the Quéstion of Québec
Il est faux de penser que la religion rend la mort plus acceptable. À preuve, les rites funéraires sont marqués par des moments d’intense tristesse. Et la plupart des croyants ont peur de la mort et font leur possible pour retarder sa venue! Demandez-lui si elle avait peur avant de venir au monde. Elle risque de répondre en riant : «Bien sûr que non, je n’étais pas là!» Expliquez-lui que c’est la même chose pour la personne qui décède. Elle n’est simplement plus là. Il existe plusieurs façons d’apprivoiser la mort. C’en est une.
Accepter sa propre finalité est le défi d’une vie, et ça restera toujours une peur qu’on maîtrise sans jamais la faire disparaître totalement.
M. Dale McGowan, auteur de Parenting Beyond Belief
No no, come back! I haven’t really become sophisticated — except in the pages of the Montréal-based public affairs magazine L’actualité, which carries an interview avec moi as its November cover story.
I was interviewed last month by Louise Gendron, a senior reporter for what is the largest French-language magazine in Canada with over one million readers. A website Q&A (in French) supplements the print interview.
So why the sudden interest among the Québécois about parents non-croyants? It’s a fascinating story. Québec has historically been the most religious of the Canadian provinces. Over 83 percent of the population is Catholic — hardly surprising, since the French permitted only Catholics to settle what was New France back in the day.
But now Québec is considered the least religious province by a considerable margin — and without losing a single Catholic.
Non-religious Catholics, you say? Oui! French Canadians are eager to maintain their unique identity in the midst of the English Protestant neighborhood — and “French” goes with “Catholic” in Canada even more than it does with “fries” in the U.S. Yet educated Catholics — I’ve discussed this elsewhere — are the most likely of all religious identities to leave religious faith entirely. There is, by all accounts, a very short step from educated Catholic to religious nonbeliever.
In recent years, a very large percentage of Catholic Québécois have essentially become “cultural Catholics” — continuing to embrace the identity and traditions of the Church despite having utterly lost their belief. The most striking evidence is a referendum, five years ago, to transition the provincial school system from Catholic to secular. The referendum passed easily, and a five-year transition began in 2003. This year is the last year of that transition — and to the shock and surprise of many, the entire process has taken place with very little uproar.
Until now.
____________________________
“In recent years, a very large percentage of Catholic Québécois
have essentially become “cultural Catholics” — continuing
to embrace the identity and traditions of the Church
despite having utterly lost their belief. “
____________________________
My interview was going to be a good-sized piece, but two weeks ago (in the words of Louise Gendron), “all hell broke loose” in Québec as orthodox Catholic family organizations launched a coordinated media campaign attacking the secularization of the schools. At which point L’actualité decided to make the interview the cover story and enlarge the website Q&A.
Most “cultural Catholic” parents in Québec support the transition but wonder how to explain death, teach morality, encourage wonder — in short, how to raise ethical, caring kids — without religion.
Perhaps you can understand my sudden, intense interest in Québec, and why there is talk — very early talk — of a possible French edition of Parenting Beyond Belief, to be published in (vous avez deviné correctement!) Québec!
on celebrity
- October 08, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, values
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(Being the last, and least relevant, in a series of reflections on the 2007 convention of the Atheist Alliance International.)
My arrival at the AAI Convention was marked by a through-the-looking-glass moment as I heard a young woman whisper to a friend: “It’s him!”
I looked up, expecting to see them staring at Dawkins or Harris. Instead, they were staring at mere me. They smiled and held out copies of PBB for me to sign, told me how much they loved the book, etc. It was not entirely unlike me approaching Dawkins or Harris, which made me cringe just a tad. I am not worthy, believe me. Me being on the receiving end of an it’s him calls the whole concept of celebrity into serious question.
The first time I called my kids on the phone from the convention this year, Delaney answered. And she didn’t ask if I had been a fawn-ee; she knows me only as the occasional fawn-er.
And so, when she heard my voice, she immediately asked: “Daddy! Have you talked to The Scientist yet?”
In her mind, the sole reason I had flown 600 miles and spent three days away from her was to see The Scientist — Richard Dawkins. She can be forgiven for thinking this. In retrospect, I’d told her very few things about the convention. I’d said I would talk about my book a bit, I’d be close to the President’s house, and I would see a personal hero of mine, one of the most famous scientists in the world.
“Didn’t you already see him before?” she asked at the time.
