Belonging

The Paradox of Citizenship

Adrienne Clarkson

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781770898370
• eBook ISBN: 9781770898394
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Never has the world experienced greater movement of peoples from one country to another, from one continent to another. These seismic shifts in population have brought about huge challenges for all societies. In this year's Massey Lectures, Canada's twenty-sixth Governor General and bestselling author Adrienne Clarkson argues that a sense of belonging is a necessary mediation between an individual and a society. She masterfully chronicles the evolution of citizenship throughout the ages: from the genesis of the idea of the citizen in ancient Greece, to the medieval structures of guilds and class; from the revolutionary period which gave birth to the modern nation-state, to present-day citizenship based on shared values, consensus, and pluralism. Clarkson places particular emphasis on the Canadian model, which promotes immigration, parliamentary democracy, and the rule of law, and the First Nations circle, which embodies notions of expansion and equality. She concludes by looking forward, using the Bhutanese example of Gross National Happiness to determine how we measure up today and how far we have to go to bring into being the citizen, and the society, of tomorrow.

CHAPTER ONE

THE CIRCLE WIDENS

WE ASSUME THAT BELONGING begins at home, in family bonds. Helpless as infants, we depend on family to nurture and protect us — we have the long­est period of dependency of any mammal. Gradually, we become independent, learning behaviour and values from other people. In the 1970s, the British-American anthropologist Colin Turnbull published The Mountain People, a study of one tribal society, the Ik, that descended to appalling depths when their traditional nomadic grounds were severely restricted by the Ugandan government in order to create a national park. The work was later adapted for the stage by the English director Peter Brook. Both the book and the play caused a sensation.

In our benevolently romantic way, we imagine that members of this kind of semi-nomadic society are self-regulating — hunting, foraging, and sharing food and shelter according to perceived needs. We also assume that they would have close family bonds and would look out for each other with mutual need and understanding.

Indeed the Ik did forage and farm, but with their traditional movements and patterns restricted, the family structure and the foundation of their society soon collapsed. So distorted had the tribe’s need for survival become that they could no longer uphold the values we consider human: caring for each other, sharing food, risking danger to save the weak, and, most important of all, raising children to adulthood. Instead, Turnbull revealed a society that manifested nature “red in tooth and claw.”

In the pursuit of survival, selfishness became the norm and the search for food became the centre of the Iks’ lives. Not only did they not share food, they searched for it alone, and they stole it from each other and even from children. As toddlers, children were thrown out of the family hut and fended for themselves near the outskirts of the village. When individuals found a source of nourishment, they ate in hidden solitude. If they found more food than they needed, they gorged until they vomited. They had become so consumed by their own survival that they simply did not care about wives, husbands, and children. Sexual relations more or less ceased, since producing children meant another mouth to feed and more competition for food.

The reasons for the decline of the Ik tribe were much debated at the time. Generally, the Ik seemed to demonstrate that the social structures, the family structures, which we consider inherent to human beings, were not at all necessary; the Ik seemed to be a people who could survive without the bonds of kinship, loyalty, and sacrifice. All structures and value systems can break down if their basis is severely limited, artificially restricted, and continually denied. The lesson that Colin Turnbull drew from the Ik forty years ago is the same one we can draw now: if we remove our sense of belonging to each other, no matter what our material and social conditions are, survival, acquisition, and selfish triumphalism will endure at the cost of our humanity. Under extreme circumstances, each and every one of us is capable of a mentality that brings about the abandonment of children, the lack of cultivation of human relationships, and the deliberate denial of love.

That our humanity can be lost for the sake of our survival is not a new lesson. The sacrifice of others in order to save oneself has been portrayed by artists like the nineteenth-century French painter Théodore Géricault, whose work The Raft of the Medusa depicts survivors of a shipwreck throwing each other off a raft in order to save the fittest. Starving and thirsty survivors killed and ate their weakest companions. The painting caused an enormous scandal at the time that it was first shown, in 1819.

