiences during his lifetime.
The question now is this: Do we believe in our democratic fantasy like a fanatic who would die for his religion or do we believe in it the same utilitarian way that John Wayne believed in Catholicism? Whatever the answer, I have a few more questions. What sort of civic education those commentators thought was needed? And who would they teach it to? The lawyers? The accountants? The visible minorities? The invisible majority? Or the commentators themselves?
And what would happen if we are shown that our knowledge of the system we adhere to does not exceed the knowledge of the students who never opened their books? Or the knowledge of a three year old who has yet to learn how to read and write? Do we then import teachers from where the visible minorities came the same way that we imported their priests when we realized we had lost our moral and religious compasses?
When I think of these questions I am reminded of what happened ten years after I learned to recite the alphabet. I was so eager to say things before I thought them through; a teacher felt compelled to give me advice. He said I should engage my brain before I open my mouth. And this is the advice I now give to the commentators who would say something just because the least informed among them said it first.
Whether born here or born elsewhere, most of the minorities that the commentators wonder about are likely to be better informed about the history and the civics of this country than anyone else. And there are a couple of reasons for this, they chose to be a part of this country and they know how to be responsible citizens. Can the commentators say the same thing about themselves?