The Uselessness of Policy Resolutions
In a recent post, I suggested that no policy resolution passed by Canadian political party convention between 1994 and 2020 had effect on party election platforms or policies enacted while in government. While there may have been instances of party conventions adopting policies also adopted by their part in government, these adoptions were either post-facto or coincidental.
Time and again, every Canadian political party from the Greens to the Conservatives has defied the policies passed at party conventions and written election platforms into which, not just members but ordinary MPs and MLAs, have negligible input. With all power concentrated in the office of party leader, to select candidates and caucus members at will, since 2003, it is not surprising that Canadian political parties run like the imperial Russian state. Power flows into the office of the autocrat by vote of the members in convention. Thereafter, all power remains concentrated in that single person until removed by a party convention or stepping down.
In such a system, there are other powerful people with decision-making power, finance ministers, attorneys and solicitors-general, chiefs of staff and candidate vetting committees but their power is not derived from party members or even voters at election time. It comes from and is solely dependent upon selection by the party leader.
I have rehearsed these arguments in other essays in recent years, more than once. But what I have not chosen to examine further is the thinking and behaviour of party activists who spend hour upon hour drafting policy resolutions, getting them prioritized on convention agendas and building a supportive coalition of convention delegates to vote them through.
A half-remembered tradition of convention resolutions affecting party platforms and government policies from Canada’s first century seems an insufficient explanation. We are approaching fifty years since consequential votes at national policy conventions were part of our political culture. And given the general state of collective amnesia that envelopes our politics today, it seems quite improbable.
So, what does motivate these folks to pass resolutions at the conventions of parties that they know will ignore them?
I want to make a radical suggestion in the form of some fancy religious studies/theology terminology: ontological dualism.
Ontological Dualism
As Los Altos Institute approaches its tenth birthday, we are settling into an organizational identity, history and culture in which we can observe patterns. One is that, unlike many ecologically conscious, socialist communities, our culture is not especially atheistic, even though atheists are likely a majority.
Rather, it is a culture friendly to and representative of atheists and other “ontological monists,” like Jews, Mormons and Sikhs. These faith communities, like atheists, tend to either reject or minimize the idea of the supernatural. All of creation, whether originating in God or not, is governed by the same set of rules in ontological monism. If people have spirits, they are material, either epiphenomena generated by brain activity or physically detectable parts of the body our instrumentation cannot yet pick up. If angels exist, they have physical being of some kind and operate within the same systems of physical causation as human beings.
More importantly, ontological monists focus their religious practice on creating a just order on earth. The work you do for God here on earth is an end in itself, not a means of purchasing a ticket to heaven. If God has a kingdom, the centre of religious practice is building the part of it that exists on earth. In other words, our institutions members may be atheists but if they are theists, they are likely “religious but not spiritual.”
Ontological dualism, on the other hand, is something we associate with most religious folks. Their discourse and practices are heaven- rather than earth-centred. What we do on earth is understood to be “just a test,” as memorably characterized by David Shore’s Gregory House. Our actions on earth are highly consequential only insofar as they are the basis on which God judges how we will live our next life, whereas, for ontological monists, they are consequential for the opposite reason, that this earth, this society, are the ones that are most real and merit our sole or primary attention.
For ontological dualists, then, religious debates are often about guessing, deducing and describing the divine order and divine judgement that are understood to follow this life on earth. The phrase “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” seeks to mock this kind of speculation that has characterized most theological and cosmological writing across religious faiths.
Ontological dualism is a way of thinking that grew up gradually between the Classical Period (500-322 BCE) and the Englightenment (1750-1849), with Plato often credited as its progenitor. The idea that material reality was an inferior creation made by a fallen divinity called the demiurge, and that it was but a shadow of the true reality, the world of forms, which could only be perceived in one’s mind’s eye, was easily hybridized with a wide variety of religious traditions. And as hard science increasingly diverged from the descriptions of the cosmos in religious doctrine, we built a category of ever increasing size to enable science to continue advancing unimpeded by religion.
In the Middle Ages, this even became formalized in educational institutions. There were two separate academic fields that studied the heavens, Mathematical Astronomy, an empirical discipline used to calculate the length of years, the timing of eclipses and the like and Physical Astronomy, the discipline that described how the universe really is. In this way, the crystalline spheres made from the quintessence (fifth element) that encircled the sun, moon and each of the planets orbiting the earth could be safely protected from the insights of mathematical astronomers about how the planets moved.
In this way, religious authorities were happy to admit that the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo constituted major advances in the field of Mathematical Astronomy. They were just not pertinent to Physical Astronomy.
This was something Galileo could not abide. The existence of Physical Astronomy as a discipline was anathema to him. “It is for the church to decide how to go to heaven, not to decide how the heavens go,” the quotation attributed to him goes. Rather than being content with their being two universes, a natural one governed by empirically discoverable physical laws, and a supernatural one governed by laws communicated through the church, Galileo saw only one universe, making him a heretic and an ontological monist.
Although the Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton saw the movement of the boundary between the natural and supernatural, it nevertheless required the continuation of this bifurcated view of the universe to prevent religion and science from going to war. As long as science did not pronounce heaven, angels and the immortal soul either subject to discoverable physical laws or non-existent, an uneasy peace could be maintained, until the next time the nature-supernature boundary had to be moved.
Secularized Dualism
I have spent some time writing about how conservative religious folks today are focused on pushing the dividing line between the natural and the supernatural backwards. Faith communities that once broadly accepted that our climate, geology and evolution of species were in the “natural” category of phenomena now campaigning to place these in the “supernatural” category, things that only God can describe through his chosen ministers. But what I have not done is adequately examine the ways that these categories have been maintained in the mental architecture of the secular and the unchurched.
