Ideas - The 2000 CBC Massey Lectures: The Rights Revolution by Michael Ignatieff

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

In his 2000 Massey Lectures on The Rights Revolution, Michael Ignatieff confronted the conflicted rise of human rights language in Canadian and global politics. "Has the rights revolution brought us closer together as a nation, or driven us further apart?" he asks in his final Massey lecture. We revisit this talk, as part of our series marking the 60th anniversary of Massey College.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

The entire legitimacy of public institutions depends on our being attentive to difference while treating all as equal. This is the gamble, the unique act of the imagination on which our society rests. In the year 2000, long before he became the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, Michael Ignatieff addressed the nation from a much different platform, as a Massey lecturer. The rights revolution has a double aspect. It has been about enhancing our right to be equal

and protecting our right to be different. Trying to do both, enhancing equality while safeguarding difference, is the essential challenge of the rights revolution. And this is what I want to explore with you in these lectures. The lectures were called the Rights Revolution, and in them, Michael Ignatieff examined the rise of rights language in Canada and around the globe, following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. He asked how our embrace of rights has transformed our understanding of what we owe each other, and how it's also challenged our sense of unity.

Rights bring conflicts out into the open, but there are ways in which they also help us to resolve them. This episode is part of a special series we've put together to mark the 60th anniversary of Massey College, one of our partners in the Massey Lectures. It features the fifth and final installment from Michael Ignatieff's lectures, The Rights Revolution, as it originally aired 24 years ago. In the course of these lectures, Ivory told the history of our country since the 1960s as a story of the struggle by different groups of citizens for rights and recognition. In this final lecture, it's time to draw together the argument and ask a basic question. Has the rights revolution brought us closer together as a nation or driven us further apart?

The answer depends on whose point of view you take. In these lectures, I've taken the point of view of the rights claimants in these struggles. Women seeking sexual and economic equality, Aboriginal peoples seeking recognition of their title to land, ethnic minorities seeking protection of their culture, and same-sex couples seeking rights equivalent to those afforded heterosexuals. From their perspective, the history of the past 40 years is a story of freedom, painfully fought for and far from achieved.

Unity, by and large, has not been their concern. From the viewpoint of the bystander majority, however, the rights revolution has often seemed less about emancipation than about fragmentation, with the Canada they once knew taken apart and reassembled into a fractious collection of rival rights communities. Gays versus straights, aboriginal peoples versus non-aboriginals, French speakers versus English speakers, immigrants versus native-born, non-aboriginals, French speakers versus English speakers, immigrants versus native-born, abled versus disabled, rich versus poor. The rights revolution empowered these groups at the price of disempowering the majority, and when a majority feels it's weakened, it's natural for it

to believe that the country has been weakened as well. Minorities have won recognition, and now it's the turn of the majority to look around and ask in astonishment whether it recognizes itself. Where is the majority anymore? Who are we? Once we thought we knew white, heterosexual, family-oriented, native-born people who were Canadians first and anything else second. Now the population is cross-cut with identities, sexual, racial, religious, and ethnic, making it difficult to speak of a Canadian majority at all. This may be one reason for the belief widely held among our elites that our country has become more difficult to govern.

The essential work of national politics is creating majorities, that is, national coalitions of interest. As the rights revolution fragments the majority, it fragments the coalitions that keep the country together. The rights revolution also seems to turn our politics into an exchange of recrimination between victims and their supposed oppressors. Now, it's not that there aren't real victims out there. The problem is that the majority has genuine difficulty accepting the idea that present generations remain responsible for the harms committed by past ones. How long must the Canadian majority continue to pay for the abuses committed by past ones. How long must the Canadian

majority continue to pay for the abuses done to Aboriginal peoples in times past? How long must it do penance for racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice? It's clear that for many Canadians the debate over past injustice has ended up producing not mutual recognition, but resentment. Victim and oppressor become codependent, locked into their roles and unable to shed them. The victim minorities resent depending on the majority for redress. The majority resents depending on the minority for forgiveness. Since forgiveness would foreclose future claims, victims tend to withhold it.

