A friend of mine has been complaining about a much-publicized legal case, where a Sikh employee at a lumber yard is demanding that he be exempted from new safety laws, which require a hard helmet when working with lumber. There is no question of the employer using the law to further prejudice or racism. Sikhs are highly respected in the community. The employee has been there for years, and the company wanted to solve the problem by shifting him to an indoor position, where there would be no conflict. In the distant past, there have been several legal squabbles where it was obvious that regulations were being used to further intolerant agendas. However, there have been none of those kind of things, to my knowledge, for decades, and this certainly is not one. Is this a “human rights” issue, as many claim? No, it is not.
Our higher education system has been much influenced, over the last century, by totalitarian intellectuals, who hated and despised the very idea of “rights”. For decades, most universities taught that “human rights” was a meaningless phrase and an irrelevant concept. This fostered a belief among lawmakers and the educated elite that only power and privilege should determine the laws and customs of our society. But the ordinary sense of justice and fair play that still survives among people, and the obvious injustices of the world, ensured that the concept of rights survived the scorn of intellectuals. In recent decades, the strategy of opponents of human rights has been to co-opt the term, and use it in incoherent and contradictory ways, so that it will become meaningless. As counterfeit money devalues and drives out real money, a counterfeit notion of human rights devalues and ultimately paralyzes the real stuff. Because of this intellectual ball-under-the-cups game, few Canadians now have any idea what the word “rights” means. They can only assume, from what they are taught, that it means “privileges” or “special powers”, and that society consists of a bunch of discrete groups that compete to get as many of these powers as they can. At the same time, anyone struggling for genuine rights (say, for example, gays expecting to have their legitimate right to equal legal standing in love and marriage respected) are easily portrayed and denounced as “seeking special privileges”.
Among religious hierarchies, there is a keen understanding that this confusion can be used to advantage. Everywhere in Canada, orthodox religious bosses know that the tolerance and civility of Canadian society encourages private and independent religious belief. This disturbs them, and threatens their claims to authority. For example, 80% of Canadian Muslims rarely or never attend a mosque, a pattern identical with Catholics and Protestants. But in the press and in political circles, only the voices of clerics, and usually clerics unrepresentative of the views and values of modern Muslims, are heard. Sikhs belong to a religion that requires more intense observance, and ritual separation. The turban and the kirpan are designed to keep your religion visible at all times. But Sikhs, too, are drawn in great numbers to the easygoing personal independence that is possible in Canadian society.
The orthodox hierarchy in every religious movement knows that the real challenge to their power is not persecution — persecution closes ranks and increases clerical power — but tolerance and freedom. Tolerance and freedom encourage adherents of a religion to think for themselves, and this leads to questioning the authority of clergy, and perhaps to conversion to other religions, or even worse, in their view, to “secularism”. For this reason, it is always in the interests of the orthodox clergy of any religion to maximize friction and confrontation, and hopefully to trigger intolerance and even persecution. The orthodox clergy of religions that supposedly despise each other will eagerly band together to combat “secularism” — by which they mean tolerance and freedom. And they will use the leverage of the distorted concept of “human rights” devised by the anti-human-rights intellectuals to good effect. Many “secular” intellectuals, those who are firmly in the managerial-authoritarian-collectivist tradition, also sense that their power and authority is enhanced by collaborating with self-declared religious leaders, whose power comes from exactly the same kind of intimidation. Both these groups want to see a society, not of respect for universal human rights, but of graded and compartmentalized groups, each assigned specialized privileges and fixed roles. This view of human society is very ancient, and unfortunately very common, but it is not acceptable in a free, democratic, and modern country. We built this country precisely to free ourselves from that termite-like vision of life.
It all works out to a simple conflict between the powerful and the weak. By promoting a confused and contradictory notion of human rights, the powerful have yet another tool with which to manipulate, bully, and exploit those whom they regard as being under their authority. Notice how glibly both the media and politicians assume that clergy “represent” all Muslims, or all Catholics or all Methodists, or whatever, that they have the right to speak for them, and have legitimate authority over them. This is nonsense. Canada is a democracy, and in a democracy, no such claims to speak for collectivities should be recognized. Individuals represent themselves, speak for themselves, think for themselves. No one has the right to speak for them, or represent them, unless they specifically, and personally, choose and assign that role to someone.