It is society that makes it possible for us to develop ourselves as human beings. Personal relationships enrich us, work makes us feel useful, and goals give us purpose. We are part of a group, as we are all born biologically from a union. And it is as part of a group that we yearn to belong. If we concern ourselves with the idea that we exist because others exist, that we are in a web of human relationships, then we understand our individualism in a different way from that of the solipsist. Individuals are not independent of each other. We have individual rights, but we also have duties to others. But if we assumed that relationships are on a cost-benefit ratio, they would therefore be impermanent and fluid by definition.

In what follows, I will explore how a sense of belonging is a necessary mediation between an individual and society. And in belonging to ourselves and to our society, we have the greatest possibility to live full lives, connected to all other human beings.

ABORIGINAL CIRCLES IN CANADA emphasize that inclusiveness is a form of expansion. In 1977, testifying before the Royal Commission on the Northern Environment, Grand Chief John Kelly described how the Ojibway were cheated by Treaty 3, originally signed in 1873 by the Ontario government while the federal government stood by. Kelly pointed out that we work together by enlarging, by allowing people to join the circle, not by hierarchy, nor by sheer will and force of power:

Despite being robbed time and again by the government and more recently by industry, we still possess certain things of value which the white man covets. We have learned through the experi­ence that wherever Indians possess or control anything economically valuable, there will be always those who will attempt to steal it. . . . Each time [we are promised] perpetual repose and gluttony . . . [we are left] with famine and disease. It also appears that, as the years go by, the circle of the Ojibway gets bigger and bigger. Canadians of all colours and religions are entering that circle. You might feel that you have roots somewhere else, but in reality, you are right here with us. I do not know if you feel the throbbing of the land in your chest and if you feel the bear is your brother with a spirit purer and stronger than yours, or if the elk is on a higher level of life than is man. You may not share the same spiritual anguish as I see the earth ravaged by a stranger, but you can no longer escape my fate as the soil turns barren and the rivers poison. Much against my will, and probably yours, time and circumstance have put us together in the same circle. And so I come not to plead with you to save me from the monstrous stranger of capitalist greed and technology. I come to inform you that my danger is your danger too. My genocide is your genocide. To commit genocide it is not necessary to build camps and ovens. All that is required is to remove the basis for a way of life.

What we understand from this statement is that a circle allows everyone to see each other, touch each other, and lose fear of each other. The Other is no longer separate, no longer above or beneath, no longer unknown, but a part of the greater circle. In a circle we do not have to ask “Who is my neighbour?” because our neighbour is right beside us and across from us, and each of us just has to let go of a hand in order to let them in. In a circle we have to listen to each other’s stories. In a circle we have to meet as persons, and we have to acknowledge that we share a culture or a heritage or even just the land we are standing on. And we cannot deny to others the right to belong. It is the most profound acknowledgement of our belonging to the human race.

As part of the circle, we belong to the same ring of being; we take our place and let others do the same. This neutral, unconditional acceptance is the basis of the kind of society we are creating in this country. Society, the network of groups, allows us security in numbers and a context for inevitable struggle. The joy of working with others should be in the effort of working together, not in the scramble to gain power, praise, or pleasure. Aboriginal life emphasizes mutual dependence, which is the ecology of human relationships. One form of life exists in relationship with all other forms, so that a bear or a salmon can become a human being or a tree. This is the most concrete and powerful iteration of the interdependence that we call belonging to each other, being part of a whole. The circle opens to include us, for better or worse. The circle implies a common fate that we share and that we acknowledge. Your destiny is my destiny.

EVERY SOCIETY IN ITS own particular way affirms the value of belonging in its history, its fortune, and its personality. Let me take you to a village I know called Eygalières, in the part of southern France called Provence, where picturesque ruins are surrounded by tumbledown walls, and a bell tower on the summit rises some one thousand feet over the plain. The northern gate was called la porte de l’Auro, which means in Provençal “the gate of the wind,” and the southern one was called la porte de Sylvane, after a local celebrity. This latter gate had a somewhat sinister significance, because the walls on either side of it were drenched in a bright yellow stain made from crocus pistils (and therefore gave the street outside it the name it still bears today, rue Safranière) to signal that debtors were not allowed to live within the walls.