Since redress implies culpability, it too is withheld. So the politics of argument is replaced by a politics of blackmail and stonewalling. Many in the majority Canadian community who have felt themselves put in the dark by the incessant accusations of various victim communities do not see the rights revolution as a story of a successful fight for inclusion. Instead, they see it as a story of how a once strong country was fragmented. Before we can determine whether the Rights Revolution has been destructive of national unity, we should notice that focusing on the Rights Revolution and its consequences offers a different perspective on the unity issue than the one we became used to before the Rights Revolution began.

The unity debate of the early 1960s was almost entirely about whether Quebec's demands could be met within the framework of the early 1960s was almost entirely about whether Quebec's demands could be met within the framework of the Canadian Federation. No one else's claims belonged in the frame, certainly not those of Aboriginal peoples, women, people of color, and same-sex groups. None of these groups was perceived as offering any kind of political challenge to the unity of the country. The only such challenge came from Quebec, and the holy place where this challenge was addressed was the preserve of the high priests of federalism, constitutional lawyers and federal and provincial bureaucrats who knew by heart every arcane clause of the British North

America Act and could tell you, as the old joke used to have it, whether having sex in Canada was a provincial responsibility or a federal one. These high priests went about their work for a century and a quarter, interpreting the sacred texts and waving the incense of rhetoric in the direction of the congregation. But they didn't succeed in keeping the country together. Indeed, in 1995, we came within 60,000 votes in the Quebec referendum of beginning the dissolution of our country. By then, the high priests had lost control of the rituals of unity. Quebec's battle with Canada had become fused with all the other battles for recognition.

At the constitutional talks on Quebec's future, Aboriginal and women's groups won a place at the negotiating table. Quebec discovered that it could not secure its demands unless Aboriginal peoples and women also won theirs. As these rights claims converged in one negotiating forum, the result was deadlocked. A bilateral discussion between Quebec and Canada was transformed into a multi-dimensional chess game. This rights frenzy, as it's been called, the proliferation and entanglement of rights claims,

has made many commentators question our very capacity to keep the country together. But this negative point could also be put positively. Instead of fragmenting the country, Wright's talk has actually made the national unity process more democratic. By forcing their way into the negotiations on national unity between 1987 and 1991, women and aboriginal peoples secured a right of participation not just for themselves, but for all Canadians. Future constitutional change will have to be ratified by a national referendum. The citizens have forced their way into the inner sanctum, and whatever arcane rituals of accommodation are enacted there in the future will require the citizens' consent.

This particular point about rights, demands, and democracy could be generalized. Not all of the battles fought by minorities have only been on behalf of their own groups. Sometimes the rights that have been won have been won for everyone. For example, women were never fighting just for themselves. They were fighting for their own children and even for the men in their lives. Likewise, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not just a collection of entrenched rights for various linguistic, sexual, and aboriginal minorities. It's standardized rights for all citizens.

To the degree that rights struggles for particular groups enhance or clarify the rights of all citizens, they strengthen rather than weaken the country. In other cases, however, the majority is less convinced that it has benefited from the rights revolution. Other battles, such as those for language rights, aboriginal title, and sexual enfranchisement, have seemed not to benefit the majority, but rather to force it to cede power and cultural authority. The cultural authority in question is the right of the majority to define what the country, quote, stands for, unquote,

right of the majority to define what the country, quote, stands for, unquote, and how it's seen by itself and the rest of the world. So on questions of sexual morality, for example, the impact of the rights revolution has been to diminish the power of the heterosexual majority to define what is normal and normative in personal life. On questions of our national history and self-image, for example, the impact of the Aboriginal Revolution has been to force the Canadian majority to face up to the specter of racism in our national past. When groups get rights, in other words, they also get the right to change the national story.

