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Over the past year, literally gallons of ink have been spilled dissecting, analyzing and just generally poring over the entrails of the failed Charlottetown constitutional accord. The media and political elites of the country seem obsessed with determining, once and for all, why such an open and inclusive document was so massively rejected by the Canadian people.
According Stephen Schecter, they will be unable to do so because they are asking essentially the wrong questions. A professor of sociology at l'Université du Québec a Montréal (UQAM) and a senior member of the university's Multidisciplinary Post-Modern Studies Group, Schecter has written his own appraisal of the Charlottetown Accord. In Zen and the Art of Post-Modern Canada (Robert Davies Publishing, 1993) Schecter puts Canada's constitutional crisis into the larger context of the crisis of Western civilization and the ending of the Modern era.
"We were trying to give ourselves a constitution," he says. "The founding document of society, the document that codifies the basic rules that govern the way we live and the basic precepts upon which the country is founded. But we did it in an age when politics is no longer the central institution that governs our lives. In fact, most politicians disclaim any responsibility for the reasons they got elected in the first place."
This is a hallmark of Post-Modern societies, Schecter explains. "As opposed to Modernity, which was a type of society that had certain goals as a collective entity, whether they lived up to them or not. These goals were enshrined in the fundamental political organization of the society. Today we live in a kind of free-for-all in which the 'social contract' we associate with Modernity falls apart."
Under these conditions, according to Schecter, constitution-making is well-nigh impossible. "If you try to found a society --which is what giving yourself a constitution is-- on a terrain where every interest group in society is considered legitimate and its rights something to be addressed; and if you assume that the sum of all these rights, interests, needs and desires are going to make society, you're never going to have any agreement. The spiral of unlimited demands, interests and pressure groups is going to continue forever.
"That's what happened to the 1992 constitutional agreement," he continues. "On the face of it, the agreement gave something to everybody: to women, to the Indians, to Quebec, to the West, and yet nobody was happy. Like Oliver Twist, everybody kept saying 'More, sir.'"
This is a consequence, a symptom of the changing norms of Post-Modern society. Ironically enough, this mindset originated in that 19th century bastion of Modern thinking; industrial capitalism, and its procedural, managerial approach to problem-solving.
"In our society, most decisions are made based on feasibility," asserts Schecter. "In other words, if something can be done, well, it's fine. And if it can't, it can't. And this becomes the way all organizations are run, starting with big corporations and their 'scientific management' and going on to virtually every other institution in society. There's no more specific logic to any institution; a factory, a university, a hospital, a parliament, they all look the same because they all run the same. They all follow the same logic. And when somebody's upset, when they try to protest in the name of justice or for some other substantive reason, they're always told: 'These are the rules. These are the procedures.' You can't argue with that, and it drives people crazy."
A kind of zero-sum game, I suggest.
"Not a zero-sum game," replies Schecter. "Because this game allows for the infinite satisfaction of multiple desires, interests and demands, whether they are individual or sectoral. That's why Post-Modernity has such tremendous attraction, everybody feels that they get a piece of the action. And since this society runs on the basis of management principles, everybody is a little manager in his or her life, and their aim is to get the most out of it that they can, and the devil take the hindmost. Except that the 'hindmost' happens to be society.