Although not spectacular in the showy way that the nearby hill town of Les Baux is, Eygalières nevertheless gives you an idea of what it is like to live in a high, protected place where you can see in all directions. The village has a clear view of the range of tiny mountains called the Chaîne des Alpilles, which Henry James described as looking like frozen waves cut into wedges of limestone. The peculiarity of this land form is that if nothing were placed close to it, it would resemble an enormous mountain range. The fact that it is miniature gives it its charm and element of surprise.

For hundreds of years the village wall enclosed 1,400 inhabitants. From the eleventh century until the sixteenth century, Eygalières grew by about a thousand inhabitants, and these inhabitants shared a rich history, moving from a feudal society — in which all human actions, however small, were governed by the enormous forces of the Church, the landed aristocracy, and the monarchy — to one of relative freedom. As the village of Eygalières came through the Middle Ages and into the modern period, the people demonstrated their own power by choosing for themselves how they might live together and thus determining what it means to be an individual in such a society.

But to understand this passage from feudal duchy to “free” society, let’s go back even further. Prehistoric remains of Stone Age weapons dating back to 3000 BC are commonly discovered in this area, and from a window of a house built into the southern part of the village wall, you can see a flattened space on one of the hills that has never been excavated but where local villagers have found remnants of the Chalcolithic Age. These are the remains of the Salyan tribes, of Ligurian stock and known today as Gauls.

At first the Ligurians established a civilization based on the oppida — city settlements on rocky hills surrounded by sheer cliffs. These fortified settlements were difficult to reach and were always guarded by watchmen. The location allowed for the safe storage of provisions, and the sanctuaries could be kept inviolate. The Salyans believed that cutting off the heads of their enemies guaranteed the tribe’s protection, as the spirits of the dead were inseparable from their skulls. The wisdom of the dead was gained by accumulating heads. Many rocks in the area have carvings that depict decapitation. In some cases a carnivorous animal, such as a lion, is shown resting a paw on each severed head. The beast is not there to frighten his victims; he merely serves the sacred attributes the heads represent.

Despite all these safeguards against intruders, in 124 BC the Salyans were defeated in the Romans’ relentless imperial march across the northern Mediterranean and into Spain. From the fourth century BC, the Greeks had penetrated the area, looking for water. They eventually found it at the Salyans’ healing spring in today’s Saint-Rémy, where there is an extensive Roman ruin called Glanum.

From about 100 to 50 BC, two important roads passed through this Gallo-Roman city. Vestiges of the roads still exist near Eygalières, to the north and south of the Alpilles. The northern road was called the Via Domitia. The southern road, the Via Aurelia, still goes through Eygalières. The town became extremely important to the Romans because of a spring called Aqualéria, or “place of the waters.” An aqueduct was built from there to Arles, some forty kilometres away. Parts of the aqueduct are underground, where it can still, with a bit of excavation, be seen. The water flowed on towards Barbegal, an enormous industrial grain mill that used the natural slope of the hill to draw water and move the waterwheels.

The Romans established silex quarries nearby to extract the stones for the mill, and stones from these quarries were eventually used everywhere in Provence. For nearly two thousand years, stones were mined and polished here, and in the nineteenth century the industry employed more than one hundred men. Millstones with “Eygalières” carved into them have been found as far away as Russia, the United States, and Turkey. The weight of the millstones varied between 120 and 300 kilos, and the journey by cart to Marseilles, where they would be put on a boat, took two days. In an abandoned walled area just inside the southern gate of the village, one lone millstone survives, propped against a wall. How old is it? It is difficult to say. It could be anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 years old.

But nothing lasts forever. As the Roman Empire collapsed, chaos subsumed the area, allowing other religions to make their hesitant appearance and bringing in cults like the Mithras. Visigoths, Franks, and other barbarians invaded, destroying the vestiges of Roman civilization. Christianity, which in the fourth...

Table of contents

• Openers
• Contents
• Epigraph
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• The CBC Massey Lectures Series