And when they do so, the results can be painful. Once rights are granted, the majority has to live with the truth, and the truth can hurt. In more direct and immediate ways, that is through tax dollars, the Canadian majority has had to pay for the rights revolution. For many in this bystander majority, it seems that the Canadian state is being treated like a kind of general store situated at a dusty crossroads where federal and provincial power meet, which every passing traveler feels free to loot

in the name of some rights claim or other. Certainly, the cost of meeting rights claims, and these claims include rights to welfare, employment insurance, pay equity, and aboriginal title, did help to increase the federal deficit. And by 1995, the problem demanded a solution. But the solution, cutbacks to federal services, further weakened the welfare and regional adjustment programs that hold the country together. So in this way, meeting rights claims has not always strengthened the sinews of national unity. The revival of English-Canadian nationalism in the 1980s and 90s is a reaction to these trends,

not just to Quebec nationalism. The mood of English Canada has settled into a single angry demand. Enough is enough. This anger is focused not just on Quebec, but also on Aboriginal peoples and other rights claimants. Enough concessions, enough negotiations, enough rights already. There's a new sympathy for symmetrical federalism, equal rights for all provinces and all individuals, no special status for anybody. What I've called the pool table version of national political space seems to promise an end to the politics of victimhood and blackmail. Strict equality of individual rights will bring us together.

We'll cease to recognize each other as competing rights communities and instead see ourselves as fellow citizens. In an earlier lecture, I argued that this symmetrical version of rights just doesn't work. It's not true to our history. We simply are a patchwork quilt of distinctive societies. So Quebec is entitled to recognition as a distinct society, and its language laws, immigration statutes, and education provisions should be different in order to protect what's different about that province. There also need to be special language laws

as well as French language education for a province like New Brunswick because of the size and importance of its Acadian minority. Provinces with large aboriginal populations like British Columbia may have to devolve power over land and resources in ways that are different from other provinces. Each situation is different, and each needs to be addressed with special provisions. Yet recognition of distinctiveness doesn't have to fragment the country. What ought to balance these distinctive provisions is a politics of reciprocity. If Quebec is granted certain rights in respect of its language and culture, the rest of the

country has a right to expect the province to protect the cultures, languages, and religions of its minorities. Reciprocity, rather than strict symmetry for all, is the way to move beyond a politics of concession and threat into a process of mutual recognition, in which each side acknowledges the distinctiveness of the other. Aboriginal groups, to use another example, have a unique claim on the land and its resources as the original inhabitants of the country. But just as their treaties cannot be extinguished, quote-unquote, by later legislation, except with their consent,

so the rights of other Canadians cannot be extinguished by recognition of Aboriginal rights. The task is to find a way to reconcile Aboriginal claims with the rights of other Canadians, and to reconcile Aboriginal claims with the duty of the federal government to husband and conserve the environment. On both the Atlantic and Pacific fishing grounds, these issues have exploded. Burnt Church has joined Oka in the annals of Canadian conflict. But we would do well to remember, before we shake our heads at the loss of our civility, that rights haven't created these conflicts. They've merely validated the claims at stake. And in the case of disputes

over resource management, it's good that claims are understood as rights. We don't want a return to the days when Aboriginal peoples had no rights and when the federal government's management of resources went unquestioned. Equally, we don't want people defying the law or taking it into their own hands. If these are the limits of what's tolerable, then courts and legislatures will simply have to find peaceful adjudication somewhere in between. Aboriginal peoples and non-Aboriginal Canadians cannot live together unless both accept the ultimate sovereignty of Canadian law. Within this common frame, distinctive Aboriginal rights can be reconciled with both use rights by other groups and federal environmental controls.

The overall objective for all concerned is to find a way to recognize group rights while maintaining the unity of Canadian citizenship, so that we do not have either second-class citizens or privileged ones, and we can maintain equal moral consideration for all Canadians. This goes beyond balancing rights. It also means balancing acts of recognition. At the moment, the Canadian majority feels that it's faced with multiplying demands for recognition from various minority groups without these groups accepting any obligation to recognize the majority. This is the heart of the bitterness in English Canada over Quebec. It's the feeling that

the Canadian majority is being asked to concede recognition of Quebec's distinct status without earning any commensurate recognition of Canada in return. This perceived inequality of recognition has led many English Canadians to refuse to be party to further concessions. What has proved insupportable is not the nature of Quebec's demands, but the threat of separation that accompanies the demands. Give us what we want or we will go is not a form of recognition. It's an expression of contempt. But this inequality in recognition is felt on other fronts of the rights revolution as well. If a sexual minority demands its rights while at the same time scorning heterosexual family values,