How to maintain respect for human rights, in this particular case, is clear to anyone who actually believes and advocates the concept of human rights. Everybody has the right to believe in, and practice any religion they want. Laws about workplace safety should be devised for the sake of promoting workplace safety, and no other reason. Their application should be exactly the same for everyone. Period. Religion should not enter the calculation as a consideration, in any way. If I dream up a religion that “requires” me to keep myself blindfolded all the time, then I can’t claim I’m being persecuted if I am not granted a pilot’s license. Pilots licenses are determined by my fitness to fly, not by my ethnicity or my religion, or any other irrelevant factor. If I follow some custom that makes me incompetent to fly, or makes me dangerous to others, then it is irrelevant that the custom originates in some church or religious tradition. The complainant’s personal beliefs about what he must wear are just that, personal beliefs. He should use them to determine what kind of jobs he wants to do or doesn’t want to do, but these personal beliefs are not the concern of workplace safety experts, who must recommend rules on the basis of reason and science, or legislators, who must legislate on the basis of the public good, within the framework of universal human rights, not a primitive differential caste system.
The opinions of other people, who do not work in the lumber yard, but happen to share his religious beliefs, are also irrelevant. The complainant is the only person that the law should take into consideration, not whether he has a large number of like-minded people who share his personal beliefs. That would amount to the claim that individual beliefs should be unprotected by the law, while beliefs that can summon a large or influential gang will be privileged. Behind such thinking is a yearning to establish a graded caste society, in which some people are discarded as unimportant, because their group affiliation is unimportant, and others are elevated to positions of automatic superiority. In other words, a primitive, unjust, and barbarous society. Legislators who devise laws to ensure the safety of the workplace, if they have respect for human rights, will apply those laws to all citizens, regardless of their religious affiliations or belief, and, in fact, have no business even inquiring into the personal beliefs of any citizen. Religious beliefs in Canada are personal choices, and nothing else. No religious organization has any legal authority over anyone, and should never be treated by legislators as if it did.
I’m sure that the employee in this particular case is sincere. He feels that his faith requires him to do this. But remember that the argument presumes, not that he has devised these rules for himself out of his own personal, individual quest for religious or philosophical enlightenment, but as someone obeying rules devised by someone else. Religious orthodoxy is not an expression of individual conscience. It is the opposite, the surrender of the individual’s conscience and judgment to an authority outside of himself or herself. The complainant claims that he is not following his own judgment and conscience, but an authority outside of himself, and that it is a conflict between two authorities, competing for jurisdiction over safety in lumberyards. What authority are the employer and the employee supposed to obey? — the law of the land, or some unknown person unconnected to the issue, whose only authority is self-declared “ownership” of a body of arbitrary doctrines. The answer is, the law of the land.
All of this nonsense is the legacy of totalitarianism, which still shapes our intellectual life. Without a solid grounding in what “human rights” actually means, and with a garbled and contradictory notion of human rights being peddled by our academic community, it’s not surprising that cases like this come before the courts. A prominent Canadian lawyer, who struggled to found a Human Rights Commission in the 1960’s, when it was needed, now recognizes that the very same commission is now a bureaucratic tyrant largely dedicated to stifling free expression and suppressing human rights. Under the influence of the authoritarian notions common in academia, it has assumed all sorts of draconian, undemocratic powers, and used them capriciously to favour or disfavour groups of Canadians, rather than to defend their universal human rights, which they possess as individuals. This is what happens when you give the keys of the hen-house to the foxes.
Back in the 1970’s, regulations against Sikh dress were clearly being employed unscrupulously, in contexts motivated by resentment of Sikh success in business and ranching. This was a genuine human rights issue, a case of laws and rules being twisted to further a sectarian agenda. But nobody seriously believes that this lumber-yard case is anything like that. Issues and motives both shift over time. For example, laws against the use of marijuana began as part of an aggressive campaign of racism against African and Mexican Americans, back in the 1930s, then mutated into a campaign against those who opposed the Vietnam War, and now is maintained because it is fabulously profitable to both organized crime and corrupt police. Similar laws in Canada, though less draconian, were initially created under furious pressure from the United States, and are maintained for the same economic reasons. They are a cornerstone of Conservative hatred of freedom and human rights. This is an example of a law that does violate human rights, and did originate in racism. All civilized people will oppose such an evil law. But a law concerning workplace safety, clearly constructed on rational grounds, and fairly applied to all, is not. Real respect for human rights demands that the courts rule against this claimant’s demand for an exemption from it.
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