Among scholars of religion who have sought to explain the sharp differences between American and Canadian religiosity, the most important theory is that the Social Gospel movement came to be absorbed and institutionalized through the Canadian state and its party system. Canada’s first truly national socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the first to form government was an explicitly theocratic party led by a succession of churchmen. The party’s first leader was Methodist minister and former Canadian Labour Party MP, J S Woodsworth; its first premier was T C Douglas, a Baptist minister.
And not only was the Social Gospel the animating ideology of the CCF; it also functioned as a hegemonic discourse within progressive, liberal Canada. Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had written his own book on the Social Gospel and declared it to be the principal ideology of the longest premiership in Canadian history, comprising just shy of a quarter of the twentieth century.
Canadian secularization proceeded more rapidly and more completely than US secularization, it is argued, because liberal Protestantism essentially fused with the state and its party system, while religious conservatives were much more averse to leaving traditional denominations that were based on religious affiliations that could be traced back to the Old World.
But evidently, this secularism is more superficial than we realized. As so often happens with an idea you drum out of language and discourse, it actually grows more powerful in the dark, in the uninterrogated unconscious of groups and individuals.
The Modern Policy Convention
How better to explain political party conventions than as secularized ontological dualism, our Protestant heritage returning to bite us?
Think of a political party convention as an Anglican or Lutheran synod. Geographic delegations arrive from all over to do three kinds of business:
- hard-nosed, bare-fisted organizational politics, deciding who holds powerful positions, how resources are divided-up and which team of adherents gets to dominate the positions that control the organization’s purse strings and real estate portfolio;
- enjoying all the social connections that are based around the organization, great conversations with people of like mind that one rarely sees, leavened by free food and drink often dispensed in acts of competitive hospitality by different factions of the organization; and
- forging agreements, reaching compromises, conducting votes and holding debates about a divinely-ordered world you have never seen, settling questions like whether gay couples stay together in heaven and are recognized by God as spouses, deciding whether the soul enters the body at conception or quickening, deciding whether evolution is a hoax or whether it is actually the hand of God himself, in other words, making supernatural decisions about what God, his angels and heaven are like
Folks sure have got excited about whether God blesses same sex unions, whether gender exists is heaven, whether slave-owners are served by their slaves in heaven and conducted contentious votes on these subjects, despite the fact that they know their votes do not control God, nor do they control the created, physical world. And yet they vote and fight and organize and undergo schisms, all because they disagree about things they cannot affect.
This is the modern political convention. No one is debating policy resolutions about what their party’s next government will actually do. They are debating what hypothetical governments that will never exist should do. Party policies are hypotheses about the organization of heaven, not plans for organizing on earth.
The Policy Consensus
There are reasons, of course, that this shift followed the end of the Cold War. Even after Canada moved from the British imperial sphere to the US from the 1930s to 50s, it was viewed as advisable for Canada to have a stable, thriving manufacturing sector, supplied with food and raw materials by the country’s Atlantic and Western peripheries. Local elites in Atlantic and Western Canada functioned concurrently as clients to what is termed the “Laurentian elite” of Quebec and Ontario and clients of American elites who were extracting an increasing proportion of the materials from the Canadian periphery.
The central dynamic arose after the Second World War in Canadian political economy were efforts by Western Canada’s peripheral elite to become a US periphery, unmediated by the needs of Central Canada. Deregulation, ending supply management, free trade and investor rights were the calls of Saskatchewan potash, Manitoba hydroelectric, British Columbia timber and Alberta oil interests. These interests were vigorously opposed by and typically lost to the Laurentian elite that presided over the Windsor-Quebec City industrial strip.
But since the end of the Cold War, all of Canada is now the periphery. The Laurentian elite are presiding over the deindustrialization of Quebec and Ontario and are seeking to reach an accommodation, even to merge with the rentier elites of Western Canada. But the now-ascendant resource elite of the West are split over whether to accept this fusion with the Laurentians or to seek dominance in their own right and the creation a new Central Canadian resource elite.
That is all Canadian federal elections are about now. The Conservative Party of Stephen Harper represented the latter, and, to the horror of the Laurentian elite, was able to govern Canada with little assistance from Central Canada’s old elite. Attempts by the Laurentian elite to retake power on their own ended in disaster in 2008 and 2011 with Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff.
We must understand that Justin Trudeau was able to take power because of his efforts to accommodate the resource elites of the West in new and unprecedented ways, not just as junior partners but senior partners in his political coalition. The price for dealing the Laurentian elite back in was policy continuity with the Harper government; in fact, the Laurentian elite are being tested, even now, to see how far they will go for the oil industry, whether they will be successful in amplifying the policies of Stephen Harper when it comes to fossil fuel subsidies, pipeline-building, etc.
And as we have seen from the Horgan government in British Columbia and the Notley government in Alberta, every political party in this country has got them memo: we are the periphery of the American and Chinese empires. Our local elites serve at their pleasure and here to tax local populations so subsidize the extraction of their resources.
And as much as they might pretend not to, the folks at the NDP, Tory, Green and Liberal conventions all believe this in their heart. They have truly internalized the belief that there is no alternative. The only break they have from the preordained policy consensus their labour carries is the chance to organize and win the debate how many angels can dance on the head of pin.
Otherwise, we would have to admit that our current political levers are no longer connected to anything in the real world and then, we would be responsible for fashioning new ones to bring the our omnicidal petrostate to heel.