it'll find it difficult to secure majority recognition. The majority may accept that it cannot impose its values on the minority, but it sees no reason why its values should be ridiculed. Nor does it feel obliged to do more than tolerate minority sexual behavior. The full approval demanded by minorities is often being met with rituals of political correctness rather than with a genuine and welcoming change of heart. This will change if recognition becomes genuinely mutual, if both minority and majority agree that in matters sexual, genuine difference of sexual taste is compatible with substantive moral disagreement

on what is cruel, degrading, coercive, or unfair. What needs to be affirmed in order to counteract the feeling of moral fragmentation is actually a commonplace, that shared standards of decency and consent are compatible with a proliferation of sexual practice and experience. In place of a contract of mutual indifference in which majority and minority sexual cultures simply agree to disagree, we need a moral dialogue that allows each of us to reach agreement on the forms of cruelty, neglect, and abuse that we jointly condemn, and on the forms of committed concern we wish to encourage. Indeed, in a process of mutual recognition on sexual and family matters, the ideal is that both minorities and majorities

share experience and learn from each other, especially in the matter of raising children. and learn from each other, especially in the matter of raising children. In other words, recognition is a two-way street. National unity depends on equality of rights and equality of recognition. Minorities recognize majorities. Majorities recognize minorities. Both seek shelter under the arch of a law they can trust, since both have had a hand in building it. This could be called a civic nationalist vision of what should hold the country together. But why call it nationalist? Isn't that a dangerous word? I could call it

patriotism instead, but that would reproduce an invidious distinction between positive patriotism and negative nationalism. In fact, patriotism is simply the name we give to our love of country, while nationalism is the epithet we usually apply to anyone else's. In reality, there is nothing intrinsically fanatical or extreme about nationalism, if we define it as a principled love of country. Canadians have good reasons to love their country, and I would argue that our rights culture is one of them. As I maintained in my first lecture,

the essential distinctiveness of Canada itself lies in the fact that we're a tri-national community trying to balance individual and collective rights without sacrificing the unity and equality of our citizenship. If you ask me what I love about this country, that's it. Now, it may seem strange to confess a love for something so seemingly legalistic and desiccated as rights. Yet we need to think of rights as something more than a dry enumeration of entitlements in constitutional codes, as more than a set of instruments that individuals use to defend

themselves. Rights create and sustain culture, and by culture I mean habits of the heart. Rights create community. They do so because once we believe in equal rights, we're committed to the idea that rights are indivisible. Defending your own rights means being committed to defending the rights of others. The commitment to indivisibility

goes with a commitment to mutual sacrifice. All rights cost us something. Even when we don't avail ourselves of our entitlements, others do, and we pay for their use. Belonging to a rights community implies that we surrender some portion of our freedom to sustain the collective entitlements that make all of our lives possible. This idea of sacrifice is the very core of what it means to belong to a national community. Paying taxes, obeying the law, submitting disputes to adjudication,

and abiding peacefully by these decisions. Sacrifice doesn't stop there. The reason that war memorials, for example, occupy such a central symbolic place in the national life of all peoples, even though the wars remembered are now far away in time, is that they represent the sacrifice that all citizens make to keep a community free. But nationalism is more than this. It's a way of seeing, a way of recognizing fellow citizens as belonging to

a shared rights community and as being entitled to the protection and the care that the national community can provide. The central issue for Canada in the wake of the rights revolution is whether a rights culture is enough to hold the country together, whether it creates a sufficiently robust sense of belonging and a sufficiently warm-hearted kind of mutual recognition to enable us to solve our differences peacefully. The criticism most often advanced against a civic nationalist vision of national community is that it's too thin. It bases national solidarity on rights equality, but neither rights nor equality make sufficiently deep claims on the loyalties and affections of people to bond them together over time. This is a very old worry about societies

based on rights. When Edmund Burke, the great Anglo-Irish conservative thinker of the late 18th century, fulminated against the type of society he saw coming into being with the French Revolution, he warned that revolutionaries were laying themselves open to continual rebellion. For these new societies were based on contract, on consent, on agreements between parties that could be dissolved at will. By contrast, the ancien regime societies whose disappearance he lamented had been based on tradition, history, common origins, and all the deepest sources of human affection and commitment.