Yes, I had. I’ve met Richard Dawkins precisely three times — at the AAI Conventions in 2003, 2005, and 2007. Fortunately, our first meeting in ’03 was captured on videotape, so you can hear what I sounded like as I struggled to express my admiration for his work. You can hear him laughing at me in the clip:
Later in that same convention I mentioned my admiration for Richard’s work to Margaret Downey, who was accompanying him during his visit — and she insisted I join them for lunch. I absolutely refused, feeling I would have nothing to say to him beyond the fawning gestures of fan to star, and that in the attempt (as the video makes clear), I would merely have sprayed him with strained carrots.
I’m completely immune to starstruckedness of the usual kind. I loved Corky the Clown, a local TV station character in the St. Louis of my kidhood. Then Mom took us down to the station during the 1969 Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon…and there was Corky, mugging and clowning for a captive line of petrified children on the sidewalk outside. Anyone who has seen a clown close up will know just how much I longed to put him back in our Magnavox and keep him there. Since then, proximity to the merely famous has never really made my weenie wiggle.
Thanks in part to a three-year job in a hotel in Century City, California during grad school, I rubbed elbows with every imaginable ilk of celebrity and politician of the late 1980s. It was interesting to see them in the flesh, but none of them me swoon. They didn’t move me. In many cases, their celebrity even made me nauseous.
But when I meet someone of genuine accomplishment, someone whose contributions have moved and changed me and millions of others — someone who began as I did, a squinting, squealing, clutching infant, but somehow went on to [insert jawdropping, unprecedented accomplishment here] — well, when I meet someone like that, yes, I swoon.
I remembering packing for that first convention back in 2003, talking to Erin. That was her year to be the five-year-old who watched Daddy pack. “Are you nervous?” she asked. She knew I was giving a speech.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “But not about my speech.” I told her I was going to meet someone who was very important to me, a scientist who wrote some wonderful books. He was one of my heroes, I said, so I was a little nervous to meet him.
“Don’t be nervous, Daddy,” she said. “I betcha he’s very nice.” But then she wanted to know why he was my hero.
What a great question — and a rare opportunity to be explicit about just what impresses and moves me.
“Well,” I said, “I guess the best way I can say it is that he helped me understand the world better.” Just being famous, or just winning an election, or merely singing or acting well can’t possibly inspire in me the same drooling idiocy I feel whenever I extend my hand to shake Richard’s.
There’s irony here. I know, partly through Richard’s work, how cosmically insignificant we are. I know that we are essentially vehicles for the transportation of DNA from generation to generation, and that we are not fallen angels but trousered apes. It seems silly that a fellow speck of dust can reduce me to Miss Teen South Carolina with a beard.
But that actually gets at the point. I’m inspired by the fact that even though we are trousered apes and cosmic specks, we still manage, on occasion, to rise above our situation and achieve something truly wonderful. Speck Einstein saw that space and time are woven together. Speck Gandhi realized that nonviolence could be more powerful than violence. Speck Darwin explained the kinship of all life. That’s the level of astonished joy that paralyzes my mind and tongue when I meet someone like Richard. I am shaking hands with Huxley and Voltaire and Vonnegut and Epicurus. I’m shaking hands with the best in all of us.
I’ve searched for the perfect metaphor of Richard Dawkins at an atheist convention, something that would capture the odd sense that a being from another realm had crossed into our little world. At last, at this convention, it hit me. If you’ve read Flatland, you will instantly understand: we’re polygons, and he is a sphere, floating through our plane. Unable to communicate with it in any meaningful way, we just stand back and ululate in amazement.
For now, my girls are swooning over Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens and Miley Cyrus. That’s fine, of course. They are practicing the fine art of admiration. Connor’s become more judicious, moving on to JK Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and Richard Branson, and for quite admirable reasons.
My kids are also getting a mild version of the lesson from the other end as they enjoy our family’s (very) marginal flirtation with celebrity. I too would have squealed at the chance to walk into Barnes and Noble and find a book with my family’s picture on the back when I was a kid. Hell, I enjoy it now. but I’m also aware that in that moment is a rare opportunity to get all sorts of messages driven home to my kids about what’s important, and what’s not.
getting concrete: international day of peace
Regular readers of THE MEMING OF LIFE may begin to catch an unmistakable whiff of the concrete in upcoming posts. Don’t worry — I’ll continue to spatter the blog with incontestable pablum like “death is scary” and “thinking for yourself is good.” But I think it’s time to assert a few positions as well.