Now, the enduring relevance of Burke's critique suggests that he identified a crucial weakness in rights-based societies. Clearly, rights are not enough. The elements that hold a country like Canada together run deeper than rights. The land, shared memory, shared opportunity, shared hope. Yet Burke and his fellow conservatives underestimated the power of rights as a source of legitimacy in modern societies, just as they sentimentalized the legitimacy of the Ancien Régime. The ancient and immemorial tissue of connections actually turned out to be insufficient to keep the France of the Ancien Régime together,

while the democratic republic that succeeded it, which was based on consent and contract, has endured for more than 200 years. On Ideas, you're listening to a rebroadcast of Rights, Revolution and Nationalism, an archival Massey lecture by Canadian historian and intellectual Michael Ignatieff. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National,

and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA I'm Nala Ayed. talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Canadian intellectual and historian Michael Ignatieff is a professor and former president and rector of Central European University.

His Massey Lectures aired in 2000, 24 years ago, but many of the questions he posed then remain deeply relevant now. This episode is part of a series marking the 60th anniversary of Massey College, one of our partners in the Massey Lectures. of Massey College, one of our partners in the Massey Lectures. It features the fifth and final lecture of Michael Ignatieff's series, The Rights Revolution, in which he argues that the rise in human rights language in Canada and elsewhere has made society fairer, but it's also come with a price tag. Even though contractual societies have shown themselves to be remarkably robust, we continue to worry, to paraphrase William Butler Yeats, that the center cannot hold. To focus these old anxieties about contract and consent on contemporary Canada, I want

to contrast civic nationalist states and ethnic nationalist ones. Civic nationalist states are created by formal constitutional acts of citizens, much as the French Republic was created by the Revolution. Canada, for example, is a civic nationalist state, and it was formed by a compact of its citizens in 1867. We are, to use Richard Gwynne's useful phrase, a state nation, a national community created and held together by the rights framework, infrastructure, and services of our government. An ethnic nationalist state recognizes its citizens on the basis of common ancestry, language, religion, custom, and ritual. Here, shared ancestry, or to use a more emotional phrase, common blood,

forms the basis of both identity and mutual recognition. Germany could be described as a national community of language speakers whose identity and ethnicity existed before the German state came into being. In contrast to Canada, a state-nation, Germany would be a nation-state, one in which identity is provided primarily by common national origins and secondarily by common rights and state entitlements. Let's concede that no nation is ever only ethnic or civic in the principles of its cohesion. We're talking here of ideal types.

America, for example, is held together by both the civic contract enshrined in its constitution and by the fact that a majority of its population remains white, Christian, and English-speaking. Yet the dominance of this silent majority will soon pass. In the next century, a majority of Americans will not be white, Christian, or English-speaking. Hence the anxiety with which commentators, most of them from this vanishing majority, ask whether equality of rights will be enough, in the absence of common origins, to hold the republic together. Canada faces similar challenges. It's held together not just by its constitution, but by formidably strong links of common ancestry. The problem is that

our ancestry is a double, even triple, inheritance. In Quebec, the majority Francophone community traces its ancestry to the original French settlers, and English Canadians trace theirs to the Scottish, English, and Irish immigrants who opened the frontier from the 18th century onwards. One million Aboriginal Canadians, meanwhile, trace their ancestry back to the heritage of the tribal nations of North America. This triple inheritance doesn't weaken the country. I think it strengthens it, but it does mean that the principles of national unity cannot be found by joint appeal

to common origins. This is essentially why Canada has no choice but to gamble on rights, to found its unity on civic nationalist principles. Its unity must be derived from common principles rather than common origins. The importance of these principles of unity is only redoubled by the impact of immigration. If there are more than 70 languages spoken in the homes of only one of our major cities, Toronto, then it's clear that we need a single common language to communicate together, and it's also clear that rights, not roots, are what will hold us together in the future. As the rest of Canada moves rapidly towards ethnic heterogeneity and a concept of unity based on shared civic values, Quebec still hesitates

over the temptation to pursue a different course, to separate from Canada and seek national sovereignty on the basis of ethnic majority rule. It does so in the face of exactly the same demographic forces that are changing the face of Toronto. There must be as many languages spoken in the playgrounds of Montreal schools as there are in Toronto or Vancouver. The new Quebec is black, brown, Asian, and white. In fact, Quebec has always been a heterogeneous society, and most people's origins are not exactly pure Lenne, as the happy frequency of entirely

francophone O'Neills and O'Briens attests. But a minority current in nationalist opinion thinks of Quebec as the homeland of Quebecers de vieille souche, that is, ancestors of the original French-speaking inhabitants. Independence is seen primarily as a vehicle to create ethnic majority rule for them. In moments of crisis and disappointment, such as the defeat of the Quebec referendum in 1995, these nationalists blame defeat on Quebec's minorities and call them the alien enemy within. Not surprisingly, Quebec's minorities do not believe their rights will be secure in an independent Quebec. They look to Canada and to its Charter of Rights and Freedoms as the ultimate safeguard of their liberties.

Quebec separatism is an ethnic nationalism rooted historically in a myth of separate ancestry. But, in fact, most nationalists aspire to a civic Quebec capable of incorporating all of its inhabitants. This split between an ethnic heart and a civic conscience is the fundamental contradiction in Quebec nationalist appeal. And the nationalist project is fated to political failure as long as it is unable to persuade the increasingly significant immigrant minorities of the sincerity of its civic and inclusive aspirations. of the sincerity of its civic and inclusive aspirations. Separatism is also fated to failure as long as Canada manages to persuade French Canadians

to participate in national life. Quebec has never been the only national home of French-speaking Canadians. In reality, as John Ralston Saul has done so much to remind us, Canadian national politics has always been held together by a partnership between French and English-speaking leaders. From Baldwin and La Fontaine in the 1840s to King and La Pointe in the 1920s, Québécois leaders have made Canada and not just Quebec their home. These partnerships realize the quintessential Canadian achievements,

responsible government, independence from Great Britain, the creation of a national railway, and equality of citizenship. These partnerships endure to this day, and English Canadians, who have been ruled by three French-speaking prime ministers since 1945, ruled by three French-speaking prime ministers since 1945, don't understand why Québécois feel compelled to seek mastery in a small house called Quebec when they already exercise mastery in a larger one called Canada. Now, there's no doubt that Quebec qualifies as a nation, if by nation we mean a human group who think of themselves as such, speak a common

language, and adhere to common myths of origin and common political principles. If Quebecers are a nation, they ought to be able to govern themselves. Yet, and this is the point, self-determination does not necessarily imply a right of secession. Secession with full statehood is justified, in my opinion, only when nations are threatened with destruction, when only the possession of state power can guarantee their survival. So, for example, Kosovars have a claim both to self-determination and secession because under Serbian rule they were subjected to unquestionable oppression. This oppression made it impossible for them to survive in Yugoslavia. But Quebec does not face a similar challenge to its existence,

and Quebecers do not need to have a state of their own in order to rule their own affairs. They are like most nations, which in fact secure self-determination by sharing the state with other nations, by securing effective self-government within a devolved system of power. This is how it is proved in the devolved federal experiment that is Canada. In the absence of a claim to secession based on clear evidence of oppression, Quebec separatists work up their appeal by alleging that federalism blocks the province's aspirations to full self-determination. Yet the claim seems specious since anyone with

eyes to see can realize that the Quebec government enjoys full power in education, language policy, employment, and immigration. This suggests that the ultimate issue is not the real division of powers within the federal system, but the symbolism of sovereignty. Many Quebecers don't feel they've ever taken full psychological and emotional possession of the federal state, and they look to the creation of their own to feel the final sense of being masters in their own house. If this is the issue, then further constitutional devolution in Canada is a waste of time, and further concessions are beside the point. The real issue is that we do not share the same vision of our country's history. The problem is not therefore one of rights or

powers, but one of truth. We just don't inhabit the same historical reality, and it's time we did. For two generations, English Canada has asked with earnest respect, what does Quebec want? It's time for English Canada to say who we are and what our country is. And the answer? We're a partnership of nations, a community of peoples, united in common citizenship and rights. We do possess a common history, and like it or not, we'd better begin sharing a common truth.