I don’t believe a secular, freethinking worldview leads to any and all possible conclusions with equal ease. I think a stated confidence in reason leads more decisively to some conclusions than to others. We will surely differ on what those conclusions are — Christopher Hitchens, for example, might dispute large whacks of this post — but he and I would presumably agree on the terms of the debate, which is the first requirement for sensible discourse.
There is a balance to be struck. If I tell my kids, “Hey, just think for yourself! Whatever you come up with is peachy,” that is indeed moral relativism. If I say, “Think for yourself, as long as you reach my conclusions,” that’s indoctrination wrapped in hypocrisy, a là Catholic intellectual tradition. (See? I’m not always nice.)
If instead I say, “Think for yourself — then be prepared to support your conclusions and to change them if necessary,” I’ve struck just the needed balance.
So freethought isn’t about declaring all conclusions equally valid — it’s about differing intelligently. Let me then begin my plunge into the concrete:
1. If war is necessary and effective, then war it is! Woohoo!
Aside from the gratuitous ‘woohoo,’ that should be fairly uncontroversial. Here’s a corollary:
2. War is rarely necessary and rarely effective.
Let’s define necessary as “something essential; something that cannot be done without,” and effective as “something that accomplishes its stated objectives.” I believe war fails to meet both of these criteria. It is unnecessary, because there are most often alternatives that have been proven to work brilliantly, and it is ineffective because it most often exacerbates the very problems it seeks to solve.
Some stats to consider:
One in seven countries are currently at war.
More than half of war deaths are civilians.There are now over 250,000 child soldiers worldwide.
Children account for two-thirds of those killed in violent conflict since 1990.An increasing percentage of world conflicts involve poor nations (formerly one third, now one half).
The average civil war drains $54 billion from a nation’s economy.25 million people are currently displaced by war.
Mortality among displaced persons is over 80 times that of the non-displaced.Half of all countries emerging from violent conflict relapse into violence within five years.
SOURCE: UN Development Programme Human Development Report, 2005
Yes, stopping Hitler was a splendid idea. Unfortunately, our public discourse now evokes WWII as the justification for all wars instead of recognizing it as one of the very few necessary wars in our history.
Time for a final assertion:
3. Except in the rare cases when war is necessary and effective, peace is preferable to war.
Seems reasonable. And one of the many voices in agreement with this final assertion is the long and noble tradition of Catholic peace activism. (See? Discernment.)
So why do I bring this up today? Because — though you wouldn’t know it from the yawning inattention of the media — today is the 25th annual International Day of Peace, an observance created by the UN in 1982 “to devote a specific time to concentrate the efforts of the United Nations and its Member States, as well as of the whole of mankind [sic], to promoting the ideals of peace and to giving positive evidence of their commitment to peace in all viable ways… (The International Day of Peace) should be devoted to commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace both within and among all nations and peoples.” (from General Assembly Resolution UN/A/RES/36/67)
Not only do the stats and history seem to support the futility of war, but the foundation of secular ethics is this: in the absence divine safety net, we are all we’ve got, so we ought to try very hard to take care of each other. If war generally fails to accomplish its objectives while impoverishing and killing millions of us, secular ethics ought to oppose it — except in the profoundly rare cases when there really is no alternative. When it comes to this standard, most of our national violence is far more analogous to the Mexican-American War than to the fight against Hitler.
So today, the flag of the United Nations is flying in front of our house, and the preference for peace was the topic of conversation at the breakfast table. Connor plans to use some of the money in his “others” jar to buy a Peace Bond from Nonviolent Peaceforce. I will donate a day’s wages to NP’s Work a Day for Peace program, which runs through October 2, the International Day of Nonviolence.
I’ll post about nonviolent action on that day. For today, talk to your kids about your preference for peace, the futility of violence, the situation of child victims of war — and the fact that all of these opinions flow quite naturally from a secular worldview. Donate to Nonviolent Peaceforce, Doctors without Borders, UNICEF, or another organization that’s out there doing the heavy lifting for humanity.
(Watch Ken Burns’ powerful new seven-part documentary THE WAR beginning this Sunday September 23 on PBS. He lays out precisely the case that is needed: that WWII was “the necessary war,” and that its misuse and mythologizing is leading us to disaster. Catch a long preview here.)