Here, for example, is the truth as most of English Canada sees it. The British conquest, far from extinguishing the French fact in North America actually brought the Québécois their first experience of self-government. This has been the case since the Quebec Act of 1774 when the British Crown recognized the rights of those of the Catholic religion, the distinctiveness of French law, and the right of les habitants to use French as an official language. The result is that for more than two centuries, Quebec has shared the same democratic institutions as the rest of the country, as well as enjoying recognition of its distinctive national character.

Indeed, one essential element of that distinctiveness, in comparison with the American Republic to the South, is that its National Assembly follows the norms and traditions of British parliamentary democracy. The point I'm making is that rights will not keep us together if competing visions of historical truth continue to divide us. In the Canadian case, the truths each side holds to be self-evident turn out to be the truths that divide us. So how are we to proceed? One way is simply to lay the two truths side by side, acknowledge their incompatibility,

and then seek insofar as is possible to put these disagreements to one side. Few societies ever achieve genuinely shared truth between majorities and minorities, so let us shed our illusions about securing a unity based on consensus. Yet I think agreeing to disagree is not enough. We do need to narrow the gap between our versions of the truth, always accepting that a gap of some kind is bound to remain. The conquest will always be la conquête for the Québécois, but we may in time persuade them that this was a conquest like no other, for it ultimately laid the basis for the survival of a democratic Quebec in North America. Conceding special status for Quebec in constitutional negotiations is probably inevitable,

but it does nothing by itself to alter each side's view of the historical truth of Quebec's place in the Canadian Federation. Special status, in other words, will not redress the conquest, nor will it necessarily make Quebecers more willing to accept the English version of the historical record. This means we should cease believing that constitutional settlements can end historical arguments. In reality, they can only produce a new basis for ongoing and unending dialogue. new basis for ongoing and unending dialogue. Truth is truth, rights are rights, and the debate about the proper extent of both will go on. Indeed, it's only when dialogue becomes frozen,

when there's no movement, that rupture becomes likely. To commit ourselves to the idea that the search for national unity has no end is not to despair, but merely to acknowledge that it's the very essence of nation-states that they harbor within them incompatible visions of the national story. Holding a nation together does not require us to force these incompatible stories into one, but simply to keep them in dialogue with each other, and if possible, learning from each other. And we have learned. No one in an English-Canadian school today learns the history I did as a child, a history that excluded native peoples and the Quebecois experience

of being hewers of wood and drawers of water in their own land. So we need to understand recognition between peoples as something more than a process of concession and negotiation alone. Properly considered, recognition is an act of enlargement that enables both sides to envisage new possibilities of living together. We don't simply recognize each other for what we are. We recognize what we could become together. And to do that, we have to recognize what we already are, a peaceable kingdom, a place where languages, cultures, and peoples shelter together under

the arch of justice. This is our raison d'être, our example to the world, our never-quite-realized possibility. These lectures have tried to point out exactly where this Canadian possibility lies. But the lectures have also tried to situate the Canadian experience in a larger context. The revolution has been global, and the challenge it has posed has been to all democratic societies trying to cohere and live justly in an age of rights. The challenge has been to reconcile community with diversity in an age of entitlements. The rights revolution has made us all aware of how different we are, both as individuals and as peoples.

Our differences, small as they may seem, are the basis of our identity. Call it the narcissism of minor difference. We don't dwell on what we share. Our every fashion statement declares that we are all singular. This doesn't mean we share nothing at all. Isaiah Berlin used to say that our moral language inscribes us within what he called a human horizon. We disagree about the ultimate ends and purposes of human life, but in the end we do so within that horizon. Values, to call them human at all, must be within the human horizon. That's why a rights culture is not relativistic. Murder, violence, theft, betrayal, lying,

are recognizably the same in any culture or historical epoch. But this common human horizon is far away. It's the outer boundary. Closer to home, within this shared horizon, we have profound disagreements. Murder is murder, but is abortion, for example, murder? And if so, when? Irreconcilable moral conflict occurs constantly because even when we start from the same principles, we disagree as to their meaning or application in specific cases. So if we really are that different, and if we disagree, how do we ever manage to generate enough consensus to live together in peace? This is where empathy, the human capacity to enter other people's minds, plays such an important role.

We enter other minds not merely because we can, but because we need to. We need other people's approval. Our very selves depend on knowing what others think of us. We need others because we're blind to ourselves. As Virginia Woolf said, there's a shilling-sized circle in the middle of the back of our heads that try as we might, we can never manage to see. Only others can see it for us and tell us what it looks like.

And so our very individuality is social. And this means that the precondition for order in a liberal society is an act of the imagination, not a moral consensus or shared values, but the capacity to understand moral worlds different from our own. We may be different, but we can imagine what it would be like to be each other. Let's not be sentimental about this. Our capacity for empathy is limited. In Shoah,

Claude Lanzmann's famous film about the Holocaust in Poland, you'll remember the Polish farmer whose fields abutted a death camp. Human ash rained down on his fields. He was asked what he felt when he saw fellow human beings going up in smoke, and he replied, I cut my finger, I feel it. When someone else cuts their finger, I only see it. Imagination carries us only so far. Our own sensations are invariably more real to us than the experience of others.

We live at the center of concentric circles of decreasing impingement, first ourselves, then those we love, and only much later and much more imperfectly our fellow creatures. But the imperfect moral impingement that others make upon us is as much a fact about us as our selfishness. It's on these facts and our capacity to imagine them that we build such community as we can. How do we generate a world in common? We take actual human individuals, rich, poor, young, old, homosexual, heterosexual, white, black, in between, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, that is, human beings in all their embodied difference, and we imagine them as equal bearers of rights. The entire legitimacy of public institutions depends on our being attentive to difference while treating all as equal. This is the gamble, the unique act of the imagination on which our society rests. This is a new gamble conceived in the 17th century by the founding fathers of the liberal political imagination. It could even be argued that they

never thought a rights community could be composed of literally anyone. Their original thought experiment was confined exclusively to white-propertied males. But once this ideal was imagined, the die was cast. For no sooner had white-propertied males begun to imagine themselves as rights-bearing equals, than the propertyless began to ask why they were excluded, then women, then non-white peoples. Once this type of liberal imagination takes root in a society, it becomes logically untenable to withhold its promise from all humankind. The political and social history of Western society is the story of the struggle of all human groups to gain inclusion. This vast historical process, which began in the European wars of religion in the 16th century, has been brought to a successful conclusion only now, in the rights revolution of the past 40 years.

All this is so much a part of our lived history that we barely notice its enormous historical significance. We are living in the first human society that has actually attempted to create a political community on the assumption that everyone, literally everyone, has the right to belong. We're all on the same perilous adventure, whether we live with our differences or die because of them. From Bosnia to Afghanistan, from Rwanda to Kosovo, ethnic warriors seem bent on proving that rights equality among human beings of different races is a sentimental fiction. beings of different races is a sentimental fiction. In place of societies built on rights, they are hacking out societies whose unity is based in blood and fantasies of common origin.

What we are trying to prove in societies that incorporate all human beings into the same political community is that the ethnic cleansers are wrong and that their vision of the future need not come to pass for us or for the people they tyrannize. We have reason to be hopeful, and not just because places like Canada are rich and have capacities to conciliate conflict that are denied poorer societies. We are lucky, too, because as colonial peoples, we were schooled in the life of liberty. Today, in our multi-ethnic, multicultural cities, we are trying to vindicate a new experiment in ethnic peace, and we've learned that the preconditions of order are simple. Equal protection under the law, coupled with a capacity for different peoples to behave to each other, not as members of tribes or clans, but as citizens.

We don't require very much in the way of shared values or even shared lives. People should live where they want and with whom they want. The key precondition is equality of rights. It all depends whether our differences can shelter under the protecting arch of justice. So the unity and coherence of a liberal society are not threatened because we come from a thousand different traditions, worship different gods, eat different foods, live in different sections of town, or speak different languages. All that's required of us is recognition, empathy, and reconciliation. To use once again the words chosen by a wise French-Canadian judge

when he delivered a judgment that brought long-delayed justice to fellow citizens of Aboriginal origin. Let's face it, we're all here to stay. Thank you. This episode was produced by Annie Bender. It's part of a series of conversations and archival lectures we've put together to mark the 60th anniversary of Massey College, one of our partners in the Massey Lectures. Thanks to Massey College and former principal Nathalie Desrosiers